Natasha Shapiro, ATR-BC, LCAT

Day 2 Friday, 4/8:

I decided to make Day 2 here align with my new food day count. I got bad results on my “lipid panel” at the doctor and I get way more exercise than the average person of my age but I need to radically change my food and use mindfulness, no refined sugar most of the time. Usually the first few days I manage it but don’t cook a lot, but today I made a smoothie with banana, frozen raspberries, spinach, Greek yogurt, flaxseed. Then I made a huge rescission as a strict vegetarian to eat fish again. Since 1996 when I started vegetarian only, on and off I’ve gone to “pescatarian” and switched back. So I’ll try fish for a while.

I cooked a big piece of salmon and I admit, it was very good. I can see how eating fish could really make hiving up sugar different and more interesting, plus it’s a new way to do it so I won’t hit a wall again.

I’ve been wanting to post some recent poems. Here is a poem from a poetry therapy workshop in November:

Prompt about pressure to get good grades one of the workshop students talked about:

I often want

To drop out.

I give myself C’s and D’s

And

Everyone else

The A’s:

I want to drop

Into the well

And disappear

And

Fall into the place,

Get the key

To the secret garden,

Like Alice

And

Go to Wonderland,

Where everything

Is backwards upside down

And familiar,

Where the only grade

Is a gradation or a grave,

Where Report Cards

Talk and Argue with

Each other

About reports,

Fighting over cards.

Then they flap open

And turn into birds-

Ravens flapping their wings

Making V’s in the sky

On a crayon drawing

On the fridge.

<html><head></head><body style=”word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;”>Prompt about pressure to get good grades  one of the workshop students talked about:<div><br></div><div>I often want</div><div>To drop out.</div><div>I give myself C’s and D’s</div><div>And</div><div>Everyone else</div><div>The A’s:</div><div><br></div><div>I want to drop</div><div>Into the well</div><div>And disappear </div><div>And</div><div>Fall into the place</div><div>Get the key </div><div>To the secret garden </div><div>Like Alice</div><div>And</div><div>Go to Wonderland </div><div>Where everything </div><div>Is backwards upside down</div><div>And familiar,</div><div>Where the only grade</div><div>Is a gradation or a grave </div><div>Where Report Cards</div><div>Talk and Argue with</div><div>Each other </div><div>About what they’re </div><div>Reporting, fighting over cards.</div><div><br></div><div>Then they flap open</div><div>And turn into birds-</div><div>Ravens flapping their wings</div><div>Making V’s in the sky</div><div>On a crayon drawing</div><div>On the fridge.</div><div><br></div><div><br></div></body></html>

Day 1: Another New Experiment with Writing: Strange Nostalgia

I realize I have stopped writing altogether in my new blog and working on my website that I had to have a different kind of blog on it. So I’m starting another 100 days, maybe 101 days of writing every day; I prefer odd numbers. Anyway, I’ve been struck by a weird nostalgia around two years ago being locked in the house working in a closet during the “plague”, while the death rates in NYC were highest, and every day there was. a briefing from the mayor and governor and the same person sign language translator.

Also at the start of the pandemic I actually was able to write daily in the blog.

Why would I have any nostalgia for a terrible time and the worst death toll on the planet I think and a time when we had no idea how long Covid would last, etc. I guess this two year anniversary has had a weird effect on me. I’m trying out some of the art techniques I used them and similar images but it’s looking back not forward.

It was partly the weird routine in the apartment of working all day in a weird closet where I’d also eat lunch and make art. Then in the evening going out on the fire escape to bang on a drum or shake a Tamborine to make noise for the front line workers. In the first part, we’d sit and watch Schittz Creek every night together. I had to catch up to reach the current episode, whatever it was. I even saw a weird connection where this family is forced out of their house, their fortune gone and having to live in the town they owned that was a foreign country to them. It had nothing to do with what we were going through but there were parallels about not having control, having your life uprooted; in one case kicked out of the home and forced to make a new very different one, as well as the family becoming closer and the boredom that arises. Anyway it was fun to watch something completely different from the current world and laugh a lot.

I’ll take the regularity and better keeping of habits like blogging daily and working out which I didn’t start til months later. And continuing Telehealth for most clients.

