NOPE, I WOULDN'T TRADE ....

Here's me challenging myself to try new things again - I gessoed the page (still hate gesso for its chalkiness, but it does make a good base for paint) and pasted on some strips on text, then added paint on top, and a stamp made to look like bubble wrap.  I know, and its a double page too!  Positively revolutionary for me, must have been watching too many videos on You Tube ... 

Then I put in the headline text (cut from a newspaper) and went and had a coffee while I thought about what I wanted to say awhile.  I often surprise myself with what I come up with, but I've been banging on about this for years, it was just the right time to get it down on paper....

I get so frustrated by all the advertisements telling me I should want to look half my age, made incidentally using models who are very young photographed in soft focus!  As if.  I'm perfectly happy in my own grandmotherly skin, thank you - the lines on my face demonstrate a lifetime of laughter, and I'm not ashamed of any of them.  Sorry, I may get off my soapbox in a moment, but it IS true.  I look back to the low self-esteem, lacking in confidence young woman I was, and then at how my life's journey has formed and shaped me into somebody I'm (mostly) proud to have become.  I am undoubtedly still a work in progress but would not want to turn back the clock even if it could be offered.  The wisdom I have (often painfully) acquired is probably the most priceless thing I have.

Some of the seed heads on this are stamped, and the white ones were just drawn on to match.  The face is a Teesha Moore stamp.

Rosie

INVISIBLE

Those of you still of an age to claim youth had better look away now - because you don't want to hear this! It is one of the less well known aspects of female ageing that you become increasingly invisible ... and you do notice that people don't seem to see you as a person any more, just another older person. I hate that, so I did a journal page about it.

Once again I began with a blank page on which I stamped, drew and wrote ... the figure is a Stampotique stamp, and you either love them or hate them! All the colour on this page is done with Promarkers.

I know I must have been guilty of this myself at a earlier stage in my life - lumping old/older people together as an amorphous mass, but life taught me to see people, all people, as individuals who matter, both to themselves and to others. It's incredibly painful for me to be treated as a person of no account - although whether that says more about my vanity than society I can't say! All I know is that it hurts sometimes ....
I keep thinking of that poem by Dylan Thomas where it says "do not go gentle into that good night; rage rage against the dying of the light". So I am ... not going gently or quietly, not drifting towards pensionerhood without a struggle. I'm a person not a statistic!

There's been a lot in the media lately about people living on Benefits (government assistance) basically suggesting that all such are lazy, feckless cheats and scroungers, who should be made to get off their backsides and work! I'm one of them, a person with a chronic illness rather than someone who can't be bothered to work. Most of us are.

So there you are, a bit of a rant really, but it gets it off my chest dunnit? It only struck me as odd afterwards that although the page has a negative topic, its actually quite bright and lively. I think that must be because I was also trying to celebrate everything that is real and alive in me and my life? I may be down, but am most certainly not out! Ignore me? Don't you DARE!!