all i'm in is just skin.

I had a gastric bypass in 2011. It will be 2 years in April and I am not sad about it. I took some power back from losing weight and while I do wish it didn't have to go to surgical removal of my intestines and hacking of my entire digestive system, it is done. Over. I'm okay with what happened, though it took two years of therapy, mood swings, body dysmorphic disorder and three months of anorexia to be at this place.

I documented my journey from the time I knew I'd be going into the room to have my body permanently altered weeks before, to the most current video blog a month or so ago. I have become increasingly disturbed by the sheer numbers of follows and visits to my page. The Adsense google contract alone took me into another level of video blogger. I was making extra cash now, too.

Time has healed some broken & damaged parts of my thinking. Time and meditation and therapy and books and self-introspection and a LOT of fear-facing changed me. I wish my sorry ass had done this before my surgery. But I often wonder if the catch 22 will always be happiness in retrospect. Life is kinda bittersweet, so I am used to happiness as a "reflection" rather than an exact moment or thing.

In my videos, I try to use myself as an example; showing skin occasionally, dressed up and down, relaxed and at my worst, so that there is a narrative that is honest. I answered emails for a long time, but then an exchange back and forth between myself and 20-50 people became an impossible task. I felt ashamed to have begun to want to give back, only to be stretched, ironically, too thin.

Today is no exception. A new follower used her airtime to comment and scrutinize 4-5 videos of me, scattered timeline-wise, from my beginning to one of my worst moments as a dehydrated anorexic. Her comment was "you look so old here" when I mentioned I was sick. First of all, who the fuck does that? Second, who the fuck does that? And dehydrated people who are starving look terrible. But let's not restate the obvious. Did you even WATCH THE VIDEO?

I knew I was sick. The process of a documentary of self is not about fear. It took some huge balls of brass which I carry even when I am playing my own victim in a bad TV show. In many ways, my life was suddenly sprawled awkwardly all over the internet with 50,000 views, numbers, international data, followers and comments, stories, inspiring and sad. I was trying to manage it. So I stopped making videos. I virtually ignore the comments because I gasp for air when I get an email now.

A series of things might run through my mind; "is this gonna ruin my morning?" Am I going to connect and need to help someone, for free, and put off my writing, art, blog, walking, yoga, LIFE again?"  It sounds really shitty and whiney, but it's a reality I deal with. I created it, sure, and a monster it has become. I don't resent it or my followers or the newbies who are looking, as I once did, for inspiration to help them get to a place of self-love. But that's NOT what a gastric bypass does.

Meditation, daily walks, time to reflect, independence, farmer's markets, new friends, coffee... my dogs and daughter, my strength of will, (my body... the last on that list), is what gave me powerful insights and a new perspective. That's a LOT of work out there to teach. I could only do it in sections. But here's THIS COMMENTER, telling me I am looking old. And it hurts. I was so very sick. My hands cold constantly. My hair fell out in clumps and I harmed myself to deal just with the emptiness anorexia caused me.

You say to some of these prospective patients that a stomach surgery is not going to last forever. One day you'll eat candy and chocolate and have hunger return, so where are you going to be? What skills will you have implemented? So I reveal, I just became anorexic and trained my brain to love the hunger. But that screwy thinking made me dead. STILL, some of them [the viewers] are sickeningly obsessed that a fat girl would -and could- become an anorexic. It's like a lottery ticket for fat girls who hate themselves.

FATTY BECOMES ANOREXIC. WOW.

Suddenly I found my pictures reposted on "thinspo" blogs, Twitter and Instagram. I had failed not only to help, but I was HURTING these precious girls, who were not even morbidly obese. My body became a source of more pain, not for me, but for others. Poetic justice for a girl who scrutinized other women all day, every day for a long time because I was so bitter. That's as truthful as I can be. I hated other women, was jealous of them, carried the burden of resentment toward anyone thin or pretty or happy. But as I grew to be okay with my own body, I found more self-love. I thought in my later video blogs I had shared this, however, the dizzying reality is that those videos are the least watched. The powerful recovery, the dazzling feminist body-neutral strong woman... I have the numbers. People watch the victim. They LOVE the victim.

