18 months ago you entered the boxing ring an eager new athlete. He is your coach. You are ready and hyped, your new boxing gloves shining, your robe not yet stained with sweat. You've been studying and you want to knock out your opponent in the first round. You want her out of the way. He suggests that you go slow, but you do not listen. Your opponent is swift and is way more experienced. Her leather gloves have a patina from years of fighting and her robe is tattered and you are envious of the stories they tell. You go down immediately with her right uppercut followed by a powerful left hook. He encourages you to stay with it, to keep fighting. He tells you that you are stronger than you realize. He tells you that you are safe. So you get back up, you are still in the game. He is a good coach. You are learning with every new punch. You are learning new words for things and you are starting to understand the dance, the pattern, the defense. You are bobbing and weaving and swaying. You are getting a little stronger so you take some big chances. A relationship ends, you quit your job and go full-time with your art. And your coach is still standing in the corner ready with your towel and water, encouraging you to keep fighting.

     The blows keep coming and they seem to be coming from 6 fists, not two. And there is the audience that you didn't notice before. They seem to all be watching you and it makes you paranoid. You wonder why your coach sticks with you and you wonder why are all these people watching? You ask yourself Why am I even here? Sweat and blood mix together forcing you to spit out the salt and you think your nose is likely broken. Your opponent senses your weakness and has taken full advantage of you. And just like in a dream, you are no longer in the ring, but in the middle of a deep ocean at night. You are naked and the water is cool on your bruised skin. It is calming here, the water takes the weight off your sore body. Infinite dark water and an infinite star filled sky. You have been treading water and are overcome with exhaustion. You realize that all you have to do now is to let go. So you stop treading the water and for a moment you float, and then the world goes quiet and the stars disappear. A heavy silence fills you with peace as you gently sink. The water envelops you and your breath leaves your body. It is like no other peace you have felt before.

     You wake up in the boxing ring, choking, grasping for breath, drenched in salt water. He is still in your corner and he offers you a small piece of cake as if you were Alice. He says if you eat the cake, when you go to the ocean next time, there will be a raft. So you eat the cake. You trust him and at the same time you don't. He is your coach, but sometimes you question his intentions. You do not understand why he wants to be your coach when you keep getting knocked out. 

     You are in the middle of the ring now, dry and calm. It's just you sitting on a small stool at your little wooden table. The only light is a warm yellow glow from a desk lamp and you are writing feverishly on a yellow legal pad, ripping the pages out when they get full. You feel you must get your words on the paper so that they can be released from your head. You are filled with an intense energy and you must write. Papers are piling up all around you. The ring is filling up with yellow paper. Words are everywhere; on the ceiling, on your skin, in your glass of water. You share your writing and the crowd cheers. You like that. You share more. Then you wonder if you have shared too much. You start to see faces in the darkness surrounding the ring. They are all watching you. The faces are expectations, obligations and judgments. Then you realize there is no audience at all. It's just a bunch of mirrors. You looking back at yourself. You pick up all the papers and stuff them inside yourself, back where they came from. You have no more words. Blinking cursor. Stillness. You are uncomfortable here. Your worth is wrapped up in your production. You feel you have been fooled. And standing right next to you is your inner child and you cannot look at her. You feel hatred towards her. You have no empathy for her. You are told to speak to her, but you have nothing to say. You know she is just an illusion.

     You return to the ocean where you can sink back into the muffled quiet darkness. There is no raft. He told you there would be a raft. You become suspicious. Maybe you should not have eaten the cake. You are not sure of who you are anymore. You are a mother and you need to get back to the ring and fight because you have to fight for your son. But this quiet place, there is so much relief here, even if it's hard to breathe. When you return, your brain feels soft, like a beach ball on a hot summer day. It's hard to form sentences. You don't feel like fighting anymore. You stay low on the mat. You tell him you don't want to fight anymore. But your opponent shows up strong, ready to fight, every single time. So you just leave your body in the middle of the ring and let her do what she wants with it. 

