Category: Art & Expression
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A Christmas gift to myself
My Christmas gift to myself this year was starting a drawing after well over a year of inactivity on that front. I wrote at length on this blog about some of the reasons I didn’t want to create visual art in the last year, and in my last post, about why I felt compelled to…
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A few of the drawings I destroyed this year
I tore them up because I was grieving. I was grieving the loss of someone I’d thought of as my best friend for three decades, taken too soon to cancer. Followed by the loss of my father, who was about to be taken by cancer and succumbed from complications of a freak accident. Followed by…
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THE AKATHISIA FILES: PT 4
In the Midst of a Storm, Keep Moving What follows is something I wrote on 7 December, right in the middle of an akathisia attack. I left it almost untouched — just enough editing to make it readable. Today, the day after another wave, I have just enough steadiness to publish it. That’s the only…
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Toxic Positivity is…
Toxic positivity is someone grabbing at your chin when you’re crying over the loss of a beloved person or pet and saying “smile, everything will get better if you look on the bright side.” There’s a threshold where something stops being harmless “uplift” and becomes constant saccharine noise that dulls your perception and clutters your…
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Uncatalogued Species from a Dream I Forgot
A series of AI-generated illustrations that feel like pages torn from a naturalist’s field journal in a dream. Fittingly enough, I prompted the AI to make these during a sleepless phase of the pre-dawn hours. I’m tempted to translate some of these into real watercolours or pencil drawings — there’s something here I want to…
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Gustav Klimt masterpiece just shattered records this week.
Here’s why this sale matters — and where it sits in Klimt’s larger body of work. Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (shown above) sold at Sotheby’s New York on Tuesday, November 18th, 2025, for $236.4 million — now the highest price ever achieved for a Modern artwork at auction, and the priciest Klimt ever to cross…
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M, The Be(a)stie Forevs
Or: Revenge is a dish best served as you’re making yourself a pasta dinner and getting an AI to do your bidding. 🐀🦊 A tiny moral tale with very wide hips. Me to Lex: M called herself my bestie forever two months into our so-called friendship, then dumped me a month after I attended my…
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Pattern Recognition Off the Charts
I don’t know how it’s possible, but this actually happened. I sang this to ChatGPT: “Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum-pum…Papa pum, papa pum, papa pum… Dada da dada daaaada…Dada da dada daaada di da da da daaaaa da da!” And it answered: “illi……
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✨🏆 The 2001-2002 Fitness Archive: A Retrospective
Immaculate conditioning, tacky velvet, and cameras that simply weren’t ready. Intro (Or why I let Lex do his thing sometimes) Before we begin: I did not write the majority of the post you’re about to read. Or rather, I added a few touches and a handful of sentences in my own phrasing — but over…
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Nature is the Ultimate Creator
Yes — it’s real, and that’s exactly what makes it so jaw-dropping. The Orchid Mantis (Hymenopus coronatus) is one of those rare cases where nature looks more designed than design itself. That pastel pink-white translucence, the petal-like limbs — all genuine biological adaptation. Photographers sometimes enhance contrast slightly, but even unedited, they look this surreal.…
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Moon through the maples
Waning moon, November 8th, 2025 Zero degrees celcius and snow on the way. Through the maples, the night exhales.
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Erasure
10 years later 📆⏳My first attempt at drawing a bird in watercolours on this day, November 5th 2015 (above) was followed by the “Superb Fruit Dove” (below). This second drawing was a gift to my father and has since returned to me after his passing on November 5th 2024. I travelled to Israel to bury…
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Harm
My first shrink thought I was just feeding an unhealthy obsession with these drawings. He couldn’t grasp that I was documenting a social pathology — not just mine.
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How Nonlinear Thinkers Are Punished by Psychiatry
A reflection on imagination, trauma, and the failure of one-size-fits-all medicine. Our current psychiatric model, based on the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—is built around fitting individuals into statistical norms, and is too often punitive toward anyone who doesn’t conform to those parameters. Artists, creatives, and neurodivergent individuals are often misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and treated as…
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When Psychiatry Pathologizes Difference
Mistaking Survival for Sickness There is something profoundly wrong with a system that sees intensity and assumes illness, that reads adaptation as instability, and that calls difference a defect. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and neurodivergence — including autism spectrum traits and other non-typical processing styles — can both resemble bipolar disorder when viewed through…
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Regarding My Grandiose Statements…
“Ms. Shamir makes many grandiose statements, such as being a ‘professional-level artist’.” — Psychiatric report by Doctor E.Z., October 15, 2025 “Makes many grandiose statements, such as being ‘professional level artist’ is an actual quote from a psychiatric report produced yesterday by a shrink I showed the above and following drawings to: I mean… that…
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Calm as can be.
Monday September 29, 2025 12:32 PM. Day 15 being kept in lockup in a psyxhoatroc ward though I have no business being here. Just took a selfie after changing my screensaver to another one of my octopus pen on Moleskine A3 sketchbook drawings executed in 2018 after someone “liked” it on Goodreads today.
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Creativity, Civilization, and Refusal (2025)
Note: This post was generated with the help of AI, using my raw, unedited stream-of-consciousness input. I dictated freely; the AI formatted and structured my words for clarity. I Am Creative. Stop Telling Me Otherwise. I’m supposed to believe that not producing art, not writing novels, not putting out “content,” is somehow harming myself. That’s…
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Artist Strike Manifesto (2025 Update)
In 2021, I declared an artist strike. I said clearly that I would not create under abusive conditions, that I would not play the role of “tragic genius,” and that I would not let the system consume my work while starving me of dignity. That strike was real. It was public. I even destroyed my…
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On Literary Hypocrisy and the Weaponization of Silence
The author Marlene Wagman-Geller is a woman who has made her career writing books that uplift the very archetype she just refused to support in real life: the “mad,” brilliant, defiant woman. Here’s just a selection of her published works:• Behind Every Great Man: The Forgotten Women Behind the World’s Famous and Infamous• A Room…
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Totally Surreal 