The Panic at the Museum

I have been pretty busy the past few days, trying to scrounge up a pop-up exhibition out of thin air. Well, not exactly thin air, but from scraps strewn all over the place. I have a lot of stuff I'm preparing but I feel like nothing is exactly finished and I'm deadly afraid they won't be for Saturday.

I have this thing where I start things well in advance but then stop when I get bored or annoyed with sitting on the floor and sewing gummi bears together and I just leave it there to haunt and taunt me with a vague fruity smell. I feel that since I've gotten a good start, it's almost as good as done but of course that's not true. So right now I'm realizing there's still a lot I have to finish and I'm bugging out! I'm bugging out!

A lot of people have some internal (or external, if you listen to what rock stars say) way of dealing with panic but I seem to be missing that part. When I was about seventeen, I had a really intense case of panic disorder and while I've learnt to manage it during regular life (a bit, I have, I swear, don't laugh!), I tend to fall apart a bit when it comes to a really stressful situation. I just start vibrating and my thoughts run way too fast to be of any use. I'm in that place now.


I've had a mostly good week though: the weather has been great except for yesterday morning when it was snowing. But it didn't stick, so we're having snowless streets and bright mornings and lovely sunsets, even if I'm not always in a place where I could enjoy them. Last Sunday I took another trip to Kangeq with a model (see above) and we had a lot of fun, sailing in the afternoon with blinding sun, traipsing around the abandoned island, taking all kinds of photos. When we left the island, I even got to steer the boat! I was not very good at it, it doesn't actually work at all the same way as driving a car does. But it was still fun. When we returned to the city, the setting sun made everything look so different. The mountains always have a different silhouette with with the evening sun. Their shapes seem to change. Sometimes the clouds sail between them and sometimes they drip all over the mountains slowly, crawling along them like a duvet. I've almost stopped trying to photograph the mountains, it just never looks the same in the photo. I'm trying to concentrate on just enjoying them. And then also taking some photos.



There's nothing to make you feel like home like stressing out and editing photos with the speed of light. In the past week Nuuk has really started to feel familiar and in the mornings, I actually know where I'm waking up. Doesn't mean I don't miss home, because I really do. I guess it just means the culture shock will be worse when I get back, when I have to readjust myself again. I am looking forward to going home, though. Guess I'm just stressing about everything so much right now that every thought I have is making me crazy. I had a dream where somebody was trying to bomb and burn down my house, my car wouldn't run and I was also really late for work as a cleaning lady. The last part is quite common in my dreams. I've worked as a cleaning lady a lot in the past and I still sometimes have nightmares that I've forgotten to do my area. It's not a pleasant dream. Cleaning malls or schools wasn't very nice. I guess I'm just constantly afraid I've forgotten to do something I'm supposed to do and people will be mad when I just don't have energy to do it anymore. Or I will be without money and die of hunger and will only have all of my unpaid bills to eat. And they don't even send you bills anymore, now they're e-bills! I can't eat e-bills!

Deep breath. Deeeep breath. Think about how calm and quiet and secluded it was in Kangeq.

I really need to think about my life choices. Somewhere along the way I've learnt that I have to do a million things at once so that at least one of them would pan out. It hasn't really worked that well, because I feel I'm still not having a real job nor am I still a serious artist who could make a living through her art and to top it all off, I'm drowning in my feelings of inadequacy. I'm scraping my livelihood together only barely. Of course some things have panned out: I'm in an art residency in Greenland so I've gotten somewhere. But for the most of my time, I'm really low on money and struggling to make ends meet. It's really important to my mental health that I can do something I feel is creatively significant, so I keep going down this road. I would just need to find a way to make it also lucrative so I could eat and stuff. I don't know if it's possible but I know I can't just do a job that doesn't really matter to me.

I did not use the term "following my bliss". I did not. I'm not a millennial. I'm just... a person who really wants to do stuff that's important to her and also get paid for that. I'm too old to be a millennial!


The fingers of my left hand are going numb. Migraine, or a heart attack? Who knows.

I should not make jokes. To make my stress worse, one of my family members is currently in recovery after a heart surgery. The surgery went okay, from what I hear, but it's still heart surgery where they cut your rib cage open so it's kind of freaking me out. To make matters worse, this particular family member was the only one with a smart phone and a constant access to the internet, so it's hard to get updates about him here in a place where I can only get news through the net.

To recap: need to think about my life choices and calm down, she said with a quiver in her voice, knowing it would never happen.