     You are supposed to be watching a red dot at the end of a stick as she moves the stick back and forth slowly across your vision. She asks you How do you feel in your body? And when you notice the pain, you just leave it behind. You do not know how to stay with the pain. So, like you always do, you leave your body and the pain and you watch yourself from above. You see yourself there on the mat, pretending to follow the spot. You return when the chime rings and you feel shame for leaving when you were supposed to stay.

     Your coach is still in your corner. He tells you that he can't be your coach forever and you feel rejected. He is going to leave just like everyone else does. You tell him that you are scared and he reassures you that he isn't going anywhere. So you keep showing up to the mat. You trust him as much as you can.

     It's 5:47am and you've just finished lifting weights at the gym. It's dark outside and you see yourself reflected in the glass window as you walk uphill on the treadmill. Your mind plays tricks on you and sees things that aren't real. It makes you freeze up and it makes your heart race. You do not understand what is happening. It's 3:30 in the afternoon and you decide a bath will relax you, but when you dip your toes into the warm water, your heart begins to race and your body tenses up. You hear yourself say out loud you are safe, you are here NOW and that makes you feel like things have gone too far. You feel crazy. You listen to the bubbles slowly dissolve on your skin. It's 1am and you awaken paralyzed from a dream, terrified of your own imagination. This is ALL just a dream. None of this is real. Everything is a lie, a construct. 

     You can't trust him and you can't trust yourself. You eat more cake. You want the cake to save you. You eat the cake until you are full and one day you wake up and you are in the middle of the ocean, floating on the raft, an umbrella protects you from the sun. The sky is blue and crisp. You can see land and you feel safe and protected and hopeful. You relax and smile. You are filled with ideas and are excited to reach the shore. You have plans for the first time in months. You wonder where you have been all this time. Your ideas make you feel high. 

     When you reach the land, it's just the boxing ring again. Your opponent laughs at you. It was her who threw you all the ideas at once, like breadcrumbs, knowing you would pick them up. It was a trap. She filled you with a false sense of joy only to lure you back to the ring because she thrives on the fight. She has been waiting in the ropes for you, watching you wear yourself out. She is cunning, but she is also threatened by your willingness to keep fighting. Behind her laughter is intimidation. You keep getting slammed back and forth between the ring and the ocean, the taste of saltwater always on your lips. Paranoia, embarrassment. Regret. Confusion. You wonder, have I regressed? You keep showing up despite yourself.

     You keep showing up. He isn't there as much as he used to be, but he is still around. You know he has other athletes to coach. You know you need to learn how to do this on your own. You keep getting your face smashed in. Your opponent is amping up her game, throwing insults at you that you have heard over and over again, convincing you that you will never win. Through your swollen black eyes you notice he has returned to your corner and you watch his lips say this is your choice. 

     You are numb. You are questioning why you are doing this to yourself. What's the point? You seem to have lost your way. But the numbness lets you take more hits. You have filled your water bottle with gin. It gives you instant relief, a deep sigh, a letting go. It's like sinking, but you are just sinking into the mat. You are getting punched over and over and you look towards him again and again and he says this is your choice. You are choosing to numb yourself. You are choosing to let her win because you are afraid of not knowing yourself without her beating you up all the time. He tells you it's your choice to continue to be defeated and you are suddenly filled with anger. You do not want this to be your choice. You are getting beaten up and you want to be saved. You want to be a victim. You are not in control of your opponent. He shakes his head....yes you are.

     So here you are again, alone in the middle of the ring. Early morning darkness is pierced by chirping crickets, the end of summer is nearing. Your alarm goes off, but you have already been up since 2am. You are not sure where you are at, besides right back where you started. You are licking your wounds, startled by an early morning dream that jolted you awake with rage.

     Recently he asked you a question that irritated you and you investigated the agitation. You are always trying to understand where it all comes from. But sometimes the constant questioning, the researching, the swaying, bobbing, the parring, blocking and clinching- you don't know how to let it all go. So you just keep holding on while your opponent picks you up and slams you back down, treating you like a rag doll. Your body goes limp. You feel defeated once again. She waits in her neutral corner with a smirk on her face. He is still in your corner but you question for how long. You imagine he is getting just as tired as you are. You glance over and without looking directly at him, you see him nod his head...this is your choice. She is not going to stop fighting you unless you take off your gloves. Do you have the strength and the courage to take off your gloves and step out of the ring?

