No, I’m not a 12-stepper. Maybe I should be, but they did not invent that saying exclusively. Of course, it’s still a good saying, especially when you’re overwhelmed and you feel like your life is unmanageable, which is typically when those programs use this motto.

I’m using this saying in terms of getting all my work done toward my solo show next year. It’s similar in this way: if I look at everything I have to do at once, I will easily get overwhelmed and could easily sink into a bad place. I may even do things that are not good for me, probably much like an addict would. So there are parallels between me and the junkies.

I was never a drinker, nor was I too dependent on illegal drugs, but I have been trapped on painkillers in the past. That was pretty awful. I’d never “abused” them per se, meaning, I never took them “off-label,” but I sure wanted to. I took them for pain, and over time, I developed a tolerance for them. It sucked because I had to keep taking more. Trying to get off of them, I got dope sick, like any addict. I didn’t want to go off of them. I had to take less of them super slow. That was the only way, and it took over a year. Maybe a little more. Thems Oxys are dangerous stuff.

Now I take enough drugs–for mental illness, lupus, neurological symptoms, pre-diabetes, menopause, you name it. It sucks. Between what’s been happening with my body and all the medications, I haven’t been feeling myself at all. So now I’m trying to do the one-thing-at-a-time approach.

I have a lot to do to prepare for my solo show next year. This is all very exciting, but I have my work cut out for me. I had to plan which pieces will fit into the gallery. I want to hang the most newer ones I can. I’ve been planning what they are all going to look like, their sizes, and which older ones I can scatter among them. Not too many! It’s like working on a puzzle.

I have yet to complete seven of them. I still haven’t made one piece of the drawing installation. That’s going to take me a month and I’m basically going to leave that until the month of August. Meanwhile, six oil paintings will be drying over the months before then. I’ll do the last watercolor piece in July, and get all those framed nicely by the end of July.

That’s the plan.

Even though I’m not finished with the first two aerial oil paintings, I’m about to start drawing on the 40 x 60-in once today. That way, I can hopefully get three of them finished in early January, leaving me only four more pieces to do before the show. I feel like that is going to be ample time and will not stress me out at all. Maybe I’ll even have more time to brainstorm some interesting PR ideas. Who knows.

In other news, this morning I kinda wrote for the first time in I don’t even know how long. Some friends of mine from a writer’s site I used to belong to have started their own press and personally asked me for a story for an anthology they are producing with a sex workers theme. I had something I thought would work well. I vamped it this morning and sent it in, and it looks like they like it so far. They’ve read it and asked if I’d be open to tweaking the ending a little. I said, “Sure. Give me your notes.” So, we’ll see if it will get published, depending on how much they want to be changed.

Anyway, lately, all this working has got me beyond exhausted, so I need to get catch some serious ZZZs. Maybe I’m sick again, or still sick. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m frankly getting tired of it! So good night for now.