I’ve been working hard this week on putting together my talk for Melbourne. Today I’ve polished the last of the plan, selected some short poems, and painted nearly 30 ink paintings to illustrate various concepts I’ll be talking about. For example:

Illustrating a common split in traumatized people, between heart and mind, or to put it another way, between their emotions and their intellect.

I like using pictures particularly in a situation like this, where the content could happily fill a week of day long workshops but I’ve only been allocated 20 minutes.

One day, I’m going to be better known as a speaker and when I ask for an hour to do a talk I’ll get it!! Considering that nearly every talk I do has to have the basic ‘What is dissociation’ intro to it – and that to properly answer that question would take at least 20 minutes, my job is a hard one!

This is the first time I’ll be doing a talk with such personal content without sharing the spotlight with Cary… I don’t like it! It’s nice to have another person with a dissociative disorder to shoulder the load and ease the freak factor a bit. So, I’ve re-dyed my hair instead which oddly enough is making me feel better about it.

Back to it, still have four more images to paint and then need to rehearse it all and check my time.