I’ve been learning a lot listening to interviews with Dr. Gabor Maté. He often asks a simple question: What does the word DEPRESSION mean? To push down. He talks about how depression stems from the pushing down, the suppression of feelings. The inability to express emotions. Or the fear of expression. The sense of not feeling safe to express emotions. He talks about how humans are social creatures and we rely on our social network for feelings of safety and comfort. When we are young, we look to our caregivers for those feelings of safety and contentment. Before the age of 2 our brains are wiring in a way that reflects the kind of care we receive. Our attachment to others in adulthood is influenced by the first few years of our lives. He discuss the affects of “time out” when kids are “acting out” because there is a REASON behind the “acting out” and most of the time the child is looking for connection, not to be sent off alone to “deal” with emotions or “think” about their “mistakes”. They are looking to the adults on how to emote in safe and healthy ways. “Acting out” is because they do not yet have the words to articulate their feelings, so they “act”. And what if the adult is arguing back, calling names, yelling or shutting down? Then this is the message the child will receive, that these are ways to cope with big feelings. And the cycle continues.

This resonates with me a lot. I have never understood why we send children off to be alone, to stew over how much they hate the person who sent them away. Children need connection. HUMANS NEED CONNECTION. And we have severely damaged our abilities to connect over decades and decades of “cry it out” and “self soothing” and telling kids to “stop crying”. (In other words- PUSH DOWN AND SUPPRESS YOUR FEELINGS) Some of you may even be rolling your eyes at that, but look around. Maté mentions how we are so quick to say “oh, it’s just human nature” when we are discussing jealousy, contempt or revenge, but you never hear someone say “that’s human nature” in response to empathy, expressing joy and kindness, which are still HUMAN NATURE.

Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh says “If our parents didn’t love and understand each other, how are we to know what love looks like? … The most precious inheritance that parents can give their children is their own happiness. Our parents may be able to leave us money, houses, and land, but they may not be happy people. If we have happy parents, we have received the richest inheritance of all.”

For me, the process of therapy involves learning how to trust feelings of happiness. It’s all about trust. Trusting my self so that I can also trust others. Loving my self so that I can also love others. Learning how to rewire my old coping that I developed very young with healthier more loving ways of being. Being a very sensitive person, it’s easy to get swallowed up by all the darkness, the meanness, the suffering.

I think that going through this "recovery" process (re-discovering my SELF) that it shines an EVEN bigger light on all of the suffering. In witnessing how one has been coping with suppressing emotions, you see how others are doing the same all around you. One of the habits I am trying to break is to constantly say to myself, or to end a long conversation with “I don’t know”….because in fact I DO know, I am just now learning how to listen.

Thich Nhat Hanh also says “When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love. That’s why to love means to learn the art of nourishing our happiness. Understanding someone’s suffering is the best gift you can give another person. Understanding is love’s other name. If you don’t understand, you can’t love.”

I think the search for understanding is what keeps me going. So I suppose, if I am listening to Nhat Hanh, then I am also searching for love.  I search by spending hours on a painting, or getting sucked into a memoir. Listening to the wisdom of those who have come before me and those that are on a similar search. Challenging myself to draw when I have told myself I cannot, or giving my full attention to my child. What keeps you going? A search for truth? A search for Joy? When the world can feel so crushing, what sustains you?

In the recent and wonderful interview between Marianne Williamson and Dr. Gabor Maté, Marianne asks Gabor, Do you have hope? He responds “I’m not interested in hope. I don’t know what’s going to happen. What I do know is that I’m here now and you’re here now. And the question is what possibility is present in this very second? For you and I and everybody else who is listening, whoever they are. She, He, They. Whoever they are. What possibility exists in the present moment? For them, for all of us, to bend the future in a humane and loving direction?”

