Here we are, trying to build a future in only two weeks. Overcoming bumps in the road, working out the kinks, getting synced, finding our rhythm, facing facts while holding each other’s hand.
We are building something new that hasn’t existed in the world before. Like two co-builders. It’s hard work and fun play.
I’m getting worse in my health again. I give up – I just have to accept that we won’t be doing all the fun things I had planned, in the four remaining days before Johnny returns to the States. I feel frustrated.
But ironically – when I surrender to the reality of things instead of pushing for the idea of what should have been, I feel less anxious. I’m thinking about what my therapist used to say: “your fantasies will always kill any sense of genuine happiness because reality will never be able to live up to them”. As an artist and a person who loves to spend the days inside her own head, it’s a harsh truth to take in. “No artist tolerates reality”, Nietzsche suggested. It’s a difficult balance for any artist to live equally inside their own head as in reality.
I’m always chasing magic. The magic in other people. The magic in feelings. In situations. Within myself. But the paradox of chasing magic in everything is that I sometimes miss the magic of reality. The one I’m not chasing.
It’s tragic and funny at the same time. A perfect subject for a short story. I might write it one day. But I’m not planning on it because then it probably won’t happen.
Things rarely happen the way you plan it, but the unexpected always brings something positive with it. This time with Johnny has been bittersweet – I wish I wasn’t so sick and it has made me feel trapped in my own body, in my apartment and in the passivity of waiting for my health to improve, but it’s also been pretty perfect, because we’ve been spending so much time together talking – defining who we are as a couple, what we want to achieve with our connection and the direction in which we want to walk together. I’m not gonna lie, it’s been tough at times. We only have a couple of weeks to figure these things out, then he goes back to the States and it might be another year until we’ll get to build an everyday life together in the same place again. These weeks have been like a crash course in “us”
Our honesty and directness are crucial – we can’t afford to be vague about who we are or what we want, we already have the language barrier, time differences and painful pasts we want to avoid revisiting. Our talks can be brutal at times because we challenge each other, in a positive way, to get to the realness of each other and cut through the layers of insecurities and imagined expectations that’s been forced on us by other people. It hurts to let go of fears by facing them. You’re bound to get your ass kicked by them before you’ll able to triumph and rise above. It hurts to get your comfort zone crushed. To let someone inside even though you are still healing a damaged, delicate heart. It’s confusing to let go of preconceived ideas of what you should be, do, say, or act – and instead just be and see what happens when you are showing your bare bones for the first time. Will you be able to move or will you fall apart?
But the brutal nature of honesty together with the smoothness of intimacy makes the relationship vibrate with life and energy – and there’s a clear sense of movement and progress and that gives me the biggest sensation of relief and satisfaction.
“You have to work hard for the things you want otherwise it’s not gonna be what you want but a compromise or something else and you’ll end up dissatisfied”, Johnny says. And it’s true. I’ve worked hard to achieve my dream of becoming an artist. Whenever I’ve had to compromise in my art I’ll end up losing my true artistic voice. I’ve worked hard to just be me without having to sacrifice or compromise who I am in order to fit into other people’s expectations of me which leads to depression or getting caught in traumatic places. So I understand the importance of the hard work. I just wish my mind wasn’t so full of little wounds, created by the traumas and the PTSD, it makes the hard work feel even more difficult and hard. My traumas are connected with love, intimacy and vulnerability. But that’s also where the magic happens in my art. That’s where I feel at home. Naturally it gets confusing at times. I need these deep talks with Johnny, otherwise I’d probably freak out and just give up when the trauma wounds are too sore or bleeding. But I’m lucky we share this open-hearted connection and that we both want to change and adapt to each other without losing our integrity. Change is hard work – building a home is hard work, but also so rewarding. I have been breaking free from my past for several years now, but now I’m actually breaking free from who I used to be in that past. I still don’t know exactly who I am when it comes to love and relationships – “great” Johnny says, “let’s find out together!”.
We are having long and deep discussions about creativity. It’s like injecting life into my veins. It feels so good. We talk about his writing, my art, my writing, our differences and shared processes. We are both in transitional phases. Changing. Evolving from something familiar and old to an unknown expression. I’m restless about it, he’s not. “You can’t rush it, you just have to absorb and digest new ideas and visions, while leaving the old behind. It takes time”. I can’t help thinking that it’s also exactly what I’m doing with my past.
