Life is Full of Possibilities

This week’s Documented Life Project prompt encouraged group members to create a page that somehow depicted our older selves dispensing advice to our younger selves.  I decided to put a slightly different spin on the prompt, just a slight tangent.

Firstly, as I recently discovered, I don’t really like to use my art journal for the more emotive stuff.  It’s escapism and stress-busting for me to work in my art journal rather than it function as a route to introspection and reflection.  Secondly, I don’t really chime with the idea of giving my younger self advice.  Even if such a thing were possible, I wouldn’t do it.  For a start, I don’t give unsolicited advice plus there is nothing I really regret that I would steer myself away from.  Sure there are many things in my life I wish had worked out differently but for the most part those are things over which I had no control anyway so nothing I did or didn’t do would have made one iota of difference to the outcome.  I also feel happy with where I am in life and I have watched enough sci-fi movies to have contemplated the idea that I am where I am because of all the things I have been through, good and bad, and any small change might have had a ripple effect to land me somewhere else in a different set of circumstances.  So, in short, no advice is being dispensed to my younger self.

What I did decide to do was write some words of encouragement to my younger self and I plumped for the vague “Life is full of possibilities”.  I drew a simple version of myself aged about 5 in the centre of my page and then surrounded it with triangular doodles, making the words emerge in the negative space.  Simple.  That was a lot of doodling though.  My hand was a bit achy by the time I completed the page.