I think traditionally most of us are taught that emotions are weak and shouldn't be expressed. (Who remembers the "never let em see ya sweat" commercials? "Looking nervous...is DEADLY!") Usually anger is expressed in a controlling and manipulative way. Or, we are raised to believe that as children, we are responsible for the feelings of others. And some of us were taught that crying was a weakness. Do not ask for help, just shake it off, you are FINE!  And then we grow up and have kids of our own who naturally EXPRESS EMOTION in order to get their needs met, we will teach them too, if we aren't careful, that emotions are bad. STOP crying. STOP being angry. STOP being disappointed. STOP STOP STOP. For some of us, it is absolutely triggering because our nervous systems are so wired to shut down in the face of anger/pain because it does not make us feel safe. Or maybe we get wrapped up in the cycle of lizard brain, two lizards in a boxing ring. I know when I find myself saying to my son "you are acting like a jerk" (it's happened more times than I like to admit) that I have entered my lower brain. Name calling never comes from a place of maturity. But it takes WORK to stop that train from crashing. I am learning how to say "I am sorry that I called you a jerk. I was upset. You are NOT a jerk." And I am learning that when my son is angry, that is it absolutely OKAY for him to express his anger. He needs to know that it is SAFE for him to be angry. It's never okay to hit me, or to call me names, but you can scream into a pillow, or play your drums, or hit your punching bag. Showing our kids safe ways to emote, even when we ourselves are still learning, I think that's the biggest gift we can give them. Learning how to be patient in the eye of the storm, to breathe and know that these expressed emotions are about MUCH bigger things than not getting to play a video game, that's my lesson, too. We all know the kids are soaking up how we handle ALL OF THIS PAIN we are living through and it is hard. Learning how to be compassionate is a part of the process. To our kids, and towards ourselves.

Listening to Andrew Humberman's latest podcast this week about neuroplasticity, I am going to loosely quote him from my notes: "The brain and nervous system of a baby are not precise. We have all these wires/connections (small roads not highways) and as we mature-these connections get reinforced until age 25. Positive and negative events up to age 25 are stamped down into our nervous system in a very dramatic fashion by what is called one trial learning. We experience something once and our nervous system is forever changed by that experience UNLESS WE GO THROUGH SOME WORK TO UNDO THAT CHANGE. A web of connections (baby) and what you are exposed to (caretakers, thoughts, places)- your nervous system becomes customized to your own unique experience."

When I was 5 (think about that for a minute. FIVE) I would tell my mom "I'm going to go get the other Natalie." I would literally walk to my bedroom, have a small discussion with two selves and walk back out to my mom and say "I'm sorry about her. The good Natalie is here now." I have no memory of what caused me to do that, but I do know it was rewarded. I do know that it made the room lighter. I do know that it felt good. I was proud of this little drama that I played over the years and I would brag about it well into adulthood, like it was some kind of superpower. Oh, I just go get the other Natalie. When my son was very little, I would plead, I wish you could just go get the other O. 

So here I am in my 40's and I tell this story to my therapist and his face goes white. And for the first time in my life I got a very different reaction to that story. And we've been working on digging it up for the past year and let me tell ya, it just keeps on giving.

It is 1979 and the world smells like Schlitz, all day pots of Folgers or Brim, unfiltered Pal Mals, Lipton tea with sweet and low, Aquanet, musk, Old Spice, new carpet, the chalk on the edge of pool tables, wallpaper paste and sometimes motor oil and gasoline and enamel paint and sometimes mineral spirits and oils and watercolors. Occasionally like pie or pot roast and summer tulips or Lilac trees that they encouraged you to stick your face in.

Your blanket that goes with you everywhere has holes in it. Your soft blue babydoll that has beans inside her body tells you I love youuuu when you pull a string on her back. Or Play Paddy-Cake? Or Go Bye-Bye? There is scratchy carpet inside homes that soak up the smell of casseroles and tobacco, linoleum in kitchens and metal shopping carts at K-Mart with wheels that stick. Hot steel slides burn your hands at the park in the summer and mittens stick to your winter coat with little roach clips. Polyester adult laps and bird dogs and poodles who lick your hands. Velour and vinyl and always the click clack of Zippo lighters.