I’ve been without skin for over three years now, since the last break up when I also broke up with my own past. It was a painful experience to step out of my familiar skin to become naked and fragile – both to myself and the world, in order to change and grow. The same goes for my painting. I’m changing skin or at least shedding a layer or two. I feel awfully sensitive and a little exposed.
I use to live in a skin that was colored by what other people expected from me. It was a skin of a mother to the men in my life, the skin of delivery machine, their whore, nurse, the good girl. It was the skin of the artist who produced artworks to sell instead of saying something important. My skin tore up easily because of the metal from the delivery machine and it was melting from all the pressure.
Manic Mandy by Mia Makila, 2013
To be without skin makes me feel so vulnerable. I can’t go back and dress myself in my old skin. It doesn’t fit anymore. I just have to heal and take care of the new, thin layers of skin – produced by life, time and the peace I feel inside. The more peaceful I feel, the stronger the new skin will become. Both on my body and in my paintings.
Sometimes I flinch when Johnny touches my new skin, not because it’s painful but because I feel so sensitive. But his touch is the best cure. His love helps it heal. Our home makes it grow stronger. My new sense of freedom lets it breathe. I’m slowly accepting myself and the new skin that’s emerging in the rawness of my metamorphosis.
So I am without skin, but what a lovely feeling it is to let the inside get a chance to take a deep breath before it’s covered by new layers. It has been a time of self exploration – to find out what has been hiding underneath something that was suffocating me for so long.
I never realized that the fear of my own past has created all these walls of protection. After nearly 20 years of being non stop in either destructive or dead relationships, I’ve become sensitive to so many things when it comes to relationships. It would be easier just to spend the rest of my life alone – without anyone by my side. It would be easier to isolate myself completely. I don’t fear loneliness – there’s nothing worse than the loneliness you feel in a dead relationship anyway. I always have my creativity. My art and writing will always be my company. I would live only by my own rules, my own expectations and fulfill my needs without making any sacrifices for anyone else. I would feel safe in my loneliness because there wouldn’t be anyone there to hurt me, to leave me or to destroy my sense of happiness. I would be lonely but free – and I could make art all the time. I would become a hermit genius who produces like 10 000 drawings a year. I would create an amazing legacy.
It is a tempting thought. Somehow like it’s a loophole – it would guarantee a pain free future. My life would be a trauma free zone. I would outsmart the unknown and create my own destiny – and the magic word would be ‘avoidance’.
But it’s only tempting for a minute.
I look over at Johnny while he’s not aware of my stare and for a second I’m a little annoyed. Who is this man who makes the avoidance seem like a bad idea – who challenges my idea of becoming a hermit genius artist and instead wants me to be in a relationship again even though I clearly suck at it? I could ask him to leave now, then I would pursuit my plan of loneliness and avoidance and it would be the last time I would be this close to a man ever again. I could ask him to stop loving me, because I am too damaged anyway. It must be hard to love me. I have my freak outs, my days of tears and sadness, moments of ugliness and darkness. What does he see in me anyway? Is he blind? Stupid? A masochist?
Suddenly he notices my stare and gives me a smile. Oh crap, don’t smile, don’t look so happy. It makes all these thoughts seem so delusional. I smile back. Great, now I’ve done it. Now it’s too late to ask him to leave. This happiness makes it feel impossible. I don’t like it. How can my magic word be ‘avoidance’ when I just want to explore everything in life with this man? What’s wrong with me?
He comes over to me, puts his arms around me and I suddenly forget about my plans of loneliness and solitude. He whispers in my ears: “I know you feel scared, I know you feel naked and vulnerable right now. I understand. But I don’t want to put you in another cage. You’ve known too many cages already. I want you to feel free. I want to make you happy. I never want to take from you, only add. This is the first time in your life where nobody is demanding something from you, more than to be yourself and it freaks you out. But I am here. I won’t leave. I am here.”
His words feel wonderful inside but they’re equally scary. Because the antidote to avoidance – is trust. And here it is – I either trust him or I can go on with my plan of avoiding everything he represents to me. Love. Pleasure. Happiness. Sharing. Or I can go for all those things and trust that everything will be alright. But all that comes without any guarantees. Without any walls of protection.
