I know I know, I’m very amateur and should probably be embarrassed — and one day I will be! But for now, everyone has to start somewhere.
So yes, that’s my voice. You know how it is when you’re not used to the sound of your recorded voice, so you keep asking yourself over and over, “Is that really what I sound like?” I’m totally mortified! 😅
But you know, this was fun! Expect more videos in the future.
The runes at the bottom of the thumbnail are: Solwilo, Othala, Isa, and Berkana — sun, inheritance, ice, and birch tree.
A divorce was a huge blow to my philosophical foundation.
For my entire life, I was unapologetically a believer in Love. After all, I had Venus in Pisces in my astrological chart, so there was no chance that I wouldn’t go through life full of whimsy and romance. If you do your best to be good to someone, then they’ll be good to you in return, right? Cue happily ever after?
Except … no.
Maybe the world isn’t full of people who are trying to do their best. Maybe there are too many personality disorders who are all too willing to exploit others. Maybe selfish transactional-ism is the law of the land, and you should never believe anyone who claims otherwise.
And maybe there is no such thing as partners for life anymore. Maybe society is just too broken.
Throughout the entire process, I stated repeatedly that I didn’t want a divorce and that I opposed the idea, but he had done something back in April (that I haven’t the guts to talk about) that resulted in an enormous amount of social pressure on me to go through with it. From complete strangers, to boot. And given that he was solid in his decision to dump me, there wasn’t anything to fight for. Everyone around me said that it was for the best.
Worldview be damned.
But then, what do I believe in now?
One of my biggest fears is to end up as a bitter old woman, that people get together and blow off steam about over coffee because I’m that difficult to put up with. So eventually I have to find a new purpose — that is my end goal here.
And it dawned on me that my philosophical foundation was bigger than I had previously realized.
I’m still a mother, still doing my best day after day to love and support my children, homeschooling them, sharing in their interests, and cleaning up after them — my first duty is to them and their well-being.
I still have an image of the sort of person I want to be, full of life and optimism, wise yet forever untainted by the hardships of life.
Maybe my happily ever after doesn’t include a male partner, but I’m not lonely. I still have people to love, and who love me in return. I can still have an open heart.
Life doesn’t run a clear course It flows through from within It’s supposed to take you places and leave markings on your skin
I’m still pretty scared to talk about specifics, so suffice to say that I had a plethora of brand new experiences, met a variety of people, and stepped well outside of my comfort zone in ways that I never would have imagined.
Oh, and I’m also now divorced.
Turns out that you can spend years working your butt off to love and care for your soulmate, only to have it turn out that you’re the wrong “context” for them and they don’t want to be with you anymore. Oh, and they also loathe the way you state the obvious. And the way you associate concepts together. And, and, and …
Maybe one day my heart will stop hemorrhaging.
You know all those statistics that claim that women fare better emotionally after divorces? Not true in my case. Aside from the soul-crushing devastation, there’s the intense feelings of betrayal and rejection, as well as feeling like a defective failure at life. Did this happen because I’m too fat? I dunno. Better stop eating just in case.
Only I know I’m not fat. It’s the stress and pain triggering body dysmorphia — my subconscious attempt to take control of something that’s completely out of my control. Even if I weighed only 90lbs and had the flattest abs in the world, I’d still be discarded. I’m still “that” woman.
So I’ve spent hours and hours crying until I was too dehydrated and exhausted to keep crying. I’ve had numerous meltdowns, and moments when it felt like I didn’t have the strength to keep living. Life doesn’t come with a pause button that lets you get your feet back underneath you, it just keeps plowing ahead no matter what’s going on, and getting dragged along leaves you feeling even more banged up.
Then one day I woke up and I felt like eating again. So it is true that time does eventually heal some wounds.
Though I am now dirt-eating poor.
I looked into getting a job or attending an online community college, but those options didn’t feel remotely right for me. You know how it is when everything you built up over the years gets abruptly yanked out from underneath you, you feel trapped in an aimless free fall where absolutely nothing could possibly get worse than it already is, and you say to yourself, “Well, I did always want to earn a living as a writer.”
That’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to earn a living as a writer. It’s not just about getting by, but finding a new purpose in life — a reason for everything, and a means to express the hurt.
When I feel sad, I can research and implement marketing tactics to keep myself distracted (especially now that I know that I can survive far outside of my comfort zone). I can write about how much I hate men in my novels (facetious exaggeration, don’t take that seriously). I can start churning out as much fiction as I can possibly write, and I will build a new life for myself that can’t be unraveled so easily. And I will do it all while still cooking delicious dinners and homeschooling my children, because I can be that awesome no matter how hard it is. Sleep is overrated anyway.
I’ve spent the last few months telling myself over and over, “If you want things to be different, then you have to do something different.”
And I’m starting to feel ready to do something different.
The thing that I find pretty wild about AI art is how different all of the models are, and every time a new one is released I feel like I have to learn it from the ground up. Then, naturally, trying to go back to an older model feels all awkward and confusing, lol.
I’ve found that with SD3, turning both the number of steps and cfg way down produced better results. Also, figuring out a good scheduler took quite a bit of experimenting. But, on the whole, I think that the textures it produces are quite attractive, and I do plan on using it more in the future.
This is one of those moments where I wonder if I’m supposed to be more tight-fisted and controlling of the content that I produce, but meh.
I’m learning how to use Canva, and it’s been good practice to use my AI pictures to create wallpapers for phones. Shown above. Feel free to download for personal use. Maybe remember my name if you’re feeling generous. As far as I’m concerned, these are educational/experimental images, not something that I intend for hella profit(!). Though … if you try to use them for your own hella profit(!), I will come after you. Just sayin’. Hur hur.
All in good fun, of course. Everyone knows that no one reads blogs anymore (except for you and me). 😂
April ended up turning my life completely upside down. I keep asking myself, “Do I want to talk about it publicly?” and the answer is no. Not really. Maybe in the future, but not right now.
So, I’ve been keeping myself busy with deep cleaning my house. I also have plenty of responsibilities to get through and appointments to keep. Those cupboard doors aren’t going to scrub themselves!
However, I do feel that I have been absent for long enough, especially with how bad I’ve been at blogging for the last … two years. It’s time for me to get back to the things that I enjoy, even if I don’t feel like I have all that much to say yet.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have plenty of AI art to share! As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Or maybe pictures are just soothing to look at.
By Autumn Rain 