Memories are not that far removed from dreams. Some stay with you and others disappear before you have a chance to contemplate the lesson or the poetry. First memories are the most dreamlike and they run together defying all sense of linear time. One overlaps another like a crazy quilt, or rings from the raindrops on the lake. Memoirs are never about one person. Perhaps some are and maybe they fall flat. It’s what is in the foreground and the background that supports the story. It’s a shared lived experience. Art is life, life is art.

Your dream starts at the house on Piatt Street in Mattoon where you move to with your parents when you are two. Except you are not at the house on Piatt.  You are on the floor at Mrs. Welch’s house near the railroad tracks. Your’e on the floor in your brown, green, orange and yellow quilted sleeping bag that is just your size. It’s late and dark outside and you’re supposed to be sleeping, but all the lights are on. You are the only child left, or at least that is what your memory provides you. The room is vast and brown linoleum stretches under yellow lights. It’s quiet. You don’t remember Mrs. Welch’s face or her voice or what she smells like. You only remember her white nurse shoes, her thick nylon stockings and her polyester skirt that reaches her shins.

Cold air and then warm. You’re inside your bedroom, on the twin bed, on your back in your puffy blue coat which is being zipped off you. The zipper vibrates your torso. You are sleepy. A night light makes the room blue like a moonlit sky. A humidifier puffs warm water into the air with a hiss. The strong eucalyptus scent of Vicks Vaporub, thick on your back and chest and under your nose.

In your parents bedroom your dad, his dark curly hair wild from sleep, gets out of bed, naked, to go the bathroom. His feet make the wood floors creek.

You are standing in front of the Zenith TV that sits on a stand with brass handles in the front wallpapered room that faces the street. You are the same height as the TV. You are watching Sesame Street. But then you disappear. You don’t know what happens. You are just gone. You only notice you are gone when you are back. You are still standing in front of the TV but Sesame Street is no longer on. Where did you go? How much time has passed? Does anyone know?

You are standing in the hallway between the bathroom and the two bedrooms and your eyebrows are likely furrowed. You have stopped right here because you are suddenly confused. Perplexed. Frustrated. You don’t know what to do with your hands when you walk. Do you hold your arms straight down with your fingers stretched apart? Or do you slightly bend your elbows and hold your hands into fists? You panic a little. You don’t know what is right.

You are panicked again. Your heart is racing. You look down at your feet. You are relieved to see that your shoes are on. You have been worrying that you have forgotten to put on your brown Hushpuppies.

You are walking to Dairy Queen with your great-grandmother, Nana. She wears a crinkly plastic hat that she ties around her chin to protect her soft white hair, even when it’s not raining. You have been walking for a while and you are very concerned that you have made a big mistake. You think we should have gotten there by now. You are very worried. You insist that we turn back. It’s not safe for us to keep going. We return home with no ice cream, but we are home and we are safe. Years later you will remember this and see that we had maybe another block to go of our three block walk.

You are sitting on the edge of the table. Your mother is pleading with you. You are screaming because the pain in your ears will not go away. All you can do is scream.

Mr. Trueblood is your neighbor. He is an old man in bib overalls and he is mowing his lawn. He is always mowing his lawn.

You watch adults take pills and you think that is how you make babies. You swallow a pill with a glass of water while you tilt your head back and shake your head to make it go down.

You are at the neighbors on the corner who are good friends with your dad. Frankie is your age . His sister is older and she has red hair. You are playing memory together and you are not very good at it, but you concentrate. The stairs leading to the basement off the kitchen are linoleum that is supposed to look like bricks and there are little aluminum edges on the stairs that make a clicking sound when you walk down them. Frankie and his sister have a brother who is always sitting only a few inches from the TV. He is always there in front of the TV and does not acknowledge you.

It is winter and the snow is deeper than you are tall and you can barely move in your snowsuit. You walk carefully.

It is summer now and you're riding in the VW bus with your dad on a country road and you run out of gas. It is hot and the oily road is tacky from the sun. You are very worried. He is calm. You walk to a farmhouse, he carries you on his shoulders, you think. You tell everyone you see that we were in a wreck.