I guess in a way, I just have to move on and forget about it. Maybe delete the whole thing, half or a few of the videos. But if you are looking for a magical fix, don't go to a doctor unless it's to get your head aligned by a shaman Goddess, like my therapist truly is. Your body is not a factory of misery. It's not a dissociative  entity. It is yours. You are not completely *it* but to alter it, as I did, isn't the first step. Many will say "this is the last step, the final straw" as I used to tout, but that's complete bullshit.

It's truly not the first step. In hindsight, I could have reached out to my fierce female friends for support. I could have held myself accountable and ate properly. I could have read many more books and walked daily. But I chose that victim script every day. Honestly, until we see powerful happy women with huge round curves, I don't know if we will EVER change the body hatred script among ourselves. It's hard to choose to walk, when your ankles hurt. It's difficult stuff which nobody addresses healthy living as a process of heart, mind and body. [unless you are exploiting morbidly obese people for television purposes] We love a damn before and after shot, don't we?

I hope that you think about your process before you allow a man with a knife to enter your sacred body and dissect and reroute parts of it. I am not going to tell you it is awful and bad, because after my surgery, I had an awakening which I cannot say 100% wasn't due to being thin finally, and feeling worthy. What I CAN say, is that your body is sacred. If you fill it with crap food, sugar, carbonation, processed meat... I do not suspect a knife or lasers entering your intestines is a big deal. It wasn't for me. And that's where we have landed as a society.

Why do we need to shoot for the moon?
We can become alien versions of our humanity through surgery.

I hope you all find light, love and your truth ≈ value. Fat, thin, gay, poor, woman, black whatever you feel holds you back. I hope you turn that beautiful struggle inward and learn to strip your fears bare and relearn what you've been force fed; advertising, corporate greed, medicalization of mental health and spirituality; the processing of food that is killing us all with disease and obesity. All of its bullshit and the sooner you learn it and embrace that, the better off you're going to be. You might even find your clothes are loose because you were out with friends instead of Googling thinspo pictures at midnight on a friday.

timing, pace, relating

"she gives her golden radiance, but carefully, pointedly, promises nothing. all the timing in our relationship has been hers." - susan sontag, personal journal entry, 1970

there is rhythm to affection and sharing. sontag in the pages up to this and after deals with the increasing chill of her lover's touch. the connection seems one-sided and numb. sontag is dealing with this great opening of her real capacity to love fully, and rightly celebrates it for herself as a victory, but the slow unraveling is heart-wrenching. she is also deconstructing the parameters of a film, sprinkled in and out of the passages of despair.  it is remarkable. as much as a journal, it is a gorgeous piece of writing.

honoring my own defeat in risking love with yet another man, and realizing i was gay right before a visa approval and a marriage which would inevitably follow, i identify. love is an immense pleasure, and one i always gave free reign to my psyche to chew completely; with the exception of sex. for me, sex made love harder work, and vice versa. i was, obviously, having it wrong. having the wrong kind of sex with the wrong gender and trying to completely love, still... i was going mad. i went mad. sincerely, most definitely mad.

sontag goes on to write about her lover "C." as only being able to love - and *be* - on an intermittent basis. i also identify with this, from the lover's point of view. i tend to write from an emotional place of personal experience, rather than in a communicative way. i resent it in myself, because art and my love life often so readily hold hands, figuratively speaking. it seems a little sophomoric and a *lot* selfish. but i have been for many years weaving this tapestry with two very incompatible yarns. when i came out as a lesbian, when i felt that to be my truth and said it out loud, wrote it, i wanted to keep saying it, over and over...

