DIARY OF A QUITTER 

 

January 23

 

It’s 5.30am. I woke up from a dream where I was in my old house with my old housemates. I needed to stay there a while. There were people leaving the house together with some furniture. None of us had been there for a while. I asked one of the guys leaving if I could keep his sofa. He said I could, but that he didn’t know if I should because it was hard as bricks. I looked up to the ceiling. It was different. It was glass and it seemed so fragile. It was being held by bright red wooden beams. I told my friend, I think it started to rain, I am afraid the ceiling will shatter in pieces and fall on me as I sleep. It didn’t even take that long before tiny pieces of glass were raining on me, injuring me as it fell on the ground. 

 

I am struggling mentally these past days. The day before yesterday, I dragged my drowsy body to the gym. Yesterday, I put my computer in the living room again. I had taken it away because of the construction noise in front of the building. The back room is quiet for work, but I never work there. Maybe because it's quiet, and it's a room.

 

I animated yesterday for a few hours. I made a scene where there are two frames and what seems to be two identical scenes. Although on the one on the left, Olive just starts typing on her computer while on the one on the right, she stands up and pushes the chair away. Lies down under the table. End scene. 

 

Yesterday morning after my therapy, I cried a lot. It wasn’t a normal type of crying. It was a kind of crying which is used as a climax scene in movies. I sobbed, while repeating the word ‘yeter’, ‘enough’ in Turkish, several times. I just had enough. Enough, enough, enough. Of everything. 

 

In that moment of crying, shamelessly, begging, giving up… It almost felt like I was breaking character. I was complaining to whoever was directing this film or play. Telling them in mid scene, ‘ hey dude, these working conditions are too difficult, i can barely stand up straight, earn enough money, have enough security, hope is nowhere to be found. I am quitting this, right here right now.’ and I did, for a bit, quit. 

 

This animation is maybe about that? Quitting? It’s rather funny that maybe by quitting something I am starting something. I woke up at 5 this morning because I wanted to animate again. I didn’t want to keep on laying in my bed. So here I am now, back in front of the screen. I thought I would write a bit first before, it seems like all the seamless effort is coming out at dawn after a breakdown. Is it even surprising though? No. 

 

I don’t know what I will animate next but I like this idea of giving up, quitting, having enough. 

I might make it my ‘framework’ that I animate double scenes, double realities, and play with the expected and the unexpected behaviour. Travel between dreams and solids. Maybe blend it all together. What’s the difference anyway? For me, the distinction is as blurry as soup. 

I blame it all on my psychoanalyst. 

 

January 24

 

I animated another scene, where she is walking her dog and on one side she is just doing it as usual and on the other one she is picking up and throwing her dog’s poo to the face of someone who is just minding her business. Because, sometimes that’s what I want to do. 

 

Its been day 3 with this project and I am trying very hard to ‘trust the process’. As I get more ideas for scenes, I also feel the urge to have an idea for the way it will flow, the way it will end, the way it will present itself to an audience. And I even thought about lying in my writing. Because I know, this will be read by someone just like my film will be watched by someone. And of course, it is a nicer feeling to imagine the audience going ‘ oh wow, did she really do this without any script? What about storyboard, also not? WOW and she wrote about how she did it? DOUBLE WOW. She is a genius or something??’ yes that’s the reaction I want. Perhaps we all want and its engraved deeper within. It doesn’t just go away even when you embrace your ‘truest’ self, your subconscious, automatism, playfulness. The conscious still stays, and rather the word, self-conscious. I think it is possible to not care about what people think, or what the result is of what you are bringing out, or even about anything it all but then what? I think if we lose all of the ‘care’ in us, everything is meaningless so much that the question of, but then what’s the point, comes along. And that’s a dangerous line. I think mentally I find myself on that line sometimes, and then I need to care about something, to remind myself that I am still capable of it. But then again, I care what I am making at the moment but I shouldn’t care that much because it would be kind of against the concepts with which I am working. Maybe it’s within a frame, that the care can exist. And specifying where that care goes, in this case maybe I do care about my artistic project, whatever it is or will be. I try not to care about how it will be received or if it would be good enough. But I would be lying if I say I didn't already have a few thoughts about travelling with it to festivals. I am going to try not to lie here, I will do my best. But I am lying all the time. I am probably even lying to myself as I write this. So let it be, I don’t care. Or do I? 

 

I avoid a lot of text on purpose. I always tend to be attracted by sentences that are a combination of words that don’t carry a meaning, but are only there to make sense of the rest. I like to title my films like that for example. ‘Would you please?’, ‘ As if it could’ and for this one I already have one in mind ‘ if only’. It sounds pretentious, I know. But really, I am being serious, I can’t go otherwise. This is my thing. But one day, I promise I will make a film and call it, ‘this is a film about a tomato that explodes.’ and it will be exactly that. Nothing more, nothing less.  