Surreal things we saw today, going to the clinic (hopefully I’ll feel better soon with the new medication)
My health is slowly improving and I’m beginning to enjoy my time with Johnny without feeling anxious about having to stay at home most of the time. I think in a couple of days, I will have recovered completely.
The good thing about being sick and forced to be at home has been the hours we have spent talking, caressing each other, getting to know each other in a more intimate way than we would’ve done if we had been busy doing things outside. I’ve learned a lot about myself these last few days. This is the very first relationship after all the bad ones – when I felt like I was playing the role of the ‘good girlfriend’ which was all about serving my boyfriends and sacrifice myself and my needs along the way. Now, I try to be myself and to be naked and real about what I want and need. It’s not always easy. I feel torn between being ‘the good girlfriend’ and myself sometimes – not because Johnny expects anything like that from me, but because that submissive behavior is so ingrained in my mind. I feel vulnerable in being myself without making sure that my lover is comfortable, satisfied or happy all the time.
But Johnny is constantly challenging me to kill the ‘good girlfriend’ act. He keeps exposing me when I try to serve him: “stop that – just be Mia”, he says. I feel safe with him – but very naked. Sometimes I don’t know what to do when I don’t need to serve a man’s needs. I feel a little lost but of course it’s liberating and gives me a sense of freedom. And whenever I fall back into my old behavior, he looks at me with a smile and says: “just be Mia”.
But what is it – to just be Mia? I am not sure. I know how to be me when I am all by myself, but when I am in a relationship that doesn’t require anything more from me than to just be myself, I get a little lost. Because I’ve never really felt equal to anyone else, I don’t know my position in the relationship. That’s when I reach for Johnny’s hand – and it’s always there for me. We are slowly learning how to be ourselves with each other without losing anything, without making sacrifices in our needs and wants, without compromising away the essence of who we are.
Being sick has forced me to show my most naked sides. I have been too drained to be anything other than myself. It has been the perfect timing to figure out who I am when I am in a relationship. Like I am in the process of learning how to push through my old personas to let my own voice be heard for the first time, without being judged or humiliated. I am loved. For just being me. And every time I forget about it – Johnny is there to remind me to “just be Mia”.
I feel so lucky.
I don’t care if my health is a mess right now, we are enjoying our own little cloud – once I got over the “I don’t deserve this kind of love” bump that is. It took a few anxiety attacks and some days to overcome. Like breaking through some kind of sound barrier but in my own head.
Yesterday -a walk in the rain.
It hasn’t been the smoothest start for me and Johnny, because once again my health has totally collapsed. I’ve been struggling with health problems all summer. But I’m not gonna let it destroy these two weeks I have with my love. I’m sure there will be a few more rounds to the clinic and I’m feeling anxious and scared about my physical agony, but I have someone who really loves me, right here by my side. It’s easy to be blinded by the fear and the anxiety of wondering if my health will get better or worse but I refuse to let it be my main focus.
I just wish my body was stronger. I know it was only some weeks ago that I wrote about being exhausted and being a little mentally burned out. I guess I should’ve listened more to the signals before it was too late. There’s been too much stress lately, too much pain and suffering.
I guess the anticipation and the (positive) stress about Johnny’s arrival was one thing too many and what made me feel pushed over the edge.
The most important thing now is to rest. To accept the love he has to offer (even though that’s another struggle because I feel like I don’t deserve it) and to enjoy the time we have together. I am not in a good place when it comes to my body. But when it comes to my heart, I’m in Heaven.
I woke up with a smile this morning – I could feel it in every part of my body. Like I was smiling with everything I am. I let the morning light illuminate the smile for a long time before I left my bed. I spent the whole day cleaning the apartment, for your arrival of course. I scrubbed the inside of the microwave exactly like I’ve scrubbed myself clean through therapy these last few years. Very thorough. You’ve been been by my side through a couple of short lifetimes already, even though we’ve only known each other for about four years. You were there when other men tried to steal me away from you. Some of them thought of you as a threat, but you never considered them to be a threat to you: “let them be jealous of me, let them talk badly about me, let them focus on me as a rival, and I’ll just go on focusing on you instead.” you said then. You are always calm and wise. It must be that native Mexican blood in you. One man even wrote a cruel poem about you to make me look at you differently, but he failed miserably.