"i am a lesbian." there is so much power even in that. am i afraid that, like many of my ephemeral studies, this will be another project? i think to some degree, yes, but only in the sense that the sexual orientation is not new, but the excitement is. i feel a dizzying anxiousness, a giddy naiveté and a celebratory reconnect to my heart. that's good shit. it's a drug for sure, and i want to just stick in the needle over and over, because i am an addict and that's what i do.

i have been really digging in lately, not with needles, but opening myself up to non-judgement. to risk, is to be brave. it's the bravery i want for myself and expect of others. when i see myself as the only brave one in giving my love or my ideas, i am so turned off. a coward, for me, *to* me, is the anti-drug. weakness is fine, vulnerability to intimacy all that, we all have it i think, especially those of us with lots of cock in our walk. but the MAIN thing is digging into my true compass, the truth of what i need hypothetically speaking. i have yet to be with a woman in a relationship that is ongoing and sexual in nature, so it's all "research" then isn't it? i do know what love is, but maybe i don't in the context of my heart and mind and body flowing into that true path.

maybe that's a decision. like staying in love. or continuing to go work at a job. or writing everyday. for a writer, the terrible ache of failure comes not when there are no words, but when there is no flow. no timing. no pace that puts our life into context of other people. it's not so much audience appreciation, as it is- a sacred meditation that makes real synaptic connections. and so, too, is love. that pace, wow. i love it. i anticipate it. i love to feel it and write about it. the story of love is so vastly different for everyone, but i have yet to have that storytelling with the sexual connection. a lesbian connection that, to me, feels so right.

i begin new chapters of my life with learning things i never knew. i pick up a sort of cultural evangelistic approach- i code switch. i walk and dress and think in a complete cinematic way. i become my own narrative because my identity and personality as a borderline is so fluid. but that's my own therapeutic way of unburdening myself with being bored or going crazy. i have to step into a new realm and live there for a little while. immersive and often, drowning. i find that in this state of creativity, my art comes alive. a new series reveals itself. new people. new loves. intuitively i know exactly what moves to make, because i let it be what it is, one day at a time, just like in AA.

so how i relate, and the pace at which i relate to another lesbian might be revealing. i have brain crushes, particularly on accidental elitists. i get crushes on words. i get crushes on the sound of falling leaves. i have crushes on good sumatra coffee with cinnamon sitting on a balcony, like a big fluffy cat, watching the world. these nostalgic fancies are what sinks me into life. without them i'd just hang myself. [i always ask this question when i have been suicidal in the past; "will dressing up as another character help?" and usually i do that, document it. and move on to sleep sometime around 3 am.] the truth is, i am a tough nut to crack, not because i am unlovable or slightly mad, but because of my own shifting paradigm. about the only thing that sticks, year after year, is my relationship with my mom, my daughter and my dogs.

i wonder, now that i have become open to the real chance at loving someone i am also physically attracted to, what will become of the pace and tempo of life? i am already, in classic online fashion, relating to another lesbian, sexually. many others as friends. but i am very certain i do not want to run the pace of these potentially lifelong friendships. it's clumsy and awkward, even just being friends, with other women and always has been. so how do i do this?

i think i find out, first of all, what it means to be a lesbian to me. i mean, i just figured out that two girls can enter a girls bathroom and have sex and nobody thinks about it because girls are supposed to be in there. i am also learning that just because my classic role of nurturing mom to most of the people i care about is rewarding, it isn't enough. i need to let myself be nurtured. i need to be surprised. and i need to, at the risk of sounding crass, get fucked. i have been the dominant partner for so long, controlling and micromanaging details down to "send this email and thank this person" that i am literally exhausted. i have not even cleaned my house in two weeks because i just need that to be okay. i need to just play and rebuild right now.