 

I am doing this new thing now where I am reading before bed and putting my phone on flight mode while I sleep. I discovered that maybe I was never really sleeping in the past years because even now, I wake up from an imaginary sound of a buzz. I think I always kept my phone on while I slept because the feeling of people writing to me, remembering me, comforted me. When I heard a vibration during my sleep and woke up briefly, I had a slight feeling of pleasure knowing I would have received something from someone in the morning. Something to look forward to. Yes, it was disappointing when it was a notification from a food takeaway app with a 5 percent discount. 5, really? Make it 30 and I call that the start of a good day. 

 

And yes, I am reading. It is bringing me comfort and softness. I am also drinking tea nowadays. When I am setting up my kettle, I feel this funny feeling. This voice in me saying, well look at you now, pretending to enjoy this hot flavoured water, who are you kidding. This voice is a bit right, but also, I do genuinely get it, tea people. Maybe I am changing as it shows in my horoscope. Saturn is turning the direction it was when I was born, it's also turning me from an all day all night coffee-cigarette artist in pain to a tea and cookies, 9pm bedtime kinda granny.

 

Wait, reading yes. I am reading a book called ‘why surrealism matters’. I started to read it because it was the only one on my nightstand and I was too lazy to get up. It is pretty cool, it really is somehow making me feel ‘seen’ . It's very critical about the movement. I was not critical enough when I referenced them and I found that out during these academic presentations I have to do. I get it, I can’t JUST like it if I don’t know enough and approach it from a critical point of view and put it in perspective with the current times. BLA BLA BLA. I just like it, I like melting clocks, I like the manifesto, I like they were so into their own brain and dreams and that they were freaks,trolls and they liked playing games. This book is exactly describing how I need to phrase myself when I talk about why I like it though. It’s saying all the right words they didn’t even say at the time. It’s like sometimes how I feel when someone sees my films or meets me and then makes a bang on analysis of something I was trying to say or do for so long but just didn’t know how. Teary eyes.

 

Anyways, this book, as I was reading and I didn’t have a pen with me, so I tore up some pieces from the box of the lavender sleep spray I got recently with the hopes that an overpriced essential oil would cure me from my self destructive brain, and out it next to the paragraphs that I liked. I will insert a sentence from the book here. ‘ One of surrealism's main drivers was the refusal of the values that European society tried to force upon them.’ 

THERE WE GO. That’s enough for me to like them. 

That too is my driving force. 

But it’s also a thin line. It’s both something that it pushing me further but also taking me into far deep darkness. 

Like caring. 

Thin lines people!

Now I will go back to animating. 

 

25 January

Today was dark. I couldn’t wake up from a daze all day. I stared at the animation for hours, the options made my brain burn. It isn’t pleasant today. The hours are slow, my body is slow, my mind is slow. Last time I had a real life conversation with a person was last week. 

I am living like its lockdown times. 

 

27 January

 

I didn’t animate any further on the film. Please, let it not be another one of the ones I start but never finish. I guess that’s up to me in the end. 

I am teaching all week, it’s taking up all my energy creatively too. 

Today was also the first day where I lied down during my analysis. 

It’s going to be 5 sessions a week now. My therapist says I am capable of this now. I don’t know if I am. It felt so vulnerable laying down. But I felt like I saw images on the ceiling. Animated visions perhaps

 

5 February

 

Time is flying by. It was a heavy week at school teaching and I used my weekend to visit my friends in Gent. 5 times a week therapy is kicking my butt. I feel empty sometimes, there can possibly be no more coming out of me. But yet, there is. 

My dreams recently included an open buffet of strange food, a turtle man who wanted money, a trip to Toronto on a bus that was about 100 meters high, a penis museum and vintage furniture store. So, the subconscious stays busy, although I would like it to take a bit of a break, go on a vacation, ryanair tickets are pretty cheap and this break is overdue. 

