Happy New Year and Lunar New Year! I hope everyone is having a good 2026 or Year of the Horse! Maybe not because it’s rough out there, but y’know. As usual, it’s been a while since I've last sent out a post, though that's partly due to some business going on with me recently. If you don’t care to hear me dump, you can skip to the end to see my five new pieces I made. ☺
So for the sake of being transparent, I've been on a bit of a mental health journey, getting medicated, seeing a therapist, and getting diagnosed, drumroll please, as bipolar type two! That may or may not be much of a surprise and I struggled at first to recognize it, which has made things a bit messier than needed. See they put me on an SSRI for anxiety and depression at first, which for my pharmaheads out there, is known to cause a "switch” in bipolar people, i.e. make them hypomanic/manic/mixed. So what felt like a good “wow, this is what it’s like to be chemically balanced” good ass mood over the course of the month led to me winding up in a sustained mixed state, driving myself crazy.
I waved off concerning behavior as just growing pains. I had a straight-up imposter complex (despite having a family history of it and both others and myself describing my mood patterns as such), waiving off my mood as not warranting calling it what it was—a hypomanic mixed episode, until I was keeled over with my head in my hands at work, my thoughts running a million miles a minute, that I finally gave in and admitted this was a problem that I should talk to my mental health professional about. I’m starting to realize that if you think something is a problem, it almost certainly is.
I’m on the right path now, though I wish I had dealt with it much sooner so I didn’t have to deal with the rather nasty effects of anti-depressant withdrawal and getting stabilized. But still, getting a diagnosis is liberating in a way. It can be scary knowing this is something I’ll have to deal with the rest of my life, but it’s also really healing being able to reflect on past life experiences and now having the key to understand what I was experiencing. The truth will set you free.
With all that out of the way, I have another milestone to celebrate. It’s been ten years now that I’ve been making art as a hobby! It's been an incredible fulfilling journey seeing myself evolve over the years as an artist. I’ll be setting up a new art archive page on my site for my work going forward to chunk things up. To celebrate, I have five new pieces to share. I hope you like them!
your faces and gridlines hurt themes
magenta is a beautiful color.
ps2 walking simulator art museum
perspective is everything
my windows await the hungry ghosts
these ribs were cooked a while ago
cathode tumours aren’t liquidcrystals
brains are a kind of cpu
mixed episodes shine light
or not so much
PS: I wrote the following last week to originally accompany this post. It’s very stream-of-consciousness and messy, but I thought it was worth sharing here at the end.
I have to start a new art archive post because I realized it goes ten years for the decades’ sixth. So the five paintings below I batched out in just a few days, kinda productivity I don’t do much but it comes down to just dipping the brush. Last week I got diagnosed as bipolar ii, something that’s not a surprise, but sometimes it takes a month of Zoloft burning up your neurons to finally give it up and admit you have a problem. “so tell me prescriber, would you diagnose me as…” “oh you already met the criteria from our first meeting” so it goes.
so I want to rip out my own heart and they give me anti-psychotics atypical and I still want to rip out my own heart but my frontal cortex isn’t so upset about it. i’m writing this during a sangha meeting, my camera’s the only one turned off because i felt like doing this was the most spiritual thing i could do. i feel myself deviating more everyday, creeping to the edge of the fanciful “connecting the dots” without losing myself. i want to lend apologies to everyone i got close enough to to annoy, with apologies and chocolates and flowers. pop culture is the kind of thing that’s so disgusting that you want to worship it, that’s why i’ve funneled myself into it, the gaudiness.