so long, and thanks for all the fish

they are tagged with "LGBTQ+" and "Transgender" so honestly I'm surprised I haven't come across them on PsychologyToday before now. might have even sought them out for help, if not for the fact that we would DEFINITELY recognize each other and that's a no-no in therapeutic relationships lmao. fuckin good for them though, I'm so glad they're out there helping other folks like us who need it!!

I've been wanting to try out Bob Ross-style landscape painting for years, but never got around to it for various reasons (impostor syndrome, executive dysfunction, neurodivergence in general). and then last year I wound up in a mental health crisis service unit for a week, and one morning, our group therapy was an art therapy practice where we each got an 8"x10" canvas board and were told to paint our "safe space."

whenever I close my eyes and try to picture a time and place when I was most at peace, I think of the sort of mountainous lakeside campground that I used to spend my summers as a church youth at, where the air is fresh with pine and recent rainfall and the surface of the lake is disturbed only by an occasional breeze or the ripple of a fish coming up to eat a bug. so I painted the lakeside from the site my family went camping at this year, where I had spent several minutes at the water's edge meditating on the transient nature of ripples in the water. like I mentioned, it's the first landscape I've ever painted, but I've watched so many episodes of The Joy of Painting that I felt myself channeling the man himself as I laid brush to canvas that morning. I still feel a profound sense of calm when I look at it, and I use it for reference when I'm returning to my "safe space" at the end of trauma therapy each week.

anyway, I'm really fuckin proud of it. personally I think it fucks severely and the next landscape I paint will be even better. I hope y'all enjoy me sharing this with you.

this is what I get for picking and peeling it off the last time I painted them lmao. I know better than to literally pull layers of healthy keratin off my nails, but nevertheless my obsessive-compulsive tendencies persisted

just gonna have to suck it up and have short painted nails at some point this week or next, since it's looking like I won't be able to grow them out any longer for a while otherwise. the nice thing is, I've taken such good care of my nails over the past 3-ish years that they don't give me weird hand dysmorphia anymore when I paint them short. why have I, a transmasc, historically had weird dysphoria around having short painted nails even into my transition? couldn't fuckin tell you, and yet here we are

I accidentally tore a giant hole in my parents' air mattress and I felt really awful about it... immediately went to go tell them and they were like "damn that sucks. shit happens though; we're not upset with you" so that helped, but I still felt shitty about wrecking their nice air mattress as a guest in their home

then a couple minutes later, I noticed that one of my nails had broken during the process of trying to prevent the air mattress from being destroyed. and my brain's immediate response, instead of the usual Oh No Things Got Worse Meltdown Time, was "lmaooo can't catch a break today huh? oh well; hey, at least this is a problem that we CAN fix" and I started feeling better after that. good brains in the face of bad brain and overtaking it (: we love to see it (: (: