In the interests of trying to write every day:

1. I love my new printer. It's small, dinky, and I can hear it wheeze every page out as though a hamster was applying the ink, but I can print out anything I want anytime I want and that is wonderful. No more stealing printing from work. I am a fairly adept thief when I want to be but it hurts my heart to do so.

2. Working independently is hard, which anyone could have told me beforehand, and many did. I think that the hardest part so far has been struggling with procrastination tendencies and actually working during the day so that I am not crazed and over-caffeinated at three in the morning. The most irritating thing so far has been the endless bureaucracy, and the most nerve-wracking part has been waiting to see if enough work comes in. Am I going to make rent this month? Can I juggle my finances with enough finesse to make this work? I have never felt so in touch with what I spend and what I make, and that has actually been deeply satisfying. I'm making my own way in the world. Whether I fly or fall comes down to my own ingenuity, hard work, stick-to-itiveness and natural luck. And while I am worried, I genuinely believe that I can make a go of it. Being at that place of believing in my own capabilities in a fundamental way is not something I take for granted, and I can't help but look at the long distance I've come to get here. Not simple in the slightest.

Tomorrow I'll go fight bureaucracy some more and finally finish that translation I've been putting off. Right now, my muscles are telling me to lie down and read about gardening in bed for a while.

The days in Poland were intense and full. My first experiences were all sensual and almost overwhelming- the way the trees smelled, the type of clothes people wore, the translucent quality of their skin, the sour salty food and epic amounts of alcohol- all these struck me with a strength that was different from a regular tourist experience. I felt strangely, immediately at home. Cracow felt nostalgic to me in an intuitive way that I have felt about no other place, and it didn't make sense- I had never been there before. The food felt like something I had tasted in my Grandmother's house, although this clearly was not the case- my Grandmother never cooked with bacon, for one thing.

Nostalgia is one of the queerest ways we fool ourselves. One of the reasons that I didn't want to go on a Holocaust-themed trip is because I deeply dislike contrived history. I know that all history is to some extent contrived, but I resent the way in which we are steeped in Holocaust culture in Israel and the way in which it's used to inform so many of our decisions and aspects of our lives. Maybe because I moved here at an advanced age and didn't grow up in it, it has always seemed artificial to me. However in Poland it made complete, "natural" sense to think about how my ancestors may have walked those very streets, or imagining what they might have been like or invent stories about how their lives may have been. This has never been true for any place else for me.

I was pleased that we spent so much time going around "regular Poland" (as though you could divorce the history of Polish Jews from the rest of Poland,,,). One of the most interesting things for me was learning how Poles saw their own history. I liked that we often passed groups of children on school trips as we tramped through forests or castles or grottos. I felt like we were getting similar stories.

Our hosts were unbelievably warm and generous, inviting us out every night- out to their hangouts or into their homes. I felt so welcomed, and maybe this was one of the reasons I felt safe enough to explore issues of family and history the way that I did. We never stopped having conversations, my Israeli traveling-mates and our Polish counterparts. Some evenings we only cut off conversations because it was too late and we had to go to bed, and continued them the next morning.

The trip was very much a juggling act between planned sightseeing, artmaking, going out with our Polish counterparts and downtime to just wander and soak up our surroundings. I generally enjoy art that has mystical elements in it, but in Poland my mystical tendencies became much more pronounced. By the end of our time there I felt as though I was being buffeted between long, great days and nightmares that cropped up every night. I felt as though there as so much to explore, that we were only getting the very tip of the iceberg. One of the things that I did before leaving was get the names of Polish authors from our new friends, so that I could continue to try and understand. I sincerely hope that this will not be the last time we meet up with them. I felt that what we had was a rare meeting, and it would be a shame for it to be just a one- time thing.

Alopecia: how much fun is it? (not even a little bit fun)

What I am doing: trying to eat well, doing yoga, taking antidepressants, getting enough rest, working in the studio every day, putting coins in a jar to remind myself of the positive even though it's hokey as hell.

What I am not doing: continuing to go to that acupuncturist who charged an arm and a leg for every session and had me on a schedule that revolved around doing things to/for my scalp. Enough. My finances are only just beginning to stabilize now after having gone to him for several months, and I need stress like that like I need another hole in my head.

What I am doing: hoping that I'm not acting like an idiot for stopping treatment, no matter how expensive or weird the treatment happens to be. Hoping that what I'm doing is enough. Trying to let my body take things at its own pace. Trying not to trawl wig stores online and wonder about just shaving it all off. Keeping my fingers crossed.