...just a few things i am thinking about as i come out.

i wonder if i am alone, or if many people have a pace for new chapters of life?
do we change eating habits? clothing.
are these mini-mitzfas throughout life reason enough to celebrate and put on some new music, or take ourselves out to buy a new pair of shoes?

i think so. love is an incredible rite of passage. i am finally open to it, in a real way, with no mask, no armor. i want the exchange of power to be fluid. i want to touch and be touched how women do it. i may have had that in another life, but it wasn't my time to be out of the closet then. i was young. i had a husband. then i had a child. before all of that i was a teenager. i am not certain how this version of myself touches another woman. or even how it feels. my imagination knows though. or at least she thinks she knows. it was enough to risk a lot of my comfort zone to find out. whatever is going on, my body is so tender, so responsive- to music, to art, to sexual fantasy... that i literally feel like electric energy pulses through me. and for a girl who thought her vagina was literally broken and all her dopamine used up- this is quite a magical place to be. 

Artist's Life as White Box

when I think of art, the context of where it is at always slightly baffles me. a rauschenberg can be in dallas, huge and high on a wall, or in a back alley and still we will know it as what it is. but that's rauschenberg. take another piece, something by tracey emin and put a bed in a room in a shit part of town and call it what it is: tracey's fucked up beautiful world. a mother's disappointment. but put it in a gallery in london and the context is brilliance. genius. wealth. bravery. money.

i am very interested in how the context of art can change the perception of one piece to the next, one set of eyes to the next- and the very worth of a human life or career depending on how white the box is. a white box gallery, i had the pleasure of destroying in houston with splatters and graffiti on the walls with my collage work in 2007. but the same work in my garage, some 6 years after, unsold, is depressing. a reminder of "when she was good." perhaps, my own ego and need to create, and guilt over not always doing so, has become my lifeblood. typical, as it seems to be, failed and nonworking artists turn curators and critics, intellectualizing & pontificating rather than sitting before a blank canvas.

because the real context for any artist, writer- even lover, musician and or careerist of creation is to wonder if "i'm good enough" and do we, as these lifelong shame-hoarders, have it in us to keep working and keep creating something new beyond what was last season's fascination? cyclical hope is depressing a thought as it is,well, hopeful. that childlike meandering beyond the everyday ho-hum is brave. tracey emin is brave, but to show her rawness, her sadness, that is why she is important. it might not be in the slightest bit universal to some critics, but from where i am, an equally self-obsessed & curiously 1980s-stuck artist, i find her finishing art business that was started in the early century and most people by the 1990s had gotten over. [another neon sign? okay. thanks. moving on.]

we seem to want for ourselves the inspiration and truth others can afford. if i could afford it, i'd be homeless, but that comes with knowing i can slum around and do copious amounts of drugs while coming back to safety. to have gravity. that is what allows a lot of artists to keep working. bukowski once wrote to get a disability check was a poet's good fortune. [paraphrasing] and that is true. in many ways, dropping out of society gave me an education in playfulness and failure that i had never had struggling to piss & shit in a toilet with no running water because i was too broke, too crazy or too lazy to pay the bills.

there is truth in sad art. but put my dirty dildos, empty pill bottles and smash-out cigarettes into the context of a white box gallery room, give it a polished audience in designer sacks and black hipster glasses and year after year, it becomes a sort of universal touchstone- a truth and anchor to ourselves, the hidden grossness of who we all really are when alone. it's not a set decorator's choice, unless she's working on a david lynch film, but it is, it *is* the very grit and grime of our amusing, disgusting lives. and i like that. i love tears. and i adore disgusting.

i like that about tracey emin. i love that about rauschenberg.
and i like it about myself. because artists, whether they like it or not [and most of us HATE it] but we are egoists at our core. we aren't angels. we live in a bubble because once that bubble bursts, there is pain inside the release. it's fucking hard and painful to make art that is really messy and honest. however, the need is there. we have to reveal. we have to disinfect our brutally honest bullshit.

