Blog / 2023 / A Painting for Everyone Who’s Ever Had Trouble Following Through

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Do you ever have trouble following through? Is there some part of you that wants to do a thing—anything from going to a party to starting a new business—but you just can’t get all the other parts of you to get with the program? Do you ever feel like a cat marching band, where only the one kitty actually wants to make music?

This painting is about that special kind of frustration. The way we can want a thing, but also not want it at the same time. The way we too often sabotage ourselves without understanding why.

My inability to follow through has probably always been been there, but I can pinpoint the moment when the cats in my brain officially rebelled—the moment from whence they never stopped rebelling. It was after my first surgery to excise my endometriosis, when my doctor informed me that I’d have to start ingesting synthetic hormones or I’d end up back on the operating table in short order.

This was the moment the marching band music in my mind ended, because synthetic hormones murder all my rainbows.

And that’s what I told my doctor. Keep in mind: I didn’t know about the cats then, so I didn’t mention them to him either. Which is to say that I wasn’t mixing metaphors with him, just explaining about the pills and my rainbows. I was trying to convey to him precisely how horrible things get for me emotionally when I use hormonal contraception.

As you might’ve guessed, he was not impressed. But the fact is that I’m not alone in having bad mental health reactions to the pill, the patch, the ring, and hormonal IUDs. Yes, these contraceptives changed the world: they freed people with two X chromosomes—AKA people who usually have ovaries—to do so many amazing things, while also making babies only if and when they want to. But hormonal contraceptives are also garbage on our brain functions, a problem that’s been too little studied and that almost no gynecologist takes seriously.

Sometimes I wonder who I’d be if I hadn’t had to spend the last fourteen years tricking my body into thinking it’s pregnant with fake hormones. What would it be like if the medical establishment took endometriosis seriously and actually tried to cure a disease that ruins the lives of one in ten people with two X chromosomes? Who would I be if the cat marching band in my mind never rebelled?

This painting is about the frustration of wanting to do a thing and somehow not being able to get yourself together enough to do it, but, for me, it’s also about all the ways that doctors and their creepy pharma friends mess us up.

I’d really like a do-over for all of us. I’d like a world where big pharma never got that big, where there’s a whole lot more oversight in drug testing, and where pharmaceutical companies are prohibited from marketing medications directly to doctors with expensive gifts and vacations. I’d like a world where our brain cats only rebel for good reason and not because some understudied drug is messing with them.

This video is made with love and microdonations from my community!