It is 1981 now and you are 4 years old and your parents no longer live together. You are standing on the porch with your mom and your dad is in the driveway in a borrowed yellow convertible. Your parents are fighting, maybe about a missed dentist appointment. You will now visit your dad in Springfield on the weekends and your world opens up into new rooms and textures and sounds.

Your dad now has a roommate and his roommate has a girlfriend named Andrea and she has beautiful long straight brown hair that reaches her waist. She is very nice. Dad’s roommate has a stress toy named Panic Pete and he lets you squeeze it and Pete’s eyes pop out and you think it’s the funniest thing in the world. You always make sure to put it back on the shelf right where you found it.

By the time the Summer of 1993 arrived, I was obsessed with the 1960’s. I read everything I could get my hands on, and that was quite a bit. Uncle Fred was sending me books to add to my collection about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, Tom Wolfe’s Acid Test. I read No One Here Gets Out Alive a few times and was well versed on acid trips. I grew my hair long, searched for bell bottomed jeans and watched the Woodstock series on repeat. At the time, I was unaware of my pull towards wanting to belong to something, a community. I was unaware of the amount of shame I carried and unaware that I was searching for trust and acceptance outside myself. I didn’t know that approval from others is what made me feel safe. That my worth was based on others opinions. It would take me thirty years, failed relationships, motherhood and a therapist to realize that the person I needed to trust the most was me. Going into my Jr year in High School, my fear of people spray painting swastikas on my locker had pretty much disappeared, but I would always be on high alert. I was still running ahead of my friends to get in my house during Chanukah so that I could hide the menorah before they saw it. I still wished we could have Christmas lights on our house like everyone else. I hated it when people told me Happy Holidays and not just Merry Christmas. It seems so silly now, of course they knew. In small towns everyone knows everything. There are no secrets.

I meet him at the garbage dump the summer before my Junior year. It's my first job. I am 15 and my friend and I are the first girls and first teenagers to be hired. Jerry is our boss and looks like a bearded Jim Morrison had he made it to 50. We sit with him in the mornings across from the garbage trucks and make coffee in the Bunn coffee pot. It is stained with the kind of soot you will only see at a garbage dump. Everything is tacky and soiled.  We smoke cigarettes and I drink my coffee in a beat up plastic thermos, red and white, that says Sullivan Redskins on the side. I add enough non-dairy creamer to make it beige and use a plastic red stick to stir in 5 sugar packets. Sometimes when we arrive to work in the morning Jerry is passed out in the front office with an empty fifth of Jack Daniels at his side, having never gone home the night before. Within the year Jerry will die of a heart-attack early in the morning, in his red Chevy truck, just outside the landfill.

The building is made of steel with cement floors, the sound of rain is intoxicating. I work the conveyer belt in the recycling section, which is up plywood stairs on a landing with plywood windows cut out to see below. He runs the baler and I watch him from above. He stands atop the heavy hydraulic machinery, his legs straddled over the top while he uses a big stick to push down the plastic or aluminum or cardboard. A sign warns him of death. The minute I see him, I want to know who he is. I tell my guy friends and they laugh. Really? They are friends with him and knew him from school. Within days we have our first date. He is 18 and our birthdays are one week apart in the fall. He earned a GED last year. I tell him that my dad also got a GED because it’s true and I want him to know that we are not different.

We don't really date. We are just together. I am his woman. I go with him places. To buy weed in Decatur, to his Aunts house to pick up his hemmed jeans. We smoke weed, trip and drink with our friends. One night his ex-girlfriend shows up at our friends house and yells at me from her car. She calls me a bitch, a slut, a whore and tells me I am nothing but a rebound. I stay hidden inside the one room apartment with my friends.  I am confused by her hatred and her anger. I do not know her and I am scared of not being liked. 

He lives with his parents in a small white house on Harrison Street. He tells me his parents conceived him in a tent in California at the end of 1973 and I am instantly convinced we are soulmates. His bedroom walls are wood paneled and covered in posters. Fear the Reaper, Pink Floyd and Jim Morrison gifted to him from his ex-girlfriend. Soon he will give them to me and they will cover my walls, reminding me of him when he is gone.

