Found some zines from the first time my mum had cancer and I was pretty upset. 

Also boxes and boxes of paper, scraps of drawings and words and photos, what shall I do with it all? 

I guess you have to be more careful as you get older because it is all so much more consequential - time is running out to repair your damage.

Hello

Looking back through my old sketchbook, untouched since 2021, I had a lot of ideas which are beginning to wake up again.

What is different now, is I no longer have social media. No one to show off to, but also no one to share with. What will this result in? Making art like no one is looking. 

This I have only recently realised about myself

 I grew up in Oxford and resented it for rejecting me in various ways, and this has made me resent beauty and impressiveness, or at least take them for granted.

I have forgotten how to enjoy things. Instead I make everything into a job that needs to be done. I'm not even sure what I like or don't like anymore.

My favourite weather is rain.

I have been painting

 I have been painting, and for the first time since I was a teenager I am making art without any intention of showing or selling it. I am trying to make art that is a part of my life, not outside of it. And I am going to finish things and have objects that tell a story and mean something and are exactly what I had intended them to be. It is quite different to be making without the pressure to be impressive, or clever, or even 'good'. I hope I am coming into a time of my life where I can be an artist, and a mother, a gardener, a woman, a wife, without feeling shameful, or like an imposter. I think these are hard times for everyone, and it is a hard time to be a woman. I am 31 and my womanliness has always felt like something less than I should be, something that should be concealed or overcome. What will I do with that? 

 I've lived a whole life between them and now, it feels like.

Made work, shown work, sold work, made a totally different kind of work and sold that too, grown vegetables, had babies become children, tried and tried and tried, loved, moved house, started again (or tried to), cried a great deal, made more work but didn't know what to do with it, got my bike fixed, wondered and worried. I have aged and it scares me. I never liked or knew myself and now I am not young anymore. 

 Hello?

Can you hear me?

I've been talking to you.