Reflection on Artists Live

Reflection on artists live as a performer.
Planning for my artists live involved a lot of thinking about how much information I wanted to share. I enjoyed this process . I wrote it out several times and each time I read it I took something away until I felt that I wasn’t sharing anything that made me feel too uncomfortable. My thinking was about keeping myself safe and also wondering if and how people would judge me. I dithered a lot, would people understand it? In the end it felt like it actually didn’t matter too much if people understood it or not, it was just about me telling my story in a creative way.
When I began to read my poem it really touched me and I started to cry. I was very surprised by this because I had written it and read it several times. It’s funny because I think things have been dealt with and then something just jumps up and smacks you across the face completely out of the blue. Violet Oaklander (2007:p5) proposes the problems children have when they come into therapy is that they generally have a ‘poor sense of self’.   As a child I set high standards for myself because I remember the only times I was noticed by my parents and teachers was when I did something extraordinary. I have always tried hard to please the adults around me regardless of the cost to myself.
I made a flat cake to represent how I felt about myself during my early years and wrote “a cake that’s flat, what good is that” and I tossed it aside saying “I did all I could but it was no good”. The action with the words caused me to become emotional. I stuck the two layers of cake together with delicious strawberry jam saying “then how odd, I found God”. I used the jam to symbolise the ‘glue’ that holds my life together. I used lovely bright colours for the icing and spoke about finding education and how changed I am due to all this new knowledge. I iced rows of buttercream roses depicting my nursing qualification and other training I have completed over the years. To complete...