A longer post will take the place of this one, but just wanted to jot down: took valerian today, and anxiety at a discernably lower level. I have more of an attention span and of note is the fact that I've been studying and getting things done all day, it's close to midnight and I'm not exhausted. I mean, I'm not sleepy at all. And not in that I'm-awake-cause-I'm-too-anxious-to-sleep way. Just in a not tired way. Christ on a cupcake.

Plan for an installation: A group of people lying curled on overstuffed couches with their faces made up to look as though they had the shit kicked out of them. Maybe the couches organized in the center of the room like a fort?

Jumping off points would be the Saw franchise, Hostel, youtube uploads from Iraq..the public narrative of taking pleasure from torture.

Plan for a sculpture: Chicken bones made of carved wood (cherry? holy god that's expensive), tied together with a twist-tie. The whole thing should be oversized- maybe larger that a person? Maybe the twist-tie should be one of those plastic ties that clack when you close them? Leaning in a corner of the room, like the proverbial elephant.

So if I'm not already in the territory of depression, I'm certainly in the outskirts of the area. The symptoms are easily recognizable at this point: dazed, tired and distracted all day but becoming wide awake at bedtime, not hungry (but still getting that sugar drop when I skip meals), lack of sex drive, generalized anxiety and vivd, awful dreams. All in all, I feel like i'm just barely making it through the day and accomplishing all my commitments, but only just. Thank god I got that day planner. I honestly don't know what's going to happen if it gets worse- at this point my mistakes at work are few and easily explained, but there's no garantee it'll stay that way.

At this point I've dealt with depression enough times to know what needs to happen in order for me to pull out of it. I've actually got a standard set of "guidelines for people dealing with depression" that I tell my friends, when they're also feeling sad and blue: Exercise. Eat right. Get enough sleep. Depression is a condition with physical effects, and just as you wouldn't beat yourself up for not being to run a marathon with a sprained ankle, so you shouldn't beat yourself up for not being able to accomplish as much while depressed. Be kind to yourself. Depression's mechanisms feed itself, and unless you make a conscious effort to pull yourself out of it, it will likely get worse before it gets better. Even if you try, it may still get worse before it gets better. Check out medication and see if it's right for you. Check out therapy and see if it's right for you.

And even though I can look back and say, yes, this has been a long and deeply crappy year in many respects and being depressed at the end of it is a pretty reasonable response, it is still so frustrating to be back here. When I left Jlem I had finished off 5 years of therapy. I was going towards a fresh start, after having aquired new tools with which to deal with stress and anxiety. And here I am, back again.

It's not that I failed (and I have to keep reminding myself of that, since in my low state it's very easy to see it like that). But I had hoped that I would do better.

Vivid vivid dreams lately. Can't remember what I dreampt about last night, other than I had to break down a dam- the water was cold and I kept diving down into it to push the bricks out, while books fell past me in the water. I woke up with my arms stretched over my head uncomfortably. And now, all day today I've been having daymares about my family getting killed, all of them, in a freak accident. I fold my laundry and imagine that I'm packing my dead family member's things up, to be givin away. I make lists of cousins whose help I'd enlist, the people I'd probably fight with, how I'd deal with selling the house.

Doc Matthews says that vivid dreams are a sign of heat, and we've been working on reducing that heat but I don't want to give them up. I like feeling neither here nor there, even when what I'm seeing is far from pleasant. I like the light feeling of unreality. It feels not unlike when I was just getting past the age when you believe in fairies- I didn't really believe anymore that you could enter a garden and enter an entirely different geography, but felt it would be rude to the residents of that place to stop believing.

Plan for a sculpture: A 2/3 size* reproduction of Grampa sleeping on a table with two German Shepherds and a shotgun. He should be almost as short as the length of the table, with his body curled into a loose fetal position. The dogs should be nearly as large as he is, and he should be nestled in between them. The entire thing should be large enough/small enough that someone could look down on it as on an operating table, to be able to see a dissected body and assign a cause of death.


*"Why did you not choose to make the sculpture larger? Because I was not making a monument. Why did you choose to not make it smaller? Because I was not making an object."*


*Actually, maybe no. I think it might be an object. Gotta think about that.