Here is a picture of a drawing I made recently. Don’t know if it finished. I posted a lot of similar ones in the spring of 2020.

Metaphors

Today I did some outside of the usual limits or I went off the map. My teacher from grad school would have been proud. Most I can say is combining archetype card with the client’s artwork and doing some wildness. Trying to encourage growling, howling. Where the Wild Things are as I remember was so awesome the way it split the life of a young child on the outside and then finding a whole adventure you might say inside his head but he goes somewhere real. A place of freedom. He is sent to bed with no supper, a punishment that is already strange to people today. Making your kid hungry when he needs to be fed is about a lack of love somewhere in that parent. As soon as you’re born you’re fed. To make the punishment about that is cruel. Anyway maybe the wildness comes partly from hunger.

A bunch of my clients work with shamans. A lot of rituals, guidance, spiritual teaching. The Shaman used to be the therapist when there were none. I think of being a shaman you do extreme things to the body and mind for them to get in touch with their wild things.

Anyway I did different types of growling and making animal noises to encourage her. They’re lots of talk of the moon cycles but maybe witch circles howl more. I also mentioned the throat chakra and her need to talk be heard, open the throat. Homework was to growl like an animal this week. Her shaman has her disciplining herself awakening at 5 every morning to meditate so the two go together, a need for self discipline and a need for freedom even from your species.

It’s fun to work off of what other healers are doing with your clients. Then there’s a concordance going on.

I think waking up at 5 every day is one of the cornerstones of self discipline. I can’t do it.

I’ve got to get there through other means. Being a Wild Thing once in a while…

International Women’s Day workout!!!🎂🌸☕️💗

Morning pages; it’s the morning and International Women’s Day

It’s only 6:39 and I’m finally doing the morning pages. I’m noticing part of me is resistant to success. Not morning page success, although it worked to go to bed early last night, at least for me, and I’m not waiting to get back in bed. Big victory. Now I have to keep it up and aim to go to bed by 10:30.

Happy International Women’s Day. I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandma Lydia, this before the Russians started their bombing and war on Ukraine. She was born in Odessa in I think 1905. Her mother died when she was 7. At 2 months they fled Ukraine due to the Pogroms. Basically from what I understand groups of people killing Jews. It comes from the word gromit that means to destroy using violence. I imagine people on horseback even though they probably didn’t ride in killing all the Jews.

They fled to Harbin, China, apparently one of the few places in that part of the world to go where you could live without fear of getting killed for being Jewish. The Chinese didn’t care. I wonder if there’s anything more about the Chinese and the Jews. The trans Siberian Railway was in Harbin and I think her dad worked for them.

Anyway she became a concert pianist and was in Berlin during the Roaring 20s which later she said was the happiest time in her life. Maybe she didn’t say that and I’m remembering wrong but who wouldn’t say that with the suffering awaiting her, being married to a not nice person to say the least, having 5 kids, all boys, and being the main breadwinner of the family. My grandfather was a cellist but not easy to work with. She tried once to leave him and took the 4 kids to Harbin. She fell in love with a guy there who unfortunately died. He was kidnapped and his father refused to pay the ransom so they killed him. She went back to my grandfather and continued living in Japan. well I guess I got it wrong. Kaspe’s dad tried to pay them the 100,000 but the authorities told him not to.

“ Again he was advised to not pay the ransom.^[4] However, the body of his son was found by the police on December 3, 1933. Simon Kaspé had been starved and beaten by his kidnappers, who cut off his ears, ripped off his fingernails, and forced him to keep his head in a dark, cold hole in the ground as temperatures dropped to 20 and 30 degrees below zero. His captors had killed him with a gunshot to the head.^[4]”

Wow. I didn’t know the brutal details. How awful this must have been for my grandmother. She never spoke of it her entire life and I guess refused all questions about it. Looking at it now, her trauma started with the loss of her mother so, what a life. In her later years she and my grandfather moved to Los Angeles. One of my uncles moved there too. His wife is Japanese and they had 3 daughters, my cousins. My grandmother died around age 76 of a heart attack. Everyone was mad at her for not going to the doctor as supposedly she could have avoided dying then.

Oh and the other cool thing is she played piano in a silent film in 1930. You can find 2 recordings of her playing piano with my cello playing grandfather. My dad says he has more recordings of her playing but doesn’t know where they are. That photo of her got 57 likes on Facebook, probably more than any I’ve gotten. She was also beautiful on the outside.

