SNU2. The reason i might have lost the thread is because i am writing up a bit of time in which there was a lot going on and i was mentally and physically exhausted and felt overwhelmed,  vulnerable, strung out and cranky. There were a lot of different tasks and deadlines going on simultaneously. Submissions for proposals for 3 exhibitions each with a different deadline and brief. And the deadline for the Creative Odyssey postcard auction. The UEA/NUA collaborative project presentation deadline. The deadline for making work to be invested for the next bronze pour. The MA symposium taking a day out from workshop time. Applying to help with a printmaking workshop for The Pilgrimage of the Animals event organised by XR and St Peter Mancroft with local print maker Maria Pavledis. Meeting with Maria to discuss the workshop and what she needed me to do as her helper. There was also an artists meeting for the sculpture trail. And through that a further meeting with another artist who gave me a link to a residency which in fact i did not apply for because covid19 made travel plans a little unpredictable. 
And i was feeling hemmed in because when i meltdown i need to retreat but all that was happening was asking me to push out. And i was dealing with Jon grief and unresolved child's grief for my grandpa and wanting to get in touch with my father to ask when my grandpa died but not being able to because my oldest sister was in the country and when she is in the country my family prefer me to stay out of the way and not make contact which added to the grief i was feeling about Jon because when i met him he'd been my home, my happy, my soft space, away from my difficult family. 
There's a book called "Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice" which i read some years back that spoke of resilience being born out of feeling loved. I wonder if that is why i hold the love affair i had with Jon so close to me. I felt loved in his arms, and his love gave me the courage to believe in myself, believe i was ok, not rotten, ugly, useless, horrible, but what i wanted to be, someone worthy of love. My anger towards his family stems in part from the way they refused to acknowledge our love affair as anything of worth when it was of huge worth to me, and maybe of worth to him too. 
One of the things that was also bugging me was the issue of some letters of mine that he'd apparently kept which his ex-wife had told me about about two years before. I'd assumed they were a couple of postcards and maybe a birthday card that i'd sent him after our break up when we were close but not lovers. Cards he'd stuck on his fridge maybe. After a session about copyright law in the symposium i was thinking about how i wanted my words to Jon even if they were likely to be disappointingly flat to be in my hands and not the seemingly hostile hands of his ex-wife. A part of me thought "let it go, it doesn't matter" but another voice kept saying "you need those letters". In the end the "you need those letters" won over and i sent an email to nudge the ex-wife into sending them not really daring to hope she still had them, but chancing my arm anyway. Our email exchange was a bloody fight but she sent the letters to me.
What i hadn't expected was a package nearly a kilo in weight containing, it seems, all the letters and cards i sent him when we were together and a couple of notebooks; a holiday diary we'd made together, and one with poems and pictures and things that belonged to us and my thoughts collected together for him at the beginning of our affair. The stuff was so personal it seemed mad that she'd kept it for so long. It was devastating to receive. But also amazing. It made me feel not-crazy for loving him and believing he loved me too because surely he'd not have kept all that stuff and taken it with him if he didn't care. It made me want to swear because damn fool i loved him and would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he'd asked. It made me feel better about making work about him. Not silly but honest. 
This post is an explanation, i guess, of the emotional landscape in which the SNU work was growing. I think that everything the maker-creator is thinking and feeling when they are making-creating becomes part of whatever is made/created so giving this much space to my heart-work feels appropriate if somewhat exposing.