 

I animated on the train to Gent, the only thing this 3 hour train ride is good for. I have some footage from a late night bus ride I took in London. The bus window was foggy and it made all the traffic lights, building lights, cars look like a dreamy animation. I wanted to use this video for something. I think these late night bus rides have something quite magical about them. Sitting together with people who are on a journey at a time which allows endless possibilities. Maybe a steamy date, a late night shift, a highschool reunion karaoke party, home.. Or wherever night leads. I used this video to enter this space of ‘night bus magic’ . The colours and shapes gave me a feeling of fantasizing about someone you see in the bus. The wonder about who they might be, where they might be going and whether they are your soulmate or not. So I am using these blobs to go into an animation sequence where I can let loose about what the imagination can come up with from a brief encounter with a stranger. I think I will try to animate this film solely while I am on transport, like this weekend when I go to brussels and back I will animate on the train. I wonder if and how the place and conditions of where you animate might impact the outcome. I know already that the movement of the train caused my ‘normally very straight and clean’ lines to become very scribbly, which I like very much. Maybe I should go on a night bus every night around town and animate the film, the only issue is I get terribly sick in my stomach just by sitting let alone animating. I will make sure to be equipped with a power bank, car sickness pills and a bucket just in case. 

 

During my late night thoughts last week, I had convinced myself that I am a one trick pony and that all my films end up with the same story structure, characters and style. That I am actually tricking everyone that I am this artist, that I got lucky with something and I am riding the wave of it. During the weekend in Gent, I wanted to watch the new animated film ‘memoir of a snail’ by Adam Elliot together with my friend. The film was magnificently tragic, depressing, hilarious and strange, just how I like it. After we finished the film, we were talking about Adam Elliot’s distinct style throughout the years. He asked whether I had seen one of his earliest works, a short film called Harvey Krumpet. It rang a bell. I had seen it back in the days when I was a fetus watching animated films on my first edition ipod and drawing poses of animated characters one by one as my mind tried to comprehend the magic of animated movement. 

We started watching the short and we both immediately noticed the distinct elements that were in his most recent movie. We are talking about a short that was made in 2003 and a feature film in 2025. The resemblance in certain aspects were uncanny. Even down to some jokes, for example some people ending up in nudist communities, some funny bodily twitch/disorder of the main character, some close within the family passing away and more. 

This resemblance didn’t feel like him reusing his own material in any way, more the opposite. It felt like him exploring similar topics within different character plots, locations and generations. Expanding the symbolism and exploring that fascination. Rather, most likely giving him very valuable information about himself and his own subconscious as well as an audience who takes the time and interest to look into it too, like us. 

This was pretty much what I needed to get my confidence back. Why was I wrecking myself to give the world something new, something fresh and something original? Maybe the more authentic, the more the similar the works become of artists. But there is a thin line. A bit like the layers of the earth, are you staying on the top layer and exploring the surface, walking in circles or are you digging deeper, in the same spot, one dig at a time. At one point reaching the magma, the hot bubbling subconscious.  

 

On monday, I also managed to get back into the other film I am animating with the different realities. I had obsessively restricted this concept into a double screen format. This double screen idea didn’t satisfy my gut feeling, something was wrong but I thought THERE COULD POSSIBLY BE NO OTHER WAY. Lo and behold…there was.
So, now I am exploring showing the different realities in a more intertwined way. Her own imagination and her reality coming and going in certain moments within a frame on top of the ‘real’ reality, reaching a point where it all becomes a puddle, what is real and what is not? Does it really matter anyway? 

 

13 February

 

Hello again, it’s me. Sorry I didn’t write for some time. I was busy. 

Between therapy, keeping myself sane and alive, a few too many trips to Brussels and back, I didn’t find the time or energy to write or animate. What I did find energy for is watching Turkish Survivor on youtube. Terrible show, do not recommend. Last night, I sat back behind the computer and animated the second part of the kitchen scene. I am reaching the parts where my imagination can be loose like a goose. The concept and the structure is roughly there. She lives her life while being ‘interrupted’ by her dreams/thoughts/fantasies. This gets gradually intense and more frequent to a point where what’s the ‘real’ reality, becomes unclear. Yesterday, I started animating a scene where her fantasy wasn’t necessarily about reacting to people or things around her, it was about longing. As she takes the egg she fried and sits on the table, the empty chair in front of her evokes this vision. She imagines someone (the same blond curly hair character which appears in all the films I make and is based on my ex-girlfriend) surprising her with a birthday cake. As the character sits down across her on the table, the frame extends to reveal a slightly different interior of the house, a crown on Olive’s head and a present in front of her ready to be opened. This idyllic dream is interrupted by the dog rushing towards Olive to get a piece of egg she fried. Olive, slips the full egg on the ground. Lifeless and melancholic. Trying to cope with the fact that the reality is a lot more cold and lonely than her fantasy. 

Animating this scene is not easy. Although as the film is progressing, a scene like this appeared to be fitting. I didn’t even realise until I had drawn it out, that it also happened to be a very strong ‘real’ moment from my ‘real’ life. Me and my ex girlfriend broke up about 3 years ago, maybe even 4 I don’t remember. I don’t really want to. 