Look what I found: The Reconsideration of the Trial of Simon Kaspe’s Murderers 47 Notes and … To Lydia Shapiro, I leave some of my notebooks and music pages as a keepsake…

PS Irony

The outsider art fair is here! Oohhhwow. I get to be outside that. They only accept galleries to show at the fair. They lost the title even though they’ve co-opted it. It’s long been officially a cash cow for the art world, some kind of performance stamping on the history of many artists who suffered with mental illness who will not see any money from this. If your art is in that fair and you’re not dead, you’re now a “meta” outsider artist with a gallery. It’s an either or. You can’t be both and once you’re in you are masquerading as being an outsider artist. Congratulations! You have entered an elite club of inside “outsider” artists.

3/1 morning pages

For once the first of the month doesn’t mean trying some new get up early every day and do xyz including these pages.

I’m reading a book by a person who had OCD for years and didn’t get treated til age 40. Somehow it’s boring so far. The writing is plain and kind of reporting. Do I want to get to the part where the OCD starts? I know I want to read more but I guess in a writer snobby personal I want to read something that feels like literature, fiction or non fiction, like The Book Thief. I know about OCD. I’m close to a person who has it and know others.

Maybe I just have had enough of reading people’s memoirs of mental illness for now. A good book. Such a simple phrase. Do you know a good book I should read?

And the tv show of course. This time it’s The Servant, Season 3 an episode every Friday night. I had binged seasons 1 and 2. I decided to start over watching more carefully and rewatched the pilot and second episode. Then during a session a person was talking about reading and it hit me that there are better things to do with life than rewatch a really good show.

I haven’t been to a museum in ages, or even a gallery. I don’t know any new big name artists besides the successful ones on Instagram. I don’t follow the art world at all. I ignore it. Now I’m questioning, why don’t you care who are the next hot artists? Chances are maybe a lot are people of color if the snobby art world is trying to get rid of their white people artists supremacy. They have some other nepotism supremacy and then there are artists who have the gift of selling themselves, branding themselves and making art at the same time and making a living off it. People who sell paintings for an average of $25,000 per painting. I don’t know the present price that pushes you off the edge into making some real big money from your art.

So I don’t follow anything. Crit Connection just emailed us answers to our questions. A lot of artists seem set on making their website awesome. Who looks at websites these days? I don’t know. Maybe it’s a thing. I thought you could just use Instagram and find the secret formula and sell off it or get discovered or something. I won’t be discovered or sell much because I don’t have the energy to sell myself, my stuff, etc. part of it is really ADHD not laziness. Part of it is the years have worn me down to mostly being resigned to being an artist nobody in the art world knows about. When I started paint in g at age 21 I had some dream of making money off my art and getting into the MOMA one day.

Now I don’t. Apparently focusing on Instagram is a good idea but requires work. When I read the word “gallery “ I have an automatic weird response. Gallery? What gallery? I don’t want to go to galleries and get on their lists and do whatever. Ultimately it’s a waste of time because it’s too competitive. I can’t even get a small work into an artist run gallery in Brooklyn.

I think I don’t like galleries. They are so cold and un inviting uninspiring, exclusion is their automatic pilot. They exclude almost everyone. It’s like worse than auditions. They swipe no and then swipe yes to the under 1%. Even if I’m wrong if someone statistician found the formula I can bet you wouldn’t bet on that horse. If something is not just too hard but completely out of reach it’s impossible to be motivated to reach for it. It’s like being 5ft3 inches and focusing on trying to believe I can make myself 5 foot 7.

You walk into a NYC gallery. There’s a nicely dressed person sitting behind a desk who will give you a list of works and prices. There is art on the wall, usually very large but maybe not as much these days. You walk around looking at the art and maybe you ask the minion a question and they answer concisely and precisely. That’s it. That’s the experience. If it’s in a bookstore it’s a whole different animal. But that is the gallery- the stepping stone to career success. That’s it. Done. As in Project Runway, you’re either in or you’re out and really there’s one winner. I was out and am out and not even a contender for in or out. I rolled the dice and I’m out. I’m making art to live, not using art to make a living. Art saves me from myself. It’s a freedom. When I’m making something, I’m in. That’s it. That’s my life sentence to accept or be stupid and waste time trying to grow four inches and be 5 foot 7. The trick is to be happy I’m privileged to make the art and have the studio. The studio is the thing I’ve had since starting, no matter where. The room of my own that is a place to make art and be a real artist. Is it enough? Who cares? It’s what I have and I’m lucky to have it. Being small, short, not taking up space – that’s it.