“It’s not a dream when I say that I will kiss you one day…” you once said before we had ever met in real life, “…it’s not even a plan – it is a fact.”
And you were right. We met. Kissed. Fell in love.
Since then, we have been building a home together, from each side of the planet. That home is in both of us but has only one heart.
While I was cleaning all the mirrors, I thought about all the things we have in common on the inside. Like our internal mirror. The sensitivity. The sensuality. How we filter reality through our curiosity, intellect and imagination. How we believe in magic and how we create it together. The way we are equally focused on the smallest little detail as we are when it comes to seeing the bigger picture and how those two things always are in a fascinating juxtaposition against each other. How often we make each other laugh. The deep wounds we are healing in each other. Our empathy. The gratitude. Our native language of intimacy and nakedness. And our nerdiness. That’s one of my favorite things we have in common. I love how we can spend hours analyzing fictional characters from movies and create background stories for our favorite characters in TV series. Especially when it comes to Hank Moody. Or Poussey. I loved our dissection of Hannah Horvath when you were here last year and we watched four seasons of Girls together.
Once I was done with all the cleaning, my apartment was no longer mine, but ours. A clean house where we can create more magic in each other. All that is missing now – is you.
While you’ll be traveling amongst the clouds, over the mountains, across the big ocean, later today, I will be here, waiting for you. I feel excited and happy – and a little restless. But if I was able to wait half a lifetime for you, I can manage to wait another day.
I am not only making research about colonial folk art portraits, I have also started digging deeper into the palette of emotions. As a portrait painter specializing in strong human emotions, it’s important for me to know the nuances of them, not only their basic color. There is a difference between anger, rage and wrath – and between anxiety, fear and terror. Since I’m working mostly with the primitive emotions (like fear, pain, rage and shame), it is crucial that I have a deeper understanding of how they work, express themselves and what their core symbol is to me. For example; I’ve used upside-down crosses to illustrate negative emotions, but without any nuances. It could be fear, anxiety, rage or plain evil:
My latest paintings have the expression of rage, defensiveness and protectiveness:
Compare the expressions to my older paintings, where it wasn’t so much about rage but more about fear, shame and pain:
You can really witness my inner journey by studying my artworks. From the time I was still living the symptoms of PTSD, to dealing with the traumas by facing them – and then slowly overcoming them.
I will be able to tell better stories through my art, express myself more genuinely, if I learn how to work with the palette of emotions. They are the raw material in my art and the core of my creativity.
Life is full of suffering.
Those who feel too much and too intense, suffer within themselves.
Those who do not feel anything, cause suffering to others while they themselves suffer somewhere where they can not reach
As a painter I am at my best when I make (demon) portraits. So as a portrait painter, I need to study portrait painting more than I’ve done. I feel especially at home in the style of 19th century American folk art.
3 days until my love will come. I’m starting to feel like myself again, it’s a nice feeling. The seasons are slowly changing outside my window, it’s unusual cold for being the last summer month. I enjoy the cool weather. The grey skies and the melancholy. It feels like home to me.
I’ve been resting for weeks or perhaps for a small eternity, that’s how it feels anyway. I’m tired of resting and watching TV series. But I’ve been studying art and I’ve thought a lot and hard about my own art. It’s been good for me. I don’t want to overthink things or to overanalyze, but it’s like with everything in my past – I’ve been going through life without reflecting on what my true voice sounds like because I have been so busy pleasing other people. I know that at some point in my career, I started to make art for my fans, for gallery owners and collectors, instead of making it for myself. Something that was so private and intimate suddenly became corrupt and compromised in public. I know exactly when it happened. Even which painting I was working on at the time.
This struggle to get back to my art, especially painting, has been long and hard. Just like a trauma can happen in a second but will take a lifetime to overcome, it takes a lot of time to heal a compromised creativity and an abandoned inner voice. I regret the way I deviated from my path to go where I wasn’t supposed to go. I got so lost. I ended up so far from myself. From the expressions I had inside but didn’t allow to come out. I got used to the resistance, to the silence of it, to the feeling of being dead and buried underneath the fear and the doubts.
