sleep | this is lemonade

I’m posting a quick one today. Stumbled across a comic blog by animator Fran Krause that I’m really enjoying. It also made me wonder what my deepest, darkest fears are …I’d love to submit something and see what he makes of it!

One comic that made me smile is this one below. When I was younger, I often had nightmares. My dad told me that my grandma warned him not to sleep on his left side as he’d be sleeping on his heart and that it would give him nightmares. Following that innocent tale, I developed a slight obsession with sleeping on my right side until I was a teenager. It’s all come back to me since seeing this comic.. and it’s relevant because there is lots of advice suggesting pregnant women should endeavour to sleep on their left side. Please click through on the picture to see the full comic. What would your deep dark fear be?

I ALWAYS SLEEP ON MY RIGHT SIDE | FRAN KRAUSE

On another note, I came across a great #linefebruary sketch on Twitter by Russell, whose art blog I love following. Being a bit ignorant, I asked him what the hashtag was all about. Here’s the result…

@drawthepublic A quick scribble. Thanks for the tip! #linefebruary #insomnia pic.twitter.com/5VYIGy3yST

— this is lemonade (@ThisIsLemonade) February 7, 2014

Don’t hate. It’s a scribble by an insomniac. I might just get hooked though and not want to sleep – I love the idea, and there’s lots of great sketches to discover! Let me know if you take part…

Have a great weekend x

In my heart of hearts, I believe that each of us lives according to our capacity in life. However relatively rosy our lives may appear to the next person or however privileged and elevated our position in society is perceived to be, when we as individuals are in the midst of it, we know when we have met our limit. Even if we have fame and fortune, when something breaks us, it breaks us. We are stripped down to our bare human frailty. The rest are peripherals. Mere stabilisers on a bike we never quite learn to ride perfectly. Sometimes, those wheels come off. Oops-a-daisy…

Words. Such potent things. And for that, I am truly grateful. Lemonade is not easy to make from lemons as we all know, and tonight, I met my match. It’s been getting progressively more difficult recently, to make that lemonade sweet enough to swallow. But then I remembered some words I had written over a decade ago. I searched for them in some old folders. A sample of twenty-two poems I had written during some of the darkest times in my life. Through those words I revisited my younger self. I was reminded of some of the reasons why I made a decision then, to keep trying to live. I felt as though I was fingering tiny precious gems I had rediscovered in a well worn silken pouch. I wrote those words a long time ago in my pain. I never dreamt that they would speak to me again through these mists of time…

And then the simple image below appeared in my malfunctioning WordPress reader. It was so poignant and apt. It was exactly how I envisaged my feelings to be. I felt so small in an overwhelming emptiness that was keeping me awake but wanted to be in a deep restful sleep in a beautiful peaceful nothingness all at once.

Life is still wobbly. But I think I can now catch forty winks to the soundtrack of birdsong at dawn. Thank you for reading and for being out there for me 🙂

Reblogged from Christophe Gowans: