I’ve spent a lot of time at hospitals and doctor offices lately and worrying myself sick about things I cannot control (read: health of myself or others). Even though I know better I still spend long hours research all the symptoms of all the things that could possibly be wrong and just as many hours on the phone with insurance companies and specialists (everyone is fine). Loving people with your whole heart is stressful. So is watching the news. Motherhood is terrifying. So is the world.
It’s often the shitty feelings and negativity and hatred that get my creative juices flowing, though, and always has been. My art is often a response and an outlet. This is an embroidery on vintage embroidery, a series inspired by female pop song lyrics (here Taylor Swift) from 2015.
I’m still spending a lot of time dealing with people who hate my brand of body positivity and feminism - both online and in real life - and it’s making me super angry. I feel so often like ideas and conclusions I’ve come to are so rational and so helpful that I find it sometimes irritating that I’m deemed so radical and ostracized for it.
I do lots of things to cope when the going gets rough(er than usual). Mostly trying to focus on the positive and being thankful for the good stuff (and the bad, too, because it inevitably teaches me something about love and life and myself). I also write. And bake. And drown myself in Netflix series (lately it’s real life cult & crime docs and I’m especially obsessed with the Oregon Rajneeshees in the 1980s and Mormons who let their neighbor kidnap their daughter twice in Pocatello and unfortunately UGH THIS ONE IS AWFUL Internet stalkers who helped catch this Canadian who murdered a man and put him in a suitcase a few years ago).
I also find solace a bit in wandering thrift shops and trying on things for fun. I don’t always buy them, but lately when I do it’s leopard print anything and bikinis because ‘tis the season and also 2020 is the year of both.
I also remember that the love and support I receive and the thank yous and powerful stories and words far outweigh the hate. They mean so much more to me, my heart and the greater work I’m doing. This week I got a note from a mom in Oregon who told me a story about taking her teen daughter to the doctor’s office for a mental health appointment for anxiety. On the way back the nurse said like they always do that her 14-year-old needed to be weighed and because her mom has been learning and listening and knew this might cause some unnecessary pain and was likely an unnecessary step on this day told her daughter, “you can always say no thank you,” and her daughter bravely did just that. She wrote to tell me the story and how I’m now an active verb because that’s what they call “Amy Pence-Brown-ing the situation” (mind blown).
I posted a photo of the new to me vintage plus-sized pin up Hilda calendars I just bought and got in the mail and one of my followers told me she almost didn’t recognize me with my clothes on (I was holding a calendar and wearing my favorite jeans and a tee shirt). This made me LOL with gratitude and joy. Another women emailed me out of the blue to tell me that her nurse at one of Idaho’s largest hospitals recommended me and my work to her and how glad she was for that, as she’s been following me and reading me and looking at my photos and internalizing my words and it’s already changing her life for the better.
I fucking love this series that Rio Chantel took of me modeling for grey jays jewelry last spring and have been sharing a bunch on my Instagram with some quotes from Susan Sontag’s 1977 book On Photography about subverting the power of the gaze and images and how I love to do both in my selfies and with my body.
I don’t like to dwell on the negative (and believe me there are so many stories you’d be shocked to hear and saboteurs you’d be surprised by if I outed them) but it wouldn’t be right for me to pretend it was all easy and lovely over here doing this work. Leading the charge and putting myself and my ideas out there is daunting, exhausting, sometimes harmful and hard, but it’s also so worth it, so important and something I believe so strongly in. Someone just left this comment on one of my Facebook posts about love and sex positivity and it has stuck with me for weeks now: “You’ve always been ahead of your time, I suspect. To the great benefit of us all.”