=envelopes on the road=

::The last three days we've been driving from Brooklyn to Florida. Here are two of the envelopes I made on the way (there are a lot of miles between Brooklyn and Florida). Fortunately, my husband was doing the driving. 

These envelopes weren't so much inspired by the "OCD in Art" exhibit at the Visionary Art Museum, as encouraged, inasmuch as my work has always had a strong element of obsession, compulsion, and disorder to it. In these works, I let my OCD tendencies loose, as it were. Like other OCD artists, doodlers, and mark-makers, I find that working with these repetitive, close-up, patterns leads to an anxiety-easing absorption, a meditative state of calm and peace.

* * *

Traveling isn't done only through space but through time as well. With so much scenery flying passed the windows, both inner and outer, over the last three days I've had plenty of time to reflect. 

My  biggest regret in life is having wasted so much time and energy trying to convince people that I was normal (they were never convinced) and trying to appear normal (I never succeeded long at that either). I would have served myself much better and wasted less of everyone else's time and patience if instead of trying to mimic functionality, I'd sat in a room obsessively covering envelope after envelope with tiny detailed scribblings that put on full and unapologetic display my utter dysfunctionality. If, when for the umpteenth time that someone had accused me of being "so damn weird" I hadn't denied it with all the eloquence and passion at my disposal, but, instead, had said, as I do now: "You're so damn right. I am weird!" I'd have found much sooner my rightful place in the universe. 

There's only one thing worth being and that is yourself. Sure, everyone says that, pays lip-service to the notion, but all too few ever put the idea into practice. I've come to be convinced that the only part of me worth anything at all was the part that fit nowhere, that found no correspondence in the world, that marked me as a misfit, an outsider. It was that part in me—in each of us—in which I might have found whatever meaning may exist in life. The only viable reason why any of us come to exist at all is to provide something the universe is missing, some manifestation of possibility that hasn't been manifest yet, even if it's something as manifestly stupid and irrelevant as scribbling on envelopes. At least it's a reason for being! 

Too bad the things that make us so different from others are all too often the very things we all try so hard to smother and keep hidden. The very thing we often feel the most ashamed of and never bring to life at all. Indeed, as Thoreau once said, what sad and desperate lives most of us (don't) live.::