Week 5 ~ Peek at Penelope's Journal ~ Vancouver Special

As I mentioned to you in the class, I sit down and do all the exercises I give you in class, so I thought I'd give you a peek at how the Vancouver Special exercise came out in my journal.

Here's how the front turned out:

I didn't think too much about how it looked, apart from making it look like a house, that is. I found a black and white photograph of a distressed wall in one of the magazines we've been cutting up in class. Most of what I did was cut and rearrange slices of the original photo to get the texture where I wanted it. Then I added colour using felt pens and washi tape. In the background, the sky is pencil crayon, then I painted over it to make it darker, and I used washi tape to create the yard. Of course, the point of the exercise is the writing on the *inside*, but it was kind of freeing to work as quickly as I could with the front, not stressing out about whether or not it was perfect. Which is important when you see one of the Qualities I chose. Yep. Perfection. Under control, but still in the house.

So here's the inside:

So ... I've still got Perfection the basement, but at least she doesn't take over the whole house anymore. I've figured out that Perfection is impossible to live with fulltime. She's never happy. But maybe without her being with me all these years I wouldn't have got to Contentment? I do wish however she'd stop talking to her cousin, Fear. When the two of them get together, they have trouble sleeping and they do laundry all night.

Okay, so that was a bit of a digression, but I wanted to write it out for you so you can see that by giving these aspects of our personalities some room to be themselves, we can remove some of the emotional sting of facing them. I often think we should nurture ourselves as we would a child. Particularly if you had the kind of childhood where you were under-nurtured by the adults around you. It's never too late to be kind to yourself. Kind, but firm. Embrace, nurture and nudge. But make sure you nudge eventually. Looking at your qualities at a distance should make that easier.