My first film was about ‘finding’ her. It was my love letter to our love. She was truly my soulmate. That film created itself from us. Every scene, every colour, every line captured all the tender details of us. I didn’t interfere with the film, I don’t even remember making it. All I remember was that we were far from each other while I made it and every day, I animated until I reached her again. Why, how, what.. I don’t know. I was in love, I was psychotically in love and my brain was on fire. 

 

That film is my time capsule. I want to go back and live in that film, over and over again. The film ended with me not finding her but her coming in. I guess I still  want her to come back in from the door again, as if nothing happened, as if she never left. It was only about 2 years after our break up, I realised what I had lost. I had lost someone so special and so wonderful. I lost someone who really saw me. Only 2 years later, I started to grieve. I told her, I begged her to come back, she said she grieved during those years while I ‘moved on’  and that it's too late now. She thanked me for telling her anyway, ‘Makes me feel better knowing our relationship meant as much to you as it did to me..’ That was the last time we spoke. 

 

I thought of animating this scene because it makes sense, it feels right, it fits well. But I think I am also animating this scene because tomorrow is Valentine's day and I will spend it alone. 

Last time I saw her, I told her ‘You are and will be the love of my life. But I wish you, I wish us both, that there will come another love, as profound as ours.’ I didn’t fall in love again after her. She did, she is happy, and I am happy for her but I am not THRILLED about it. She lives on a boat now in London with her girlfriend and a dog. Boats are stupid anyway. 

 

It’s really hard being single/alone in a world so built on coupling up people, pushing them into nesting, reproducing, and living’ happily ever after’.  No but really, it’s hard to feel complete against the constant subliminal messages coming from society even from friends and family. They mean no harm, we are all brainwashed about it. It’s tragic actually, because love is the most beautiful thing in the world, but it’s also the biggest selling point, the most ruthless scam.  I am sick and tired of it.

 While I spend money on therapy to be okay with myself,  I am also being constantly bombarded with ads like BUY A SOCK FOR YOU AND FOR YOUR LOVER AND WHEN YOU PUT YOUR TOES IN A CERTAIN ANGLE IT BECOMES A HEART. Fucking hell… give me a break.

Yes I am single, but should I die because I am? Should I hide in a cave? Should I speak and look like Gollum? 

You know what, I will buy those socks and put them on my dog instead. Love can be in so many forms. So I beg you, world, stop torturing me about it. I already feel lonely as is, I don’t want to be a stereotype, to cry and eat ice cream alone on valentines day because i am single. I want to walk, animate, and cry watching dog adoption videos. Not because I am single, just because I CAN. I blame the scene with my ex and this piece of Brigit Jones diary entry and my rant on fucking VALENTINES DAY. 

 

Till next time, mon amour. 

 

19 February

 

Good morning. 

It is a very cold Wednesday in Genk, very very cold. As I am writing, I am waiting for water to reach boiling temperature so I can fill my hot water bottle and rest in on my lap while I continue to animate. I received a very high electricity bill a few days ago, but I mean like VERY high. The only thing that’s plugged in to electricity is my computer and will stay so until I move to a naturally warm apartment. I might even resort to using candles in the evening for lighting. Maybe even wear long gowns and chant old love songs instead of using speakers for music,  as I animate on my high tec wacom tablet. What a sight. 

 

I had a dream yesterday where I was in. I don’t mean as me, as the main character POV vision. I mean me, as Ada, within the dream as another person. If I was in the dream and I was also dreaming the dream, I woke up thinking then who was I? I will refer to myself as Ada. So, Ada came up to me and told me to come with her. She was larger than me, I walked next to her as she kept talking joyfully to other people we were passing on the street. I remember observing her closely. I looked at her flushed cheeks, her little hairs on her chin, the mole next to her eye, her curls and her bitten fingernails. She had my jacket on, and my scarf too. She smelled like me but because it was coming from her, it wasn’t my smell anymore it was hers. She was confidently walking down the street, sometimes checking if I was walking behind her. I could see that her neck and back were hurting, as it always does. I could see her doing the thing where she puts her tongue against her teeth when she is a bit out of breath. It was fascinating. When I woke up and went to brush my teeth, I saw her again in the reflection of the mirror. It was strange, as if at night, I was someone else and in the morning I woke up as the girl I saw in my dream. I entered her body and now I live as her. But I keep wondering, who was I then? 

 

Wait a second, the water has boiled. I will fill up the pouch and be right back. 

 

I am back.

