Excerpts from a lost journal

1/14/06:
Painting - no, I don't want to write about that. That's another dimension. World really. I don't even know if I'm the same person as painter and all else. I don't know. I'm reading about Van Gogh. his artist saved him for a while. Mine could kill me.
1/16/06:
Hmmm. It's Julie's birthday. I think we found out today that it would kill me. I musn't let it. here's what I've got: 10 weeks. 7 paintings completed, 4 paintings started, and 4 left to be started, besides putting the supports together. . . But if there's something I hate right now besides George W. Bush and his idiotic regime for oil, war, death, and reversing the progress of women's rights, it is the very fact that . . . is leading me through the process. There's one simple problem. . . I am left to ask my respected classmates for what it is within me that I cannot find. This will build my character as an artist, or kill it, which in turn should save my life. What is more important to me? What I paint, or what I do with the rest of my time? It's not about what I paint anyway, it's the process. I feel stuck in one that dilutes the very emotion I need to transfer to the canvas. Sometimes I hit it dead on. Other times I hit what's holding it dead on and instinctively swear, get red in the face, and subsequently yell at whoever happens by with a word of encouragement or advice. Too bad for my husband, it is not I who has words of that kind, so as he slightly persuades my reasoning brain, awakening language and my voice, he hears the frustration the canvas glares at me as though it wasn't mine to begin with, yet reminding me I put it there.
But in other ways lucky for him that an artist I can't be, for I am other things that I can't quit. My love for other things I can not give up completely. Loving him, for example. Enjoying nature as it is and as it is meant to be and not wondering which colors express its emotion and mine. To feel without the obstacle of production. I will never stop creating. It is a part of me as my breath is a part of life. But I won't let it kill me, lest my breath fade and to this life I am no use. This I refuse to be. I cannot make anything better off if I am mad. My time in which being an artist would have saved me has come and gone. But art did not save me. Something else did. Art and I owe each other nothing. It is an activity that I do in my convenience. It owes me no masterpiece, nothing even at all good. And I owe it no time, though randomly I give it freely. I ask nothing from it, but that I may learn to become better for it. And I give it nothing but faith in just that.