Year 5, Piece Two: 29. Blue Red

I DON'T WANNA

I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. I don’t wanna. 

I have been dragging my heels on this second one, not able to bring myself to just sit down and make. I do have an excuse: we moved this week. Moving is labor-intensive and disorienting enough, then add in two small children and a pandemic, and well, there is not a lot of energy left over for anything else.

Everywhere I look there is something to do, something to unpack, something to organize. Everywhere I look there is something new to notice and study, from the uneven paint lines on the moulding to the neighbor’s yard out the window. My brain is working overtime, humming like an overtasked hard drive. 

So it is no wonder that at the end of each day over these last five days, I am spent. After I close the door to the kid’s room at night is when it should be my time to work. But three nights in a row I just couldn’t do it. I’m just plain tired. 

I could cut myself some slack, but here we are only on Piece Number Two of this new year. It is always harder at the beginning when I don’t quite know what I am doing and don’t have momentum yet. I could skip a week, but as much as I don’t wanna make this week, I also don’t wanna not have made anything this week. What is that impulse? Is it constructive or a compulsion? Not that those have to be mutually exclusive.

I finally mustered the will to start something at 10pm last night. In bed. I fell asleep while I was doing it. Those blue smudges at the end are my fingers slackening mid-stroke as I lose consciousness. That’s what we get this week: the genuine article. This animation is my second one using Procreate. Maybe I will use this technique all year, maybe not. If I do, I certainly hope to see these animations improve. But this kind of crude communication style is appropriate for Blue Red anyway.

Blue Red is the beginning of the Blue cycle, the cycle of Communication and Expression. And like all cycles, it begins with the body, with Red. So even while I am dragging my heels at getting to work on this self-expression project, I am hitting the wall of my body. Again and again. 

What is your body telling you? How are you listening?