So fed up!

 

So fed up that now that menopause is finally being talked about, the 'wellness' industry is muscling in and telling me that I can have the body I had at 40.

I'm sick of seeing ads of muscle-bound 50, 60, and 70 year olds telling me that Tai chi walking is the best thing; that I can lose menopause belly fat by eating large amounts of protein; that it isn't okay to look the way I do at 57, which is a bit softer, a bit rounder than 10 years ago. 

I lift weights, I walk, I eat a diet containing a wide range of foods that I cook myself. My body is getting older, just as yours is, and there is no shame in a changing shape. You cannot stop time and nor should you wish to. 

Haven't women had enough body-shaming up to their 40s without it chasing them into their 50s, when bodies are changing so much on the inside that it's all you can do to hold it all together some days? 

Embrace your aging body - it has carried you this far, gone through puberty, cycles of hormones, maybe pregnancy, and now another change with a whole range of uncomfortable symptoms. It's your body, and no-one else's business.

Play with water-soluble graphite

 

I've been playing with water-soluble graphite sticks this week. The piece above is my favourite. I made it while letting my mind wander a bit. The lines started as abstract squiggles and then formed a face. The lines themselves aren't the sort of lines I would usually use to make a drawing of a face. They don't aim to catch a particular line accurately - they're just scribbles, really - but they still tell our brain that it's a face. It set me thinking about how far one can abstract a face and still read it as a face. 

This one was the first using the graphite. I drew a face and then sprayed it with water. I wasn't happy with how the lines looked amongst the pools of grey, so I wiped a lot of it off and went back in with more lines.

They're darker than the other pieces because the paper was still wet when I drew the second lot of lines. 

This one was the second one in the series and  again has some of the more usual lines, but also wiped with water for shading. I found that just wiping over the lines with water made dark lines in a wash of pale grey, and wasn't the effect I was looking for. Maybe loading a wet brush with the graphite will be a better option. 

The three below came after my favourite, and are the experimental lines without water. It seems that the brain likes to find faces in even the simplest of lines.

Different wavelengths

 

It's difficult to communicate when you're on different wavelengths.

Miscommunication is easy, especially when you're coming at things from a different angle from the person you're trying to communicate with. It can feel like being on trains on parallel tracks, moving alongside one another in the same direction for a while, but never arriving at the same place.

We have to work hard at understanding where someone else is 'coming from' if we want to communicate well with them. Getting to know people, their culture, their history, can help us in this endeavour.

Full diary

When the diary fills up.

This piece felt a bit full with lots of different things, reminding me of how it feels when there is a little too much going on. Some of the colours became muddied, just like I feel when there is too much on my plate and things start to merge together. 

And this one below is a ten minute 'sketch' of frustration.