i hope i can start making it. [that kind of art] the handwritten journals over the last year are important to me because i've slowly been bloodletting the emotions and the crossed wires are getting more organized. i am finally out as a lesbian and finally, sigh, out as a failed artist. i hated the work i was doing. i hated the person i was. now, i feel like i can create in a messy studio, throwing my paint and collage work & basically -fundamentally- not care about context. there is daily bread and there is daily "head" and i was giving myself the latter for about 3 years in order to heal and become. but that grind is pathetic. while it has created something new in me now, i want to spit in my own face for losing precious honesty in order to feed a plastic baby doll. the real human, flesh and bone baby over here needed nurturing, yet i was just not the mama i needed to be to myself.

so when people have no context for art, the next time they see "ugly" or something really fucked up looking, i hope they can understand one thing- we are all vile creatures in need of a little release. every piece of honest art has a gross quality. even the most gorgeous painting has a slightbit if adversity it has overcome. we all need to be able to reach that- and invest in it as an audience. how even the ponce of a dapper dan can have a little mud on his shoe. the strongest M&A guy in the world might need a bit of panty-wearing to open his chest to keep breathing. these secret worlds create our humanity. some of us want to tell the secrets- and as artists- it's an ugly job. you have to have an open mind to hear a whispered secret and think about it in that context. like all great secrets, too, you kind of want to share it. so the whispering moves alone a line- and audience and art- are created, as well as the abstract "value" of art is given and rewarded the creator. it's a process that can take a night, a year, but mostly, it gives us the context we all search for our whole lives. being an artist can suck, though.

the pay is shit [unless you're tracey emin] and the work is often disregarded. but while that validation of the white box room can be nurturing, it cannot be the confidence artists need to be brave. those revelations are only in risk. that is a grown-up thing to do, being honest & creating new ways of seeing the world and ourselves... and nothing and no one can give it to us. it cannot have a predetermined price. it has to be *done* and failed. and repeated.

it's negotiated, gently, alone in the lab of our lonely studio.
in the quiet of gardens.
in the heartbreak of lovers.
in the solitude of tears.
in the morning bed, where our journals await us.

in writing because it's what we do; we write.
in making art because without it, we'd cut ourselves off from the feeding and care of the umbilical cord of the art universe.

i am in a public tea room and i hear no voices, but yet, all of the words are slipping into me. the context of creation here, is my attempt at being within the audience, while being completely alone in my head. i like that. the same way i like "cunt vernacular" by tracey emin- it's like saying "welcome to the party, but be warned... this art party is gonna get out of fucking hand and you'll probably make out with someone embarrassing."

but that's okay, man.
it's only art.

susan sontag & coming out

in the last year i have come to some pretty unsettling conclusions. but in a way, unsettling is good. it's freeing. it's hopeful and in that blank canvas there is a potential so fucking scary and elusive and great I can't really explain it. but it's a slow and- then sudden-secretion. it feels like being licked from ear to navel and back, the first time one is succumbed to love. that first drink of heavy wine, drunk on life. that is the unsettling of being in the moment.

what could i do if i let myself stop, for once, caring for everyone else and just really, intently and gently, looked at myself in the mirror? not just looked, but stared? not just stared, but interpreted the meaning behind the fears and tears and all this denial? what symphony can be heard over the fucking denial anyway? i am not the nicey nice cupcake queen. i am the girl who writes too fast for caps or correct punctuation. ain't nobody got time for dat. ha.

i have openly come out as a lesbian. this has been like turning on a bright light and blowing a circuit in four major rooms in the house of my life. but like all unsettling things, it has shown me things; who i am authentically. that i missed writing. that i missed love, real connections with women- and that i was getting to a point of such raw misery that when i was touched, it felt like burning embers on my skin. true beautiful, passion- was not for me. i didn't deserve it. feeling happy and sexy and creative and healthy inside and out [pardon the pun] was just too much fucking GOODNESS. i had no degree to prove i could be, or should be happy. i mean, we all look to rites of passage like diplomas and jobs and babies to sort of bring us into our "self" but there is no great celebration for being gay- except coming out- and that is not hand-delivered in our mailboxes.

even for someone like me, so psychologically advanced in my knowledge, gravitating to a path of authenticity- i did not know for certain, i was a lesbian, until now, 38 years old. i thought the entire hole in my life was a borderline personality disorder. not feeling love, not allowing realness. always wearing masks, but then the mask slipped and get this- it would NOT allow me to place it back upon my face once it had admitted that i *might* be gay. i had dodged this gay bullet for over 20 years, and now i was taking myself seriously. i blamed everything else. my body. my celexa. my boyfriend, then fiancé. my exes and my family. but never just good old fashioned destiny to be a woman who likes women and feels closest to females and is also sexually attracted to their bodies.

i knew men were odd. the men i chose were soft. i liked the fullness of their asses and backs and the pockets of frontal fleshiness call "manboobs" but it never occurred to me these were all nicotine patches for my true orientation. that i craved softness. i needed the intimacy of another woman, how a baby craves a breast, how a lover craves the tenderness of feeling home with their partner. and how dreadful to clinch my heart and not wring it out properly. so i sit here, writing for the first time in many many months... and it feels like i am awake. there is no terror in me to make a mistake. hell, even a mistake with a woman if that is to happen, would be fantastic. because it would be REAL. and that's the really gorgeous part of coming out. feeling i am now able to expect as much as i possibly can hold in my arms- great big huge armfuls of love, not just existing on as little hurt as possible.

that is what coming out means to me. it means i can fully, completely, put myself into my life without any fear. if i fail, i fail as kelly, now. i fail as someone who tried EVERYTHING to be straight and dipped my toes in "bisexual" in order to cope- but now. i am free. do you hear that? I think God loves me gay, too, because i am still here and if there is a universal God, he's not going around killing gays and lesbians- the humans are. we hold the knife to our throats by not coming out. by sinking our consciousness into denial, we are made heavier, sinking more, heavier still, until our last words were "i wish i would have ______..."

regret can be metaphorical for anything; addiction, dreams, coming out, not letting ourselves love, hurting another person because the elixir of adoration can make us drunk and temporarily happy even if it means we're dying secretly. so i am thankful that i am finally not sinking. i am constantly coming up for air, right now, but i suspect that is because i have not a single close friend who is gay. i have clients, acquaintances but not friends. not someone who i could sit and watch a movie with and feel like "okay, that was good, this is friendship." but i see my *people* kind of on the horizon, bobbing in the water on a rescue boat while i am out here waving...

not drowning.

Framed mirror DIY makeover

Recently I had an old framed mirror on my bedside table fall over. Lucky, the actual looking glass didn't crack but the frame bit the dust. I pondered a revamp, and after a new excuse to break out my ruffler foot on the sewing machine, I came up with a cute Toile shabby chic makeover!

super easy and the script ribbon I hand stamped using Staz On permanent ink and an America The Beautiful text stamp. I ruffled using a 6 meaning every 6th stitch I have a pleat. The ruffle foot is by FAR one of my top ten "must haves" for creative fabric mixed media projects. It's totally worth the $10 cost and the twenty minutes fiddling with learning to attach it & get it going. best of luck! happy saturday! -Kelly

paperballet's photostream

paperballet's photostream on Flickr.

photos of my work over the years... a flickr morgue file of my various projects and art! enjoy.

a weekly update for End of July 2012

crafting. hot weather. joyful thrifting experiences. jewelry making & junk picking. This has been my summer recently. Did I mention it's HOT? ;)

Lately I've been trying to step up my looks with a more mature style. I noticed the hot weather made me curiously more & more sloppy about closet choices, so I've been splurging on new clothes. Of course, I needed new bling too-

my fiance covered that one and proposed on july 5th so NOW, I have a wedding to plan! yall know me, the southern yard sale diva; while he's the gentleman Brit. Opposites attract!

I'm thrilled to be blogging again, bur I won't inundate you with pics or words- or posts- just yet.

hope everyone is good & I hope to hear from you! Kelly