I’m in a funny place at the moment. You go through life thinking the ground is solid beneath your feet and you know where you are and then it suddenly shifts and all that secure feeling disappears.
There has been no massive change in my life (other than Covid obviously), but there has been a large number of tiny changes, which over time have snowballed into actually a big change and the ground shifting beneath my feet has been about a shift in my head, suddenly seeing myself differently.
I’ve had a month of migrainous type headaches and tiredness, fluctuating from day to day. This sounds like a bad thing but I think it is more akin to an athlete adjusting to a new training regime and feeling aches and pains in muscles they never really used before.
This is all to do with taking my work to a new level, collaborating with my inner eight year old, Sukey in a more open and overt way (documenting it on my course for example).
In essence my inner eight year old has been making all the creative decisions for a while, she chooses my clothes (bright and colourful!), she plays the piano, she has made a lot of impulsive changes around the house which I’m really pleased with so I trust her, but I am still scared about exposing her to ridicule / a harsh world?
I had a dream that I had (gently) murdered my mother and was then left with the difficulty of concealing the body so I wouldn’t be discovered, which reveals more of my fears nicely.
I have decided to use the name "Sudanim", a collaborative partnership which is Sukey and me, for my autobiographical project. It is partly about not being completely overt about my identity for my brothers’ sakes, but also about how as a woman I started with my father’s name (I am barely in contact with him now), then took my first husband’s name (now ex) then my second husband’s name (happy to do so, but I was marrying into a family name rather than feeling it made up my whole identity).
I’m still struggling with this a bit, is it foolish? will I regret this decision? is it the right path? but I also know I can struggle with these sort of decisions and then once made they become very obviously the right one. So fingers crossed…..
Edit
I’m feeling a bit dim now about thinking of using the pseudonym “Soodanim” when I already have a perfectly serviceable one in the form of spillustrate! I had an inkling I hadn’t quite found the right solution to the name. I like the idea of “spill” as I am spilling the beans and “strate” as I am trying to get my thoughts straight / make sense of my past.
So to recap, I am going to do my next project under a pseudonym but I will use spillustrate as the name.