How wide to open the spotlight.

Disclaimer: There are no dolls here. If you’re here for dolls you should return to the main blog page and click on the category tag of “doll” under the images. That will take you to a landscape that is all doll related.

I blogged for years on Live Journal.

It was a heady and heartfelt time for bloggers.

Intense friendships were made with strangers, sometimes stemming from something so little as seeing that their user icon showed them to love one of the same things you did.

I’ve maintained a solid number of those friendships. Many of them I met in person on trips to America. Some reached out to me when Japan was roiling with radioactive ash, contaminated water, and the other terrors that followed the earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear disaster of 3/11/11. One took me and my friends in in Nagoya when we were fleeing the Tokyo area at that time.

Friendships are not where I made my big mistakes when writing my blog posts.

Other relationships were tricky.

When you write or create other art/content about your life there is always the question of how much the light you cast on yourself will expose those close to you.

Me, years ago, contemplating an image about my life I created even more years ago.

My first web page (yeah, not even a blog) I wrote about a weekend I’d had with my ex boyfriend at a convention but, in trying to preserve his privacy I almost completely removed him from events. The erasure made him sad and frustrated.

I also followed what he posted online and learned my own lessons on what its like to see yourself through the words of others.

Once on LJ, (2003-?) I had a boyfriend who enjoyed his appearances on my blog and still uses the nickname (let’s call him WG) I gave him back them for the Instagram he keeps to stay in touch with me.

He also always supported my art but skipped one show featuring drawings I created in the aftermath of our break-up, understanding that he wasn’t in it but that some of it might be obliquely about him and unpleasant. My life and emotions aren’t only loud in my words.

He wasn’t wrong and I supported his choice.

I had an on again/off again boyfriend/friend who read me until I shared a detail he wished he’d heard from my mouth, not my typed words. He didn’t speak to me for 10 years.

I grew more careful.

I barely typed about the next guy I dated. He didn’t read my then waning LJ.

I later learned, in a series of long angry emails he sent to me after we broke up, he assumed I’d always been writing about him in great detail, mining our drama for pulpy topics to titillate others.

There was no friendship there to save so I never bothered to correct him.

We haven’t communicated since 2012.

A desk sketch from that time.

When I started up blogging again in 2017, on Wordpress, I kept my relationships (what few I had) quiet.

I didn’t just do it for their sake. I also was protectively hiding my own flaws. I didn’t always make the best choices. I was conscious of that fact. I was embarrassed.

When I finally wrote about a boyfriend again it was 2022, on my second to last Wordpress Post (which lives here now), it was the most obliquely I’ve ever written about someone I was seeing. I ran it past that boyfriend and he said it was fine, as there was really so very little of him there in those words.

When I focus my art, my words, on my life I do try to make it about me. I try to be specific about what I am feeling and thinking. I hope that that my specificity and voice sparks moments of shared feelings that others might be able to take something from. I don’t want what I do to be a source of stress for others.

Its also because I write to know myself. That painful but educational quest of of self-knowledge. I often write to contemplate and understand what I am thinking and feeling and why.

Yet I know that there are these intense friendships I’ve forged through words and time. There are people who know me so well that they can sense the figures lurking at the shadows of my sentences. They hear the unnamed voices. They see possible scenarios flickering at the side of the frame. They know me. They smell the tears and the turmoil when it presents.

One hour ago: When your heart reaches beyond you: sketch for a possible sculpture.

They look at what I post and think…well, that can’t be a good sign.

And they are right.

There are pains I am not explicitly writing about.

But I am writing. I am sketching. If I were near my sculpting supplies and not dog sitting I’d be sculpting.

Milo and Nike have been suuuuch good puppers.

I’ve made social plans for tomorrow and the next day and days after that.

Those are all good signs that whatever it is I’m going through, I’m processing it and sharing.

I don’t know what comes next for me. I do know that I have good friends, family, and coping mechanisms to get through whatever it is and feel light again.

From the same show as Inward Collapse. It now lives in Japan with my friend Brenden