In the spirit of my friends here (and also recent events) I've been trying to get my act together. A day planner has been purchased and events written into it. I've been virtously doing laundry, folding my clothes and putting them away instead of leaving them in a pile and even doing dishes.

I kinda want to be responsible, that is, I want to know where things are when I put them down and not suddenly remember obligations at the last minute. It's a nerve-wracking way to live- I make myself crazy, I make other people crazy. I already find, writing things down in the planner, that I feel less anxious about my time. I know what's going to happen. It's written down, look.

I rubbed ginger on my head two nights ago, and cinnamon on my head last night. They're supposed to bring the blood to the surface of my scalp, and maybe make the hair grow back. Every time I look at the bald spots I am reminded that I am still adrift. That I am still in at least some ways at the mercy of my anxieties.

I talked with Hill this week about this and that. He told me how tired he was of living like a vagrant- he hasn't had a bedroom for the past five months. His current digs are in a squat, and while he's not paying rent the ceiling has taken to crumbling on his bed in the middle of the night. Before that he was working in the cornfields in Texas, and sleeping in a barn at night. I can only empathize. I haven't had a single living space of my own all year. I cannot wait (my reservations about living with Hill aside) to move this last time. My own bedroom..god. I haven't had one since moving out of my parents place last November.

I have a whole laundry list of the things I would like this studio to be. But I think more than anything else I want it to be my own.

Bottom line: the women that I work with now that I'm on the evening shift are a real trip.

A few people in the office tried to warn me about them before I started, but I really do get it: they're shallow and can be petty and catty, and probably stave off the boredom of the longish shifts paired with little work with internal politics of the most pointless kind. They are the type of women that professionals would easily call "girls", and I'll admit that that's how I thought of them in the beginning: they have a childish viciousness to them borne of the same kind of small-mindedness that draws a person to aspire no higher than to get married, and have nice clothes along the way. I can see them in my mind's eye at the age of five, hitting their friends over the head with their dolls when they don't get their way.

That said, they are entirely professional at what they do. I often find myself lagging behind, even when the work is as simple as scanning and printing. They easily complete three pieces of work in the time it takes me to complete one. So while they're not people I would willingly hang out with, they do what they do well.

Yeah, they're shallow- an entire shift can go by with the only topic of conversation being fashion- and they're definitely petty. But they're not (most of them) genuinely stupid. They do however have that sort of laziness of intellect that you often get with people who are born pretty and as a result haven't had to try too hard over the course of their lives. The office is absolutely filled with the conventionally attractive, and the secretary pool is the last place where there would be an exception: all young, female, thin, (mostly) blond. I am sure that they were given their (fairly cushy) jobs not only on the basis of their abilities but also based on their ability to be an attractive front to the office, to be able to smile prettily when the clients come in.

Some of them are university students, which is why they're working the evening shift. The evening shift is ideal for that- you make a full time salary at a part-time position. I can imagine that this job is another in a long line of unearned perks, just for being pretty- they won't have to work slinging hash or cleaning stairwells. They can stay in the air conditioning, with the complimentary coffee.

Maybe it's all sour grapes, I don't know. Probably "On Not Being Pretty" is a series of (probably long winded and self-deprecating) posts all by itself. I'm doing what I always do in these kind of situations: do my job, keep my head down and think about what's going on around me.

I really miss Yeller. He's gone for six months to the States, just to wander around. He's got a few places that he knows he wants to go to, but other than that he's just following his nose through various punk communities. It sounds completely awesome, but I do miss him a lot. When he was here we would talk on average 3-4 times a week. Now, if we manage to pull off one Skype convo in a week and a half that's good.

When we Skyped the other day he told me that he was thinking of cutting his trip short. This didn't come as a huge surprise to me because a couple of years ago when he was doing the same sort of trip in Europe I got the same sort of phone call. He loves what he's experiencing and the people he's meeting, but he misses having a social community around him. He loves traveling but at the same time feels "traveled out". This time he said that he's been thinking about his future and realized that he needs to make long-term plans (specifically about re-entering some academic framework), and in order to make those plans he needs to come back.

God knows I can identify. We're both introverts and deeply nerdy- like him, it's hard for me to make friends, and we both get comfort from books. I don't take my friendships- the real ones- for granted. They've been around for years and the people I have them with are extraordinary. With all due respect to the romance of being a citizen of the world, it's hard just packing up and starting fresh, building those relationships- that safety net- up again from scratch. It's lonely thinking of most if not all of your relaitonships as here till they're gone. I want to do a second degree, and I know that the single greatest obstacle is going to be the fear of being in a new city by myself. I've traveled a great deal, I'm good at picking up languages and understanding social cues (at least enough to not fuck up too badly)- but it's still very hard.

It's kind of depressing, all in all. We're both deeply ambivalent about this place we're in, which is a very polite way of saying that we feel ill on a daily basis at what goes on here. He's much more active politically than I am, and even he's ready to cut and run at this point. But he keeps coming back, and I never leave. It's getting to be kind of a joke at this point- I go on and on about all the different things I hate about being here, and eventually the person I'm talking to says, "Well, go then! Nothing's keeping you here!" And nothing really is, in the sense of school/army service etc. Financially, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to leave. But it's not that simple, and the thought of actually being stuck here just from the inertia of having stayed is..unsettling, to say the least.

I miss him so much. I know that he's having a ball and I wish him all the best in the world, but even so I wish he was back here in this horrible place, so we could watch zombie movies together and gossip. Skype's just not the same.

So last night's drag performance kind of sucked, all in all. I was in all honesty completely underprepared- the lipsync was off, the clothes were tossed together and while I did plan a little very basic choreography I still missed every single cue I had set. It passed, I got a few compliments despite everything, and that was that. This morning I'm kind of marinating in "oh god I suck"-edness, and am trying to snap out of it. It really has been a while since I performed that badly.

Look, all in all I have a good track record of strong performances. This time really was a combination of being genuinely very busy the week before performing coupled with procrastination and not a small amount of arrogance. I really thought that stage presence and generalized fabulousness would be enough to swing a song, and I know that it isn't. I've seen umpteen drag performances that failed because of this sort of arrogance- people get told that the sun shines out of their ass one too many times and they start to believe it, and get lazy. I really dislike that sort of thing, which is why falling for that is particularly painful for me.

I don't think people will hold it against me or anything like that. While I know exactly how underprepared performers are talked about back stage, I also know how long that sort of thing lasts, and it isn't very long. I just need to make sure that my next performance is completely awesome, so I can get back to having a strong track record.

Ugh. It'll be fine. It's good to take some lumps sometimes, it keeps you humble. I just gotta get back on the horse.

That said, though, dancing with Hill and Bella was wonderful afterwords. I do love the Rogatka and what they've created there. And I am happy to be moving in with someone who takes their debauchery as seriously as I do. :)

So, I definitely don't want ranting to be the default function of this blog. But since no one reads it anyway, and this is the first time..once in a while can't hurt, I suppose. :)

Anatomy of a failed proposition:

So this woman messages me on Facebook this morning. I vaguely remember friending her a few days ago- I friend people automatically, because what the hell. She says good morning, I say good morning back. And then she says. "so I see you're into Sado and Bizzare."

She loses a point right there, for basic manners. It's 8:25 in the morning, and just because I am at my desk does not mean that I am in any way awake. There must be people out there who respond to this sort of thing immediately, because asshats keep trying, but I am not one of them. Seriously, lady, I don't know you from Adam, and that's kind of personal.

Also, I personally find the term "Sado and Bizzare" to be affected, irritating and non-inclusive. I agree with Bitchy Jones on the use of deliberately obfusticating language. Or maybe I can just see in my mind's eye a girl in too much eye makeup saying, "I'm into Bizzaaaaaaaare", as though that gives her extra points in whatever scoring system of how completely awesome you are at sex we're using. Maybe I'm just cranky cause it's 8:25 in the morning. She couldn't have known that I don't like that particular phrase, so she gets a free pass, but I'm already ticked off at this point.

I answer, "Okay..." because I'm willing to give this conversation about 30 more seconds. And then she asks, "So are you a top or a bottom?"

Friends, this is not an appropriate question to ask a total stranger. I know that sometimes there is a certain lowering of what is considered acceptable hitting-on behavior because it's kink and we're all so sexually experimental! And free of social mores! And what are you, some kind of prude? Are you sex negative or something? And just ugh. Here is the thing: kink is more complicated than vanilla sex. It touches on powerful emotions and requires a great deal of trust. You need to be more careful, not less so, when selecting partners. I use far more rigorous filters when looking for kinky partners (if I was right now, and I'm not), which means that a person needs to be extra special fantastic if I'm going to play with them. And I don't need to justify that to anyone- I let into my bed only those who I want to, period.

