Hey, Miss J!

I’m pretty sure by now my readers assume I’ve died or given up on my story… again. It wasn’t my intention to not update at all, but I was going through emotional things… then I got on new meds…

Then I got brand new stresses.

I don’t deal well with stress. Not anymore.

I showed one of my friends how my hands were shaking… I’m pretty sure she was alarmed by it. I’ve seen it for some time now. It’s why I have problems taking pictures now.

So, let’s imagine how awful this is now… I love taking pictures, and I used to have steady hands… now not so much. I think I’ve started pressing my arms to my side in a – potentially failing – attempt to minimize the shaking. Sometimes I can get a snap off right in the middle of the shaking.

It’s frustrating because I like to draw too. I was about to toss my old portfolio and decided to look inside to find all of my terrible art…

What I ended up finding though…

So many pictures done in pastel… and all of them I know took hours to do. I snapped off pictures of some of these pieces and sent them to my dad.

He kept asking if I’d drawn them. Didn’t matter that my name was in the corner – my actual name… not the pen I use. And the date was from 2006.

One of them was dated exactly on my birthday.

The real one. Not the one I use as Miss Lyst.

My picture is the real me though. No way am I smart enough to figure out how to heavily modify my picture.

Though… why would I need to adjust how I look? I think I’m pretty cute actually. It took years for me to accept it all when I was told I was attractive.

Too many years of being called ugly or uhh… what was the term…?

I was told that I looked like my mother… then I was told later on that my mother was homely.

—

Dictionary

Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more

home·ly

adjective

1.

NORTH AMERICAN

(of a person) unattractive in appearance.

Similar:

unattractive

plain

plain-featured

plain-looking

plain as a pikestaff

—

Now… I have pictures of my mother when she was younger and even when she was older, she wasn’t unattractive. I joke now that I’m the best looking of my father’s children. But… I’m really serious. Both my parents were gorgeous as young adults.

… And I got my looks from them.

Even as an old man, my dad doesn’t look bad at all.

Pfft.

I was also told by the same person that I had no backside to speak of. In general telling me how unfeminine I was… another massive lie.

As each day goes by, I find more than more things that I like about myself. Right now, I’m obsessed with my feet and toes.

And shaky hands or not… because I sent those pictures to my dad, now he keeps asking if I drew anything else today… And was asking me to draw him things to look at.

Oh dear… Maybe showing him my art was a bad idea?

~J. Lyst

I think I can draw still… but I’ll need to slow way way down.

I also want to sleep like right NOW… but I just earned my rights to game after my nightly reading.

Ugh… I think I’ll work on art for a bit tonight instead.

… why on earth I tossed out my Rembrandt pastels now, I have NO IDEA.