The ashtrays are cluttered with the butts of Kool menthols. Empty cans of Vess Soda and Coke dot the room. Sitting on the shelf of the waterbed is a half empty 2 liter of RC,  an empty 24oz plastic cup from White Hen Pantry, cd cases, incense, a yellow bic lighter and a purple ceramic candle holder I made in art class. On the brown carpet sits a glass from the kitchen with white geese, blue bows around their necks, filled with sweet tea, ice cubes floating at the top. 

We sit on the edge of the waterbed, his legs, long and lean in stone washed jeans, fold over the brown vinyl cushion. Mine are curled up in a pretzel, the ends of my bell bottoms gathered at my feet. There are only sheets on the bed. Dark blue and stained with our sex. The tv console sits on the floor next to the bed and we watch MTv. Blind Melon's Rain followed by Tool's Sober. He taps the hitter on the side of an ashtray and it makes a clink clink sound. He packs another one for me, digging the brass hitter into the side of the little wooden box packed with weed. Sticks and seeds roll around on a blue and white corningware saucer, balancing on the waterbed. I stay here almost every weekend now. I tell my mom I am staying at my friend’s house and I call her to check in. I am always checking in.

I smell like Sunflowers perfume, cigarettes, Canadian Mist, weed and sex. The world has stopped and it's just us and I don't want it to ever end. I tell him that I will have his baby and we will name him Ozzy. He calls me his woman and he smiles at me and tucks his beautiful dark brown hair behind his ears. He has all of my trust.

Within a few months a few more teenagers work the belt. I bring in my tape player and we listen to Danzig and Metallica, Primus and Black Sabbath. My work gloves become stiff from old milk, soda, a resin that cakes everything. The recycling gets dumped into a pit from one of the trucks and comes up the conveyer belt to be sorted. In the heat of summer the stench of sour milk jugs takes some getting used to, especially when you take off a lid and the putrid stench heads straight to your face. I am now in charge of the conveyer belt. My friend Adam works at the pharmacy in town and he writes me notes HI NATALIE on plastic bottles and I find them traveling up the belt. The belt is covered in the same resin as our gloves, our boots, the floor, our coffee mugs, under our fingernails.  I collect old glass bottles to burn candles in. Little trinkets we find sit collected on the plywood ledge.

When school starts in the Fall and I turn 16, my dad and uncle give me a Harley Davidson leather jacket for my birthday. An eagle embossed on the back, the shoulders still a little too big for my skinny frame. I am a cheerleader and on Friday’s I meet him at his parents house during my lunch break in my uniform and my leather jacket. We smoke weed and I go back to school. The principal of the school will scold me for wearing my leather jacket at football games and tell me I make the squad look bad. I know that it is me and not the jacket that he does not like.

He breaks up with me and I am devastated. There is no fight. He is very matter-a-fact. He tells me that I do not fit in with his friends.  I quite my job at the garbage dump and I work at McDonald’s for two weeks. I insist on remaining friends and I will soon be hanging out with him and his new girlfriend.  They pick me up one night after my shift and Fleetwood Mac Dreams is on the radio and it’s like I am hearing it and feeling it for the first time. I tell him I hate working at McDonalds and he tells me to come back to the garbage dump and I do.

That winter we have unseasonably cold weather. At work our gloves are frozen stiff and we stand in front of the huge kerosene heater that will catch our gloves on fire if we are being stupid. We take pulls off the big plastic bottle of Calvert Whisky that he has hidden behind a bale. Eventually we are all sent home because it’s too cold and we can’t move our hands. Our cars are cold and cough exhaust and our tires crunch on the gravel parking lot, which is the same color as the sky.

