Sometimes I surge with power, sometimes I just want to go home

I’ve been playing around with Teesha Moore’s art journaling style for the past couple weeks and all I can tell you is that she makes it look easy.  Combining so much visual activity into one 8″x10″ page without ending up with a heck of a mess is NOT easy.  My first page was an absolute disaster.  But I’m working to find the balance and placement that makes sense to me.  Some pages get better (more pleasing to look at), some get worse.  Regardless, it’s been fun to get messy and random and use words and quotes that are meaningful to me.  This quote is from Sabrina Ward Harrison, another fantastic art journalista.

It’s a fabulous distraction from real life right now, as I enter my busy season at work.  Some might call it denial, but I prefer “creative distraction”.

Have a great weekend!

p.s.  I’ve also been learning that not all markers, paint markers, paints, and pastels are created equal.  Holy moly.  Some markers won’t write over some paints and some paints won’t go over some markers.  I still love Pitt Pens and Copic markers, but daaaaaaang if they don’t suck the life out of a perfectly good oil-paint marker.  For example, the white in the collage here is actually split between a white Sharpie Paint marker (the water bufallo hat, her eyes, jewelry, and the circles on the border) and a White-Out pen (the lettering of the quote).  So, naturally, I had to order $150 of various pens, paint pens, and markers to play with…

 

One down, four to go – Year 1 of my countdown to self-employment

Exactly one year ago today, I decided to give myself a self-employment deadline of July 4, 2015 – 5 years from that day.  One year later, I’m certainly not self sufficient, but I have earned money for my art and I’ve taken significant steps in the right direction, including:

• Made prints of my paintings and sold some of them!
• Started introducing myself as an artist, rather than with my day job (this sounds silly, but it was a HUGE shift in my mindset and my confidence)
• Finished a few paintings (Erika 1, Erika 2, Greg, Make yourself proud…. and probably others I’m forgetting)
• Designed my Mighty Panda business cards
• Designed new Mighty Panda postcards
• Designed Mighty Panda calendars (and sold 20!)
• Had a little gallery show at Starbucks
• Built my art website
• Started classes at the Open Studio Project and it’s helped me remember to play with my art, take more risks, and be gentle with my evaluation of my work
• Donated a print to a silent auction to send children from Lydia Home to camp – and it got a bunch of bids and sold for more than face value!
• Attended the World Domination Summit in Portland and met other people who understood where I am and where I want to go because they were either heading the same place or where already there!
• Got commissioned to paint FOUR paintings this summer!
• Potential commission for the fall/winter too!

I’m still struggling to prioritize my art over being social, tired, hungry, but I’m getting better at letting go of my guilt when I cancel plans that I can do without or decide to blow off my art/laundry/etc. in favor of being in the pool with the Puerto Rican side of my family all weekend.  That’s progress, right?

Overall, I’m learning to listen to myself more and trust what I’m feeling.  It turns out that I don’t need a reason to stay home, go out, be late, sleep in, or be non-committal and last-minute.  It’s part of who I am and I’m tired of fighting against myself.  Spending 8-12 hours a day feeling inauthentic at my day job has helped me lose my patience with trying to change things about my non-work self that might meet the preference of others.  Guess what?  That’s no longer a good enough reason for me to get up before noon on the weekend.  It’s no longer a good enough reason to commit to plans that I already know I don’t have time for.  It’s no longer a good enough reason to keep plans that I had intended to go to, when I’m feeling particularly creative and need to tap my creative juices while they are flowing instead.  I need to take care of myself too.

I love my friends and family and want to see them all the time.  I want to be involved in everything they are involved in and in a perfect world, I would get to do everything and be everything to everyone and still have time and energy to take care of myself.  Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world and sometimes I feel like I barely have enough time to breathe, let alone squeeze in a lunch or a movie or a bbq or whatever.
I struggle with feeling impatient and overwhelmed by how far away I feel from where I am and where I want to be, but it’s great to have this marker in time to look back and realize how many steps I’ve taken in the right direction.

I started the word collage above this afternoon and finished it an hour ago.  I had intended to write my accomplishments around the photo of the girl, but it quickly turned into a collection of words I want to define the next year(s) of my life.

So far so good.

Rest

I’ve been feeling pulled in too many directions lately.

Torn between the “should”s “have to”s and “want to”s, and it is leaving me feeling like I’m spinning my wheels with nothing but a cluttered mind to show for it (okay, maybe a cluttered mind and tense shoulders).

I want so many things and I want them all now.  Progress with my art, finishing up over due creative projects, going out with friends, dating, finding a new job, writing, playing, etc.  At the very least, I don’t want anything to fall behind or be eliminated if I were to formally prioritize some items/goals ahead of others. but maybe (definitely) I’m too hard on myself.  I really don’t need it all right now.  I’m feeling stuck because I’m working in a job and industry that I don’t want to be in any longer.  And for the time being, that’s okay.  Even if I ned to be here in August and September when it gets crazy, it will still be okay somehow.  But it’s not what I want.

I struggle between acceptance and giving up/laziness/surrender.  But maybe surrender is what I need most.  I was in a place of surrender a few weeks ago.  Content for a moment, ready to give up control and let things play out as they will.  But somehow I ended up turning back into the frantic, not-enough-time-to-do-everything-I-want-to-do Jackie again.  I want so badly to be able to, but I can’t to it all and I certainly can’t do it all at once.

It’s time to stop it.

Knock it off.

Rest.

What I need most right now is rest.

Peace.

Quiet.

