Out most of...

...the day...

Had a sleep, then got the iPad out to try a sketch app. This is my first try with it.

The first picture top left I saw in my head yesterday. The rest of the pictures were playing with the pens and effects of the app to try and get a measure of it. I used my finger on the iPad screen to do the drawings.

When the audiologist gave me those two drastically different remappings for my cochlear processor in less than 30 days, it was too much for my Brain. It not only affected me and Brain having to relearn incoming sound, but my inner world had changed too.

Gone were the changing pictures I have always constantly seen in my head all the time all my life. Gone was so much other stuff. It would take ages to explain, but my inner pictorial world has been a big part of my deaf life.

In place of the changing pictures, which was always there as a backdrop, that I used to see in my waking hours was now muddiness, like every thing had been stirred up in a pot of liquid and painted on to a surface. I could see like granulated effects of this grey muddiness, but there was nothing much else there

This is why it has been easier, recently, to mostly paint more abstract wet in wet watercolour, or the encaustic was using an iron to 'smear' the colours across the paper/card. I didn't have my inner pictures to use as inspiration. To do a more specific, more real like, picture as that of the castle of a few days ago I needed some outside picture as inspiration. In the case of the castle I used a brown and cream bleach painting I had done a very long time ago, except it was rocks in the sea and the sea was pouring through the arches in the rocks. I changed it somewhat.

Gone were my meditations. Gone were my visualisations. Gone was my inner world.

Even visual memories were affected. Memories of the past.

Yesterday I saw the girl's face in black and white similar to the drawing top left. She was like a black&white noir comic drawing. I was in the front room, and she was peering round like that outside my head into my head, but yet she was within my head. It was a weird sensation.

Since that black and white drawing of that girl who peered round my vision into me, I am now beginning to 'see' a bit more of pictures within the muddiness. This is hard to explain.

My dreams have been different. Nothing like the dreams I had before. The weirdest of dreams. Mind you I always had interesting dreams, but the pictures/format have changed completely into something different.

The weird thing is that my memories now feel like a memory of my memories, not the crystal clear memories I have always had. I have always had a very good memory. It is very much like a memory of someone else's memory. Maybe that will change and I will get back what I had before in my internal world. But maybe not.

Maybe it will be different.

I was too scared to mention this before. I didn't understand what was happening. I thought it was just the shock of those remappings, and that gradually stuff would settle and would come back.

I did tell son that my inner world had changed because of this and he was quite shocked, but he said it made sense. Now that I have verbalised this maybe it can heal now. And I believe learning to hear music with this remapping and getting an emotive feel from music is part of this journey.

I meditate every day. Have done so for decades. With these remappings messing me up, I was unable to meditate and get to the relaxation places I used to get to. I have still been trying to meditate everyday despite this, but no pictures ot the stuff I used to get with meditation. it was almost soul destroying.

But this morning, I actually saw colours for the first time in quite awhile, while I was attempting to meditate. They were the yellows and greens I am fond of painting, like wet in wet watercolours. Just for a few seconds or a minute I was actually going into the meditation. Faces were appearing, not real faces but faces that had been drawn. But the yellow green watercolour effects were blurring them, so they stayed half hidden. They were not the faces of anyone I know.

I don't know if there is a significance in these faces.

My favourite place is just sitting on my covered swing, and I just swing looking into my healing garden. That has been the nearest I could get to meditation the past couple of months.

So, this is my drawing for today for my challenge to myself of a pic every day in 2017.