It's not that I never have casual sex. But you have to be a pretty compelling person/I need to be a very specific kind of drunk/ the stars need to be aligned just so for that to happen. Of course, a perfect stranger can't know that about me, and that's the point. I think it's gauche to assume that someone you don't know is just going to hop into bed with you. Maybe (maybe) if I had spent some time at a party with someone and gotten physical cues that they were interested too I might proposition someone straightforwardly. But not online, and not a stranger.

Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that she wanted to play. But I don't think I am.

So, yeah. Rest of conversation similarly unproductive, unfriend, block.

So the Japan project is finally (finally) coming to a close. After this week a lot of commitments will have ended- finding a studio, that performance in Jerusalem. My life will become less hectic, I will be able to concentrate on one thing at a time.

I certainly hope so, anyway. I've reached a point in this generalized anxiety which I would definitely call a danger zone: having trouble sleeping. I have trouble falling asleep, don't sleep well when I do and feel buzzed and erratic all day. It's bad. And if we're being entirely honest..I haven't been taking my hair medication like I should. I'm just tired of doing it, you know? I just want this to end. It's much easier to have a can-do "we're going to beat this!" attitude at the beginning of tackling a health issue. It's a lot harder when you've been doing this expensive treatment for months and months and there's no end in sight and you've been getting better (sloooowly) but now you're actually getting worse.

After this ridiculous week I'll look into a yoga class- I really need to get recentered. And mayeb once I'm unemployed I'll be able to sleep better, or at least longer. #crossing fingers#

Moving day today. I am beyond tired. Everything-but everything- is packed. I don't want to leave a thing there. There's actually less than I thought there would be. Maybe things look like les when they're packed in boxes, rather than put in trash bags or tied toether with string or whatever dumbass ways of packing I've had over the past year. I sincerely hope that hiring movers will make this my smoothest move this year. And soon it'll be over. Well, for a month or so.

I finished the limbo paper yesterday too, around midnight. I have a performance Thursday, but all in all I feel responsibilities slipping off of me like water. All I want is to get to the new place (which is small but whatevs), cook a big meat meal, eat and go to sleep. Not do anything else. Not hold anything together. I swear I'll deal with everything else later.

Marsa and I fought two days ago. It was awful- she uses exactly the type of communication style that presses all the wrong buttons for me. I start out trying to separate out what she's actually saying and what's dredging up bad memories but it's as though I'm participating in two fights at once, and I'm just exhausted by the end. It was just bad. I barely slept afterwords, I was so angry, and then I was angry because being angry is part of why I lose my hair and I just lay in bed churning and beating myself up for letting her get to me, and for letting myself be in this situation in the first place, for having to move in in the first place. There is more than enough pissed-offedness to go around.

I'm going to have to move out ASAP. I'm going to have to find a short term rental in which I will stay, all of my things in boxes, until Hill and I find a place. This is exactly the situation that I did not want to be in- I hate uncertainty, I hate temporary living situations. Of all the stressful situations I can think of, this is easily in the top five. And here I am, at the end of a year since I moved to Tel Aviv, and the entire year has been a temporary living situation, and waiting for it to be over. Little wonder my hair's been falling out. Little wonder I haven't been able to stop grinding my teeth.

I want to be angry at other people for this situation, and to a certain extent I think I'm justified in doing so. But yanno, it was me who allowed a lot of this stuff to happen. I took my sister in, instead of telling her to find a short-term gig. I moved out when the landlord started playing dirty, instead of putting my foot down and insisting she find her own place. I said that it was alright, that I would wait for Hill, even though his trip got put off by three months and I'm living with a pregnant lady. I put aside my frustrations with the way Marsa talks to me (and insists on the way that I live, as though I were her ward and not her boarder) again and again, because I told myself that her comfort zone (no matter how bizarre) was more important than mine. I have to take responsibility for that. I have to know when my boundaries are and be vigilant about not letting people walk all over them. Why is that so hard?

So I'm waffling back and forth between simmering-angry and wanting-to-cry upset, depending on who I'm blaming for my current situation. God help the next person who comes in the archive with some dumbass request.

So this is definitely final countdown time. Three weeks till Hill gets back from Texas. (He called and wanted to know if I would look up gay bars in Amarillo fricking Texas online for him. The boy is not overendowed with common sense.) Friends have been consulted about power tools, blogs have been perused (interior designing! organic roof gardening! make your own chandelier out of nothing but tin cans and dental floss!) and plans have been made and made and remade. I have at least two sculptures waiting to be made when we have eveything put together, so I won't lack for things to do.

