Entry: June 8, 2005 ~ morning fingerpainting

These are the finger paintings that I completed on the morning of the last journal entry. These a difficult for me to look at, but I will do my best. I know it will be a step in integrating what I don't even want to look at that is inside me. But, if I really didn't I wouldn't be blogging about them. I guess, I'm just expressing my ambivalence about my feelings and continuing on with this painful process.

It is strange that even though these were done three years ago that I find it hard to look at still. I'm still in process. Well, no duh!! There are four of them completed one after the other and displayed in order. Again, the pictures do not show the colors well especially in terms of how brilliant they are.

Again, colors mean the same to me:

Red=pain/anger
Orange=rage
Purple=terror
Blue/light bluish/lavender/grey=sadness, crying, tears, hopelessness

The colors in this one are actually darker. Looking at it today. I read it left to right and see a solid base of terror. Then, hopelessness and a bit of sadness with a lot of tears beginning to move out of it. There is also pain starting in the terror and disappearing as it moves through the picture. I don't think it is disappearing as much as it is hidden by the other emotions.

This is your brain on drugs!! No, just kidding, but that is what was jokingly going through my head. I'd rather joke then tell you what I really see. First off, the orange is actually red with only a small amount of orange in the lower right corner. I think that little funny looking thing in the middle is me curled up full of fear and sadness and surrounded first by sadness that is completely surrounded by terror with protrusions of rage, pain and terror. There seems to be a lot of movement and intense feeling in this one. I still feel unsettled by it now.

This one scares me the most because it is the most intense and filled with terror, deep sadness/emptiness, loss, pain, rage, death, dying and hopelessness. Which matches the way I've been acting out, my bruising. Acting out meaning telling you what I feel or think through my behavior instead of other means, telling you behaviorally. All behavior is a way that someone communicates a thought or a feeling, usually feeling. Speaking of that. This one feels a bit out of control and all over the place which would match how I was feeling then as indicated in both my behavior and journal entries.

The lighter orange is actually red. I think the last one scared me so much that this one became more subdued and structured. It seems like a reaction to the other one. Just more of the same feelings. I think the last one represented the most of how I was feeling at the time. In this particular case, this was one of the times that finger painting increased my anxiety and thoughts, so did not help in preventing me from bruising. (Bruising to the point of drawing blood. I have to call it bruising, for now. Just as I am having difficulty accepting my self injury, I am having difficulty accepting my painting and the feelings that I am still trying to integrate now.)