We park the car on the side street. The starry sky is lit up by a big white moon. Across the street is a salon attached to a house. Hand painted on the plaster facade is GUYS AND DOLLS and I admire the shape of the letters. Car doors slam. Chatter. Casseroles and Jell-O molds. My family and I walk in formation to the synagogue. High heels on old cracked sidewalk. It's Friday night and it's also Chanukah. I am wearing patent leather shoes, shiny and black, white opaque tights and a new dress. The air smells like pipe tobacco and wet leaves. Our synagogue is a house. Just an ordinary white house on an ordinary street in a small midwestern town. We climb up the stairs and greet others and the warm light spills from the doorway. The neon blue Star of David shines in the front window, telling us apart. I am not paying attention. I am too young to notice the glass bottles that have been thrown at it. We gather inside where it's warm and we take our food to the kitchen in the back, past all the folding chairs in the center of the big room. Prayer books and song books under each seat. Once our casseroles are in the oven to stay warm and everyone has hung up their coats on the back wall, we settle into our spots. The same spots as most every Friday we are here. There are a few cushioned chairs in the front row. That is where Aaron and Hassie sit. I often sit behind Hassie and notice how her body spills out from her vinyl chair. Her elbows melt over the steel arms like bread dough. I stare at the way her feet fit inside her shoes. Her brown nylons and her polyester skirt well past her knees. She has bottle thick eyeglasses. Aaron and her both have heavy eyelids like my great grandparents and Aaron's lips are big and he sometimes spits when he talks. He calls me Natasha and tells me that would be my name in Russian.

Soon the service will begin and our voices become a whisper. It smells of spices, musk, cigarettes, hairspray and mildew. I will likely fall asleep on my mother's lap. But there is a lot of standing and sitting and standing and sitting, so I don't get to dream. I want it to be over so that we can stuff our bellies with noodle kugels, potato latkes with applesauce, gefilte fish with pink horseradish and orange Jell-O with canned fruit floating inside. I will excuse myself to go to the bathroom. It's cold in there and cavernous. Big and open. The bathtub sits thick and heavy with a piece of plywood over the top. When I sit on the toilet my shiny shoes don't touch the ground. I am confused about the bathtub. I haven't quite yet figured out that this is a house. That people used to live here before people threw glass bottles at the star in the window. 

My man @lumbering_behemoth just pointed out this @apartmenttherapy article to me from a few months back about BIG ART being the "gallery wall" of 2017. Apparently BIG art is a TREND now? Well, all be darn! Would you look at that. That's what I DO! The article wraps things up at the end with a few links on how to buy big art for less than $100 and what STORES to purchase big art from. If you have been following along for a bit, you know that I encourage you to seek out the artist and purchase directly from them. Not only do you gain a stronger connection to the art, you are making a direct impact on that artist's life. Like, you know, helping them pay for their kiddos summer camp. (eh-hem, kids are expensive!) And as far as big art for $100....I can't help you there. When you purchase a big painting of mine, it is a true investment and will have an impact on your daily life. In Alain de Botton's book Art as Therapy, he makes many wonderful arguments about the need for art in our lives. I really love this little excerpt: "What we’re worried about forgetting … tends to be quite particular. It isn’t just anything about a person or scene that’s at stake; we want to remember what really matters, and the people we call good artists are, in part, the ones who appear to have made the right choices about what to communicate and what to leave out. … We might say that good artwork pins down the core of significance, while its bad counterpart, although undeniably reminding us of something, lets an essence slip away. It is an empty souvenir." 

New work in progress. It started out a VERY windy and rainy morning, my favorite studio weather. I've been in the studio over 6 hours already and wishing I could slow the day down. Time always goes so fast when I'm painting.

I'm super excited about this new body of work. I have a great start on this Wolf painting, based off a photograph by Stephen Canino @goodwolfsessions. When the original painting sells, I will donate 10% of the profit to the Wolf Hollow Sanctuary.

I wasn't sure if I was going to move forward with this Florida Panther painting, but I'm glad I decided to put more time into her. I've found a lot of helpful information on the Big Cat Rescue website regarding these big cats and others. I didn't realize that I live in one of the handful of states where you DO NOT have to have a license or permit to own an exotic animal. Dang. I will donate 10% of the profit of this painting to the sanctuary @bigcatrescue to go towards the sanctuary and education. These paintings will be a part of a new body of work that will be on display Johnson Public House by early Summer.

The more I am learning about these organizations, the more my world is opening up. These paintings are very personal to me, and they continue to teach me so much. More than I could have every imagined.