Intense.

I'm bad at keeping my emotions to myself. Even if you don't always know my exact reasoning, you can always see the way I feel all over me. Maybe my fair skin lends itself well to transparency. Maybe—deep down—I don't wish to hide anything I'm feeling. I don't know. I do know it often leads to trouble. Or happiness.

A man I believed for a moment would be around a while once wrote a story about how I never manage to keep the lid on any sort of boiling emotion I have. I just fully commit to every whim I suppose. And the same goes for my art making. I never know from one week to the next what I have to do to avoid that familiar ache I get in my hips and back when I'm not making something. Stories or striptease costumes. Blogging or bump and grinding. The one thing that is for certain is I become part of whatever I engage in fully. Sometimes so fully I come out of a long, creative hypnotic state looking as if the cat first dragged me in, then forced me to stay outside in the cold again.

I love totally the same way I make art totally. If I'm not exhausted after a spell, then I'm not doing something properly. When I care for someone, I throw in as much energy as I can. But that means sometimes, I exhaust. And instead of retreating from art to love--it is back to art I go again to refresh my soul. In the most life-altering relationship I've ever had, I once told him that when I wanted him around, I wanted to be all over him in love. And when I wanted to be alone, to be with my art whatever it might be at that second, I wanted him completely away. He told me when he left that was the reason why--he couldn't understand needing those sorts of extremes of companionship. I can't say I blame him. But I also can't say I can change me.

I think there will always be this certain level of conflict between my art and the people who try to love me—or rather those that love me who need to maintain the traditional pattern of how we always assumed adult relationships should behave. I decided four years ago, though, that I needed to create beautiful things. Rearrange pieces of myself to spawn new works of art in any form I could conceive. I've made a commitment I plan to keep.

Art is my love. I love so intensely I exhaust myself to retreat at times. But I need both desperately in my life...even if I'm only giving and not receiving—as is often the case in both love and art. I think balance is something we achieve in lifetimes.