What if rest becomes my goal?  What if peace is my end game?  What then?  If rest is my goal, then the “should”s and “ought to”s become less urgent.  The “have to”s (i.e. work) remains, but what if I set an alarm to remind me to close my eyes and breathe deeply every hour on the hour?  Will I finally be able to get to my “want to”s?

What if my goal is rest?

Then feeling guilty about missing plans and being non-commital could be minimized.  Then it would be easier to forgive myself for late art projects and staying at home and opting out when the distractions become too much.  Then I would put a higher priority on creating, writing, playing and sleeping – the things that give me rest.

What if I give myself time to heal and grieve and sleep and be 100% me?  What if it’s okay that committing to plans a week in advance goes against “me” right now?  And what if that’s okay?  And what if I start looking at the positive side of such traits for a while instead of apologizing for them?  Like how I’ll drop everything to be with a hurting friend when it matters most rather than keeping to a schedule, for example.  And what if my ability to feel such deep compassion is the same thing that can sometimes make it overwhelming to be with big groups of people for extended periods of time?  And what if my ability to deeply connect with people 1-on-1 is a gift that I give and receive in my own unique, irreplaceable way?  And what if I sometimes feel more alone in a crowded room than home by myself?  And what if my strengths and your strengths over lap or are opposites, but all equally necessary and remarkable?  And what if all of the time I spend trying to make other’s happy by joining their “should”s and “ought to”s would be better saved up in my Jackie artistic energy reserves to fuel my best, most expressive, uniquely ME work yet?

I hearby release control of my own “should”s and “would”s and “ought to”s in favor of a new path to find rest.

I’ve been fighting so hard for so long to dig myself out of depression and a stressful job that it’s time to give in to it.  This isn’t about giving up on myself – quite the opposite.  I’m giving in to accepting myself where I am, as I am.  New job or not.  Finished art projects or not.  Regular blog posts or not.  Party attendance or not.  I’m giving in and beginning to trust that regardless of anyone else’s expectations of me, I am enough as I am today.  And I will find rest here.

World Domination Summit 2011

This weekend’s World Domination Summit changed and inspired me in many ways, but as I sit in the Portland airport waiting to return home,  I’m realizing that the primary life affirming, game-changing messages I gained from this experience are three-fold:

1. Today, more than ever before, I know that I have something unique to contribute to the world and the world will not benefit from my message unless I get off my duff and make it happen.

2.  I already possess everything I need to make it happen.  There’s nothing that i need to do, be, or learn before I can start adding value. I just need to be as ME as I can be.

3.  There are now 500 additional people in the world who are rooting for me to embrace my ME-ness and excited to see what i come up with.

The speakers’ messages and the new friends I made this weekend moved these ideas from my head to my heart.  Now I KNOW these things to be true and i can feel the change.

I’m so grateful to Chris Guillebeau, the messages of the speakers (especially Jen and Andrea and Karen Walrond), and all of my fabulous new friends for their contagious enthusiasm and encouraging words!

Now please excuse me while I roll up my sleeves and get to work!

New Painting – Make yourself proud

Bad news:  I’ve been sick with an ear infection/sinus infection/strep bug and have been in bed for the better part of the past 4 days.

Good news:  When I wasn’t in bed, I found a canvas in my closet and made a new, Open Studio Project-inspired, mixed-media painting, which essentially means that I just had fun with the process.

Instead of my usual over-defined, stay-in-the-lines style, this allowed me to experiment with collage using scrap paper and strips torn from my walgreen’s prescription receipts, get messy with my brayer and what used to be a yellow marker, stamp with the end of a giant foam tube left over from my hot water heater packaging, and let go of my expectations.

The result is full of color, messy layers, and raw expression.  Yay!

And now, back to bed…

Holy smokes!

The last few weeks have been INSANE.

Future posts may provide more detail, but here are some of the highlights:

• Came home from work to find that my hot water heater had been transformed to a fountain, spraying water all over my basement.
• Was temporarily evicted from my house for 10 days because I had to turn all my water off due to the leak and my neighbors were dicks about letting the plumber in to turn off the water so he could fix it and I could more back home
• Spent those 10 days at my mom’s house and ate really, really well while I was there
• Spent $1,500+ on flood clean up, plumbers, and new hot water heater (thus depleting my travel budget for my upcoming time off work)
• Ear infection
• Two phone interviews with a potential new employer (although it’s a consulting firm in my same field and I’m not at all sure that this would be a good move for me)
• Trying to schedule my third round of interviews (half-day, in person interviews) around my yet-to-be-determined vacation schedule
• And last, but not even close to least, I had improv classes 5 hours a week leading up to Saturday night’s FEAR EXPERIMENT SHOW AT THE PARK WEST!!

The show went better than I could have ever hoped and it was also most fun I’ve ever had on stage (normally I HATE being on stage and just like the improv classes themselves).  I consider all of my fellow FE-ers friends and can’t wait to see what comes next!  I felt so loved and supported by friends and family who came out to see the show and also by those who rooted for us from afar – thank you!!

There are more videos coming, but here’s the first video clip hot off YouTube:

Thanks for the reminder.

Yesterday started out fine – made it to work, got through my big meeting, made my boss laugh, and was nearly fully caffeinated.

Then it got better - I got a random call from a woman who saw my work at Starbucks, loved it and wants to discuss potential custom work! We scheduled time to meet up Sunday morning before my art class.

Then it got tired – My energy level faded quickly (i never seem to star off the week with anywhere near enough sleep), but pushed myself to go to improv knowing it would be fun.

Then it got better – The Fear Experiment programs are done and we got to see them