Friday, Jul. 16, 2021 - 9:08 p.m.

Okay the other thing was that J asked if I would be interested in us spending a semester or a year in NC.

I have had the pleasure of transcribing a couple people’s therapy sessions at this point, plus a research interview conducted by a therapist. So now I know that it mostly consists of someone going, “Right, right. Okay. So, it sounds like you’re saying [thing you just said]. Is that right? Do you want to say more about that?” And they do that for an hour and then you pay them $200 or whatever.

So, I can do that to myself.

So today I want to figure out what’s behind my knee-jerk NOOOO whenever he suggests going anywhere for longer than a day.

I mean, I know why I don’t always want to come to his parents’. But it’s a bit of a puzzle why other sorts of trips still set that off, because if you ask me, I’ll tell you that a dream of mine is to spend my artistic career at different places every few months, making art with the plants there, and then moving on.

Is that different in any way, or am I once again self-deluded as to what I think I want versus what I actually enjoy doing?

So what am I worried about?
The task of packing up enough of my studio and bringing it along and unpacking it and working in an unfamiliar place.

The thought of just being thrown off my schedule and maybe not being able to get back to whatever project I had going. Let’s not forget how coming to TN last summer essentially broke my gum bichromate groove, and it still hasn’t come back. Or how the summer before that, the trip to NH ended up breaking my groove on that big round thing I was making. Or maybe it was the trip to TN/Wales that September that did it. In any case, it ended.

And I don’t know how to control that.
So what if I went and I couldn’t work on the cyan jewelry anymore? It’s not a worry to be dismissed.

Also it takes me so long to get comfortable in a place. Not just with the home, but I mean with the community and the environment. More than the month we usually stay anywhere. An entire semester, I might be warming up to it by the time we leave.

I don’t have friends in Tucson I’d miss, so it’s not that. I don’t even have site-specific routines, after the pandemic broke up me and the coffee shop habit.

When I fantasize about moving from place to place making art, I suppose it’s an idealized version where where I’m a place of my choosing… small house, very rural. The explorations are explorations of the countryside or national parks. In my fantasies, I have autonomy over my comings and goings and activities. I won’t say I don’t imagine my family there, but I do imagine myself getting to behave as though they made no demands of me.

In reality, we end up in urban or suburban settings that I’m uncomfortable exploring. I have little autonomy and what autonomy I do have is choked out by my anxiety around being in a new place. So I sit at home, make food for the kids, but hey! Without my studio to escape to.

I don’t know how to overcome any of this. I’ll
keep thinking, I guess.

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