2/28/22: Back again: morning pages

I seem to be unable to be consistent with anything in my life. It’s ridiculous to be after some kind of self-discipline all the time and changing up what it should be but that’s usually my process. My therapist a long time ago said something like “That is just your process.” It’s an annoying word after a while; a trendy word to describe working through something. I use it in my notes. They “processed” issues in their relationship or whatever. There is some other phrase like it; I think it is “talking out”. I feel some kind of way about it. I’m not sure what to feel about it. I don’t know. I know there’s a list of phrases that are new that I like. I have a client around my age who says,That’s my story and I’m sticking to it which is not a new one. The way people now stop themselves in the middle of a sentence and say, that’s a lie, calling themselves out for expressing something not quite right/true. Anyway I guess I’ve accepted that “going through it”, another new one, is unique. I just wish my process wasn’t so convoluted and full of extremes. In the end I tend to try to accept/embrace my ADHD way of never doing things the easy right way and expending time “perseverating” over something unimportant.

Yesterday on the ride home I attended a Zoom memorial for a very loved and loving person. Also a very sturdy person. I’m fascinated by sturdy people. She was a therapist but surrounded by people drawn to her and talking with her. A great listener, a no nonsense person not afraid to call people out or have strong convictions; definitely consistent in who she was and consistently present for all of life and with a lot of people. I knew her through my parents and had mostly interacted with her years ago. She was incredibly intelligent as well as all the other things many people said. A great great grandmother, the matriarch. There were lots of social activities and people and long friendships. She had a bible reading group where they talked and analyzed every part and she would force them to stay longer on a passage.

I’m fascinated by people who are so able to manage and deal with life and then pile on more life, enriching is one word that comes to mind.

When you have an unquiet mind and spend a lot of time alone and can barely handle Simple daily stuff, it feels like these other people are on this other level of just being present to every part of their life and wanting to know people and what makes them tick. Funny how therapists can have these similarities and such differences in their lives and how they live them and how able they are to manage themselves in any setting. It was a happy memorial and it was strange how this person who affected so many people and squeezed so much out of life had a Zoom memorial about two years after dying. I imagine if it had been in one place it would have felt a lot different but the through line of the kind of person Sheila was would be the same. I was glad I could easily attend while in a car with my headphones on.

You are stuck with you. Fragile, disorganized, moody, scared, the opposite of unflappable, comfortable hiding and watching, terrible at socializing, sometimes regret and resentment come to my “guest house” brain and linger… I can’t make myself someone navigating all sorts of different social situations and other things; games, ruthlessly she wanted to win. She drove too fast and reveled in scaring people with it, her family members. I guess that was her crazy part. tThe driving was in the 70s, probably didn’t continue it as a hobby.

Back to discipline. I’m on and off. I push myself and then give up. I understand people who confess they sometimes don’t bother brushing their teeth. The funny thing is that I’ve been pretty consistent in making a Tik Tok at the end of the work date. It’s like I can’t leave the office without quickly making one. I’ve continued to use the dolls and creatures I’ve made over the years as my subjects talking about whatever topic so my face is never in them. It’s fun. I had forgotten how I used to be into serious filmmaking. In high school and college I liked/hated acting. Then I thought I wanted to make films.

A “big” person not physically but in the other way, someone who, I noticed to myself, was smiling in every photo of the slide show. Someone said it. A really happy person; those smiles were real. And hardly any photos of her alone; maybe none. Photos of her with family and friends, trips summers, graduations, holidays, etc. Amazing what you can see in a flood of photos celebrating someone’s life. Sitting at the dining table of life, a life well lived. A person with many close people in her life, a lovely, loving person. A matriarch. They are a dying breed…

Reblog

That was a Reblog of my fellow writer Kit Troyer that was inspiring about a conversation with a spider among other things. This new format makes it too hard.