Bleeding Heart © 2012 Jane Waterman
Healing toolkit

On Blogging – From Catharsis to Hope

I once heard it said that catharsis, on its own, does not lead to relief from our sufferings. I don’t think I truly understood that statement until last night. In the small hours yesterday, I took the opportunity to blog anonymously on a writing prompt related to something difficult, and

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Quanta #1 © 2012 Jane Waterman
Invisible illness advocacy

30 Things About My Invisible Illness You May Not Know

This is part of my contribution to Invisible Illness Week. What’s that you ask? Click on the graphic at the end of this entry to learn more! 1. The illness I live with is: A wily combination of things, but it appears that Sjogren’s syndrome and fibromyalgia are a very

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Alone In The Universe #2 © 2012 Jane Waterman
Living with invisible illness

Compassion for my Younger Self #3

Our parents can’t save us, no matter how much we wish they had, or could. When I was 27, I descended into madness. It didn’t begin then. That process began so many years before, perhaps when I was born: the same and yet so different. There were stages to this

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Shame © 2012 Jane Waterman
Living with invisible illness

Shame

I come to writing today wrung out, hollowed, disappointed, ashamed. I can forgive myself the days that lapsed since my last entry. I sank into the recesses of a cave, and there I went through the motions of life in the grip of a depression so strange I can not

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Conflagration © 2012 Jane Waterman
Creativity

Compassion for my Younger Self #2

These are not the colours of my sadness and pain. The colours of the emotions I feel for the younger self I wrote about yesterday. Her sorrows are deep purples and blues, stretching into long twilights, the one searching the stars for one that might assuage her loneliness. Her longings

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Storm On Jupiter © 2012 Jane Waterman
Mental health challenges

Theories of Depression

I’m far away from my first career as a physicist, but not so far that I didn’t learn a few things. In particular, when preoccupied with the search for a theory of everything and being foiled yet again, physicists discover there’s always another level of complexity that they hadn’t considered.

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Quanta #1 © 2012 Jane Waterman
Creativity

Possibility: 4 am

The first month of my personal 365 day blogging project has passed. In some ways, it’s become a deeper creative exploration. I am enjoying painting with the computer immensely. Last night I’d barely drifted off to sleep when pain woke me up again. At 4 am I started painting some

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Reaching Out © 2012 Jane Waterman
Healing toolkit

Reaching Out

These words are sent out into the world with love and compassion. I dedicate them to my wife and daughters. You are good enough, strong enough and beautiful enough. That doesn’t mean you can’t be tired, scared and vulnerable too. Those feelings are all a part of us. Don’t selectively

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Contraction © 2012 Jane Waterman
Creativity

Contraction

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence after yesterday’s ‘Conflagration’, but today I feel an often experienced need to contract within myself, to draw in closer for protection. Writing and creating and putting myself out there every day is likely a factor in this increased sensitivity, but for the moment

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Eternity © 2004 Jane Waterman
Interior life

Courage to Slow Down

Today was a day of contrasts, and this recent computer painting sums it up – the grieving heart surrounded by the energy of the new, the authentic, and the real. Where ‘real’ stands for anything I believe in, including the beautiful dreamer, and her right to lose herself in visions

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