A few weeks ago, during a period of intense dreams (sometimes it's extremely vivid every night and sometimes it feels like it's less because I forget bits in the morning.) I picked up a book that was given to me as a present a long time ago, called ‘Why We Sleep’ by Matthew Walker. I started from the beginning but it was mainly about the scientific side of sleep. I quickly jumped to the chapter about dreams and the title of the chapter was simply wonderful. Chapter 9, Routinely Psychotic. WOW. I am hooked. Becoming psychotic is actually one of my biggest fears. So big that I often find myself crying during therapy, saying ‘I am so scared I am going to go crazy’ so many times that it sounds a bit like I am. But this chapter starts with two sentences that completely changed the way I feel about psychosis. it says, ‘ Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight.’ He continues to explain what he means.

‘First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there - you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true - you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person - you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions - something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience -you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you'd be seeking immediate psycho- logical treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called 

REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones, as we shall learn.’

 

How CRAZY! Dreams and dreaming have been such a big part of my life for the past 10 years. I dream extremely vivid nightmare-ish dreams almost every night. I even went through a few sleep tests to see what could be wrong with my brain and nothing came out. In fact I experience routine insanity, rather more than the ‘average person’. I base this fact on the reactions of people when I casually bring up my dreams and I see their eyes open wide and stare at me with disbelief. 

 

I think this condition of mine is a curse. With maybe a few blessings in disguise. For example,  I get pretty bizarre plot lines I could pitch to netflix for a horror series, I get good content for therapy, I get inspiration for scenes for the films i am making. Every day after I have a nightmare, I beg the dream-gods to let me free and stop this experience. But to be honest, I don’t even know at his point how it would be not to have this. It is part of me now, I would feel like I am missing a limb, differently to the times I am actually missing limbs in the dreams. 

In my psychoanalysis, we talk a lot about the symbolisms that come up frequently and I feel like I have created a sort of dream dictionary of my own dreams by now. For example, I often dream of underwater. There are creatures, monsters, sharks and everything scary. I often find myself falling in this deep dark water and being eaten by them or suffocated. We think that the water symbolises my subconscious and the monsters are everything underneath I am terrified to discover. I often see very unstable houses and rooms. A lot of broken wood, shattered glass, moving grounds. These often come about when I don’t feel safe within myself and my surroundings. And so on.. 

 

I have contact with these visuals, symbols and metaphors through my dreams and that is actually so cool. I don’t create them by sitting and drawing or thinking, they just come to me even if I want it or not. In this ‘psychotic state’. But in my research I do want to try using ways to get there while not being asleep, using animation. Dreaming while awake. And I think some form of ‘ play’, ‘automatic writing and animating’ can do this. Getting people to reach these images. And I think animation has something very strange about it that can also function similarly to the repetition techniques that are used in certain kinds of therapy like EMDR. This repetitive clicking, or counting or starting at blobs. I think starting from a line for example and animating straight ahead whilst dreaming-feeling-embracing a moment or a feeling can be a tool and a portal to another dimension. 

It’s hard to justify this, maybe like how Freud’s theories were rather bullshit looking through scientific lenses. Mine might be too. I don’t really care about this idea of mine actually working or making sense in ways people can put a checkmark next to it. It works for me, it’s a spiritual thing, it’s something deeper than logic, it's like the deep sea. I want to dive to see what’s there and there is nothing more beautiful than getting to see it with my actual eyes, animated. Imagine, if we could animate our subconscious, how would that look? What colours, shapes, textures, movements would it have? I am so curious, dear reader, aren’t you? 

 

I glanced at the next pages of the book and it keeps on going talking about all things dreams related. I think I am going to need another big diary entry to go through it all and combine it with my thoughts and reflections. But for today, I think I want to stop here and go back to animating.

I am currently animating a scene where she is laying in the bathtub and as she puts her head underwater a dream sequence appears where she imagines herself floating down to the bottom of the seafloor and landing on a massive egg. After some moments of watching fish go by, a bird dives in to save her, pulling her from the egg and getting her back to the surface where she can breathe again, while simultaneously Olive raises her head from the bath. I am reaching the end scenes of the film where I want to incorporate all the elements I put in the film so far, to appear in a bizarre dream-logic way in her thoughts/dreams. I won’t put any structure or narrative red line in these scenes anymore and just trust that I know how dreams bring in all these real life elements as symbols in bizarre settings. I think as I animate further and continue to read and talk about this chapter from this book, maybe I might be even writing the beginnings of what I would hope is an academic article? Connection of animation and dreams? Let me check if people already did research on this, I suppose so.

As the well known philosopher and artistic research group Aerosmith famously said, ‘ dream on.’