From my diary 2011:
“It is more natural for me now to not be creative than to create and make art. My paint tubes and brushes are stored away in transparent storage boxes and waiting for this mental paralysis to be dissolved so I can use them again. So I can go back to how things were before.
It’s like all of me is stored away in an invisible, transparent storage box that separates me from my true identity, and from my desire to create. Like in a coffin, because I feel dead in so many ways. It is not an exaggeration or emotional debauchery – but an honest feeling rooted in my inner core. “
I know how it feels like to be dead. I know that the real death is not and the end of our lives but comes in the same colors and textures as life itself, but without your own sense of vitality. It doesn’t happen when you stop breathing, it happens when you stop believing in yourself, when you separate yourself from your core. And the way back is awfully long and painful.
At least I know what it’s like to die and to be awakened and resurrected, all in a lifetime. I have many important things to tell. I need to use that in my art. This phase of finding my true artistic voice after letting go of an older version is so unbelievably scary – you have no idea. But it has to be done. This process is just as private and intimate as the creativity itself. I’ll let you be part of it, but please know how vulnerable I feel to share these things with you.
But it’s an important and genuine part of my art and should not be undisclosed or forgotten. It is part of the substance to my future paintings and who I will become as an artist.
It’s past midnight and it’s all dark in here. There’s something bothering me about my latest paintings. I don’t know what’s wrong and I can’t shake it off. When I started painting again after almost 5 years of blockages and artistic drought, I was so focused on getting passed the anxiety, the fear, the queasiness and the nausea I felt just being near my easel. Getting started again without feeling afraid was my goal. I’ve reached that goal and now I’m focused on other things, like finding the right expression, the right artistic voice, the visual language that is true to who I am now and letting go of who I was when I stopped painting in 2010. I can’t connect with certain elements of the style – but then I also wish to go back to other elements that I’ve lost along the way. I have a deeply complicated relationship with painting. I both love it and hate it. It’s the centre point of my creativity and yet I lack flow and a sense of clarity. I feel like something is missing and at the same time like something is suffocating me. I need to figure it all out before I go on working in the paintings. I won’t finish the one I’ve been working on lately. I wish I wasn’t this insecure about my art, especially the paintings. I wish I had a more cohesive style. But at least I’m not being pretentious or making horror for the sake of horror. I’m not a poser. I’m real and my art has to be real, otherwise I can’t stand behind it.
It’s time to get real.
But first, it’s time to get some beauty sleep.
I woke up feeling somewhat rested, it’s been a while since I slept for 8 hours straight. My health is improving and I’m feeling positive about things. I’ve missed this feeling. I’m soon strong enough to paint again.
I’m lucky to have a couple of weeks left of summer to enjoy without any pain.
I’ve talked a lot to Johnny lately about how I feel lonely in my art. I don’t have a context here, I don’t have a place in the art world in Sweden and sometimes it gets lonely. I have a few other Swedish artists that I know and talk to, but we are outsiders in the art world here. Johnny wrote the sweetest thing about this matter:
I’m still sick but the toothache is finally gone. The apartment is filled with silence and a murky light that looks like an extra blanket on my bed. I’m covered in softness, even on the inside. I’m thinking about the love I have in my life. The friendships and the acceptance they provide. It means so much to me. To be accepted and seen for who I am, appreciated for who I am. It’s not always been part of my life or even part of my expectations of other people. That they would actually accept me and love everything about me, even the things I consider flaws and imperfections. They even tell me they love me because of those things. I feel very grateful. The qualities in me which I was bullied for in school, abused for by people close to me or by men who wanted to belittle me, are now something other people love and embrace. I think what other people have hated about me is my vitality, my shameless love for living my life true to who I am and the way I don’t apologize for who I am. But they tried to change that. Some of them failed and I got stronger because of their resistance. But other people succeeded in shaming me for those things – and I started to apologize for who I am and for everything I stand for. “I’m sorry, I know I’m difficult.” Or; “You are right about your judgements about me, I am a selfish and egocentric because I love who I am and want to live my life as true to my inner nature as possible, I am a freak because I used to be shameless about who I am, I am weak because I want to be seen and heard and you are strong because you want to blend in with the crowd and you don’t need attention as I do. I am sorry that I am coming on too strong, that I take up too much room, too much time. I am sorry that I am “too much to handle” – I am sorry my existence is making you feel uncomfortable.”