I probably won't end up stenciling this wonderful ornate penis pattern onto my bedroom floor. But let a girl dream, won't you?

Scared wouldn't be the right word to describe how I'm feeling about this. I'm uneasy and a little worried- especially about whether Hill and I can live together as well as work together, and whether or not we'll actually build everything we said we would. I can easily see us sitting in a filthy living room, picking building materials out of our food and bickering about who's turn it is to change the cardboard that we've used to patch the roof leaks. I do not want this scenario to happen.

But I am ready for this. Lord, I am ready. It's gotten to the point where I need space for myself as much as I need food every day- I feel the lack of it like a chronic ache that you learn to live with but wouldn't it be nice if you could get out of bed without making sure that your spine is aligned just so? I need to have a table I can fuck up if I want to, a kitchen I can cook whatever I want to in it, a work space I can spread out in with impunity- and without flatmates (god bless their souls) who'll give me the stinkeye if I do.

Meanwhile I'll go look at clothes that I would totally make if I had a decent sewing table/cloth stores in my vicinity. This is a lovely site for that and also this one. There might just be some sort of self-indulgent fashion post in the future, who knows? Stay tuned!

Plan for performance (and as usual I figure out the last bit just a day before the event. I really really need to figure out how to work according to a plan.):

*Clothing: not sure yet. need to go through costumes. For sure I will need an apron.

1. Shoo everybody away, so that there is a big, circular space around me. The motions should be like you're shooing chickens. Flap your hands at people.

Materials needed: none.

2. Find someone in the audience and have them hold up empty "mirror". Take plastecine (red and white) out of pocket and mold it over face in the shape of nose. Take your time, knead it out and bang it against your palm. mold an oversized nose onto your face and tie it on with a strip of cloth. take a birthday candle out of your pocket and place it in the plastecine.

Materials needed: plastecine (red and white), "mirror" (cut out of cardboard and hung off a belt), strip of cloth, birthday candle already melted in to holder.

3. Collect people from the audience and hand them bags of flour, taken from pockets in apron. clip off the ends of the bags and shoo them away, out of the rogatka. Make clicking noises with your tongue. The purpose of this is to make white flour trails out the door.

Materials needed: bags of flour (4-5), scissors (hung off a belt).

4. Climb on top of someone (make sure they know you're going to do this beforehand). Get your nose (and the candle) as close to the ceiling as possible. Light other birthday candles one by one from the candle in nose and hand them to people in the audience. The performance is over when the candle in my nose burns out by itself.

Materials needed: birthday candles (a handful or so).

I keep going over and over in my head different plans for the future, for as soon as I finish working at the firm. I only have a few months left, after all, and I'm pretty worried about it. It's kind of funny to be so stressed about this when during this entire period I have been pretty much non-stop complaining about how I want it to end already, and when am I going to finally have a stuuuudio? And now that it's getting closer I'm getting a little scared. Which makes sense- this will be the first time that I dedicate myself entirely to making art, as opposed to the half-assed calling-the-balcony-a-studio attempts. What if I actually turn out to be full of shit?

I'm trying to do what is good for anxiety, at least in my case: making as many concrete preparations as I can at this stage, seeing if I've missed anything that I could be doing to make this transition as smooth as possible and reminding myself that I'm doing all I can and I can't control everything. It's helping.

I'm also reminding myself that the studio (despite the ridiculous amount of money we're going to put in it) is not going to be some magical solution for Becoming An Artist. It makes things easier, by proiding space, tools and hopefully a social atmosphere conducive to work, all of which are very important. But the art-making and the work ethic needed to go with it are up to me. I think that's what worries me the most (other than running out of money in the middle): that I will find myself in a fancy-schmancy studio and still not being doing the work that I want to be doing. That not having enough space etc. will turn out to have been an excuse.

I really hope that's not the case. I don't think it is. And there's really only one way to find out.

I also know that having a studio isn't the be-all and end-all of my practice. I might find that I work better in spaces I have to negotiate, as long as they're my own. I'm just..I guess I'm just trying not to get caught up in unrealistic expectations, which will only serve to foster anxiety, which will sabotage my work and make me miserable. Sometimes it works better than other times. Which, while a pretty bland statement, is sometimes all you can say about containing anxiety.