Joy

I have been pretty busy the past few days so sorry for the small delay in posting. A few good things happened that I'm proud of myself for. First, on Thursday, I finally told my parents the rest of my abuse history. Not details, just the who and when - but I'm still proud of myself for doing that since it was so hard to do. I had to decide to do it and then stop myself from thinking so that the the worry thoughts didn't come up and then I had to start saying it quickly after deciding to do it. It was kind of like ripping the Band-Aid off. They had a good response apart from a little bit of a lack of an emotional reaction, which kind of frustrated me and made me worry that they didn't believe me. It made me feel a little invalidated to not see them have an emotional reaction to what happened. But then we talked about it the next day and they assured me that they do and that even though they weren't showing it that they had a lot of feelings about what I told them. On Friday I didn't isolate and I went to a friend's holiday party and had a lot of fun. And then today I got to go play with cats!!! My volunteer job as "cat cuddler and condo cleaner" at an animal shelter started so I got to hang out with lots of adorable animals. I'm really going to have to push my roommate to adopt now (hint hint, J).

So in honor of all of these good things, I'm going to post a piece that I drew pretty much right after I got out of the hospital. It was the first thing I had drawn in a while that is joyful.

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Dreams

November 19, 2011

I kept seeing all of these beautiful colors in my dreams, so that is where this drawing came from. I don't know where the joy was coming from since I was still a mess over losing my therapist but I think it may have come from a lot of the determination I was feeling. I wanted to feel better and so all of these beautiful colors where appearing in my dreams and swirling together and I was waking up feeling inspired to draw. And this is the result of those dreams!