I apologized and they loved it. They washed off my true colors until my body was almost invisible, they gagged my mind until there were no words coming out of my colorless body. They felt good about themselves. They had tamed the beast and finally got some peace of mind. The problem was solved. I was invisible and quiet and they felt stronger, better and most importantly – they felt comfortable around me. I was no longer a threat to their intellect, dreams, self images or ego.
I don’t know how much of this that had to do with my personality, my behavior of confidence and self love, or the fact that I came off as a strong woman. An unapologetic strong woman. I think that’s the worst social crime you can commit as a woman, to feel confident enough to not apologize for your confidence. That just have to be punished. Destroyed. Eliminated.
When I was a little girl I was totally unapologetic about who I was. Even when some girls bullied me in school. Even when a boy hit me in the face during a math class. Even when the art teachers in high school tried to make me feel bad about having an artistic voice at such a young age. But then, something happened and I lost the ability to fight off abuse and hate. I became highly apologetic. I apologized to my boyfriends for having a worthless pussy since it caused me pain during penetration, it just had to be such a turn off for them ( I never once considered that my pussy hurt because they failed to turn me on and having sex with a dry pussy destroys the nerves and it becomes painful to even think about penetration). I apologized to my parents for wanting to be a starving artist and causing them so much worry for my economic future. I apologized to my abusers because I knew it was all my fault that they had a problem with me, I was the problem, I had to be the problem otherwise they wouldn’t be that angry, right? I apologized to the gallery owners because I hadn’t produced enough artworks.
The only one I never apologized to – was myself.
Until last year when I made a ritual with myself where I forgave myself for every mistake and failure which had caused me pain in my life. It was so liberating.
The most important apology to myself was about how I had kept apologizing to other people, for who I am and for everything I stand for. That is a self betrayal. And the aftermath of apologizing for who I am, was to stop being me, and becoming passive and submissive to other people’s vision of who I was supposed to be – to them. And that is self abandonment.
I have stopped apologizing for who I am. I have surrounded myself with people who celebrate who I am. I’ve grown allergic to situations and people who try to tame my nature or my love to live life the way it is supposed to be lived. If there’s a cage, I’ll burn it. If there are chains, I’ll break them. And the shame other people try to put on me, I’ll return to where it belongs.
If I make someone uncomfortable by just being myself, then that someone has big problems of their own. You can’t tame every lioness in the jungle just because you feel threatened by them.
I just woke up, one hour later than most mornings lately. I haven’t slept well for months now. I’m so tired. But I’m grateful for that extra hour. It’s almost like a storm outside and the trees in the park next to the cemetery are violently thrown from side to side in the wind and sometimes I think they’re going to break. But they don’t. I feel like those trees right now. Life’s been stormy lately and I’ve been forced to sway and go in directions where I wasn’t planning to go. I’ve felt like I’m breaking at times. But I didn’t.
But hard times always come with new knowledge about my own resilience and capability. I survive, because that’s what I have to do – but I also add to my confidence because I didn’t give up but got back on my feet and carried on. Even though I don’t agree with the old British saying that’s been hijacked by hipsters and millennials: “keep calm and carry on” (it doesn’t allow you to feel and experience raw emotions works as a foundation to make you ‘comfortably numb’), that’s what I have to do now. To keep calm and carry the fuck on.
I’ve been painting on and off during my days of recovery. I’m hungry for a more raw expression. I must be bolder. More courageous. Although the most important thing right now is to just paint, I’m still in the process of getting used to it again after the long hiatus.
Also, I’ve been sketching up ideas for my digital art collaboration with Candice Angelini. It will be a fun suite of 4 pieces.
After my new dentist appointment this afternoon, I hope to get closure on this painful tooth infection. It’s been 1,5 months of appointments and suffering. I will be more careful with my health from now on.
I still have a lot to accomplish this year. And the storm didn’t break me. I just have to take some deep breaths and carry on.
Even though I’m drowning in the fog of pain and fever right now, I can feel how time is slowly fading as a distance between us. You are only a week away. In one week I’ll get to hold your hand again. I’ll get to breathe in the scent of your skin. In one week I’ll feel complete again.
What got me through this weekend of toothache and fever (recovery process):
MIA MAKILA 