journal

The Sketchbook Project /  by Rebecca Tillett

For the last couple months I’ve slowly been working on a sketchbook for the @thesketchbookproject. I have to send it back by February 1st and I’m finally nearly done with it. I’ll be getting it back just in time. I only get a few hours each week to spend on it but because of that, the finishing of it feels so much sweeter. It’s mixed media; a combination of inkjet image transfers, watercolor, pen, pencil, marker and a few pieces of my heart and soul.

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Free Churro /  by Rebecca Tillett

Two nights ago I cried pretty unexpectedly at the end of the Bojack Horseman episode, Free Churro. Have you seen it? The entire thing was Bojack giving a eulogy for his recently deceased mother, with whom he had a very strained & complex relationship. It was sad & powerful & raw & brutal & articulated so many feelings I have toward my father (& really, my mother too). Feelings of dismissal from both, but in dramatically different ways.

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(Before I knew it I was) Home /  by Rebecca Tillett

I could never forget this moment and I don't need this picture. I could never forget what coming home each day to this man felt like, how we could occupy such a small space and fill it with such passion; tears and rest and laughter and food, and deaths and rebirths, and smoking and drinking, and pasts and presents and futures all commingling in space and time, and friends and sex: loud and unapologetic, and love, oh my God, love. 

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Of Land and Roots and Belonging /  by Rebecca Tillett

Sometimes I feel physically ill from the memory of what I left behind and the way that I left it. I am not capable of the acts I committed, the desperation I induced. I am that woman now, capable of such things. How long am I allowed to toil in heartache for the woman I can never again claim to be? Sometimes I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches. I wake up often that way. Feels like every unbearable tension, climbing every root of every molar battling for dominance.

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Bloomed /  by Rebecca Tillett

How often do you do something that absolutely terrifies you? I've done 2 such things in the last week. I believed in myself enough to go after something I never would have throughout past versions of me, something that scared me but something I knew with every beating fiber of my heart that I could do and was more than qualified to do. I'm much more confident now, more comfortable with who I am and what I'm capable of, more ready for challenges and opportunities to lead.

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Dark Rabbit Hole /  by Rebecca Tillett

You mentioned thinking life could always get better. I think I suffer with that as well. It used to be on both a personal and professional level and now it's only on a professional level (which is good) but seriously, I feel like I actively avoid success sometimes. Does that make sense? I just can't seem to get on the internet anymore without stumbling on someone's fantastic body of work and seeing that they're somehow doing that for a living (no 9-5 bullshit). How did they do that? How did that happen?You mentioned thinking life could always get better. I think I suffer with that as well. It used to be on both a personal and professional level and now it's only on a professional level (which is good) but seriously, I feel like I actively avoid success sometimes. Does that make sense? I just can't seem to get on the internet anymore without stumbling on someone's fantastic body of work and seeing that they're somehow doing that for a living (no 9-5 bullshit). How did they do that? How did that happen?

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Young Enough to be Humbled /  by Rebecca Tillett

It really is true what they say, isn't it? You think you'll never change from the person you are when you're 15, 18, 21, 25, 30... but you DO, friends. You really do. I think I've finally reached an age in which I understand the older generation's contempt for youth. Kids really don't know a damn thing.

Hopefully I'm still young enough to be humbled by that realization.

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Against the Walls /  by Rebecca Tillett

Sometimes you spend so much time and energy beating your fists against the walls around you wanting to escape that you don't realize that where you are is exactly where you need to be at the moment, otherwise you'd be somewhere else. Sometimes, some lessons in life need to be relearned and it's true what they say: You can't go home again. It'll never be the same.

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50 Shades of STFU /  by Rebecca Tillett

I'm not a prude by any means. You don't have to know me long or well to know that about me. I love fine art nudity, sloppy and amateur porn, the many crazy kinks and fetishes that abound, sex, sex, and more sex. I love exercised dominance on both sides of the gender field and so long as animals or children aren't involved, I can appreciate any and all preferences, no matter how strange, in the bedroom. I especially love that women are beginning to feel less ashamed and more empowered in this realm and that we're slowly moving into a world where it's just as acceptable for a woman to embrace her sexuality as men have been doing without consequence for eons.

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351//365 /  by Rebecca Tillett

Could I say it's been 16 years and I hardly think of you anymore? Could I say I've forgotten so many of the sad details of your life that helped to paint my own in such vividly dark colors? Could I say I've forgiven you for robbing me of a life without a father, the opportunity to open my heart to you and spill 16 years of pain, now doubled, the sudden way you changed and redefined my life, or the way you didn't say goodbye?

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332//365 /  by Rebecca Tillett

What can you tell me now that you couldn’t one year ago? Could you tell me how your reflection in the mirror has changed with such fervent subtlety that you hardly recognize the person you once were? Could you describe to me the palpable feeling of the shattering of such long-held presumptions of yourself? Could you tell me how fucking beautiful the silencing of such familiar doubts in your head can be? Could you tell me how your smile is an accessory you rarely leave home without?

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Fall in Love Twice /  by Rebecca Tillett

"I realized recently, that I've been steadily re-falling in love with him over the last six months that he's been here. That's a weird feeling: thinking you know and love someone so unconditionally and wholly but realizing there's so much more to this person that you couldn't possibly fall in love with before he was able to stand half a foot in front of you and put his arms around you while whispering "God, you're beautiful and shit, do I love you so much." I've been fortunate enough to fall in love with him twice. Did you know that was possible? I sure as shit didn't. It's an unearthly and dreamlike experience."

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321//365 /  by Rebecca Tillett

Blanket me with the soft shroud of the setting sun's fiery mantle of clouds before I get too lost in the cold dark of the universe, before the moon soothes me to sleep with its stories of brave explorers who long ago hovered sweetly above its lonely ground, before my fingers become raw with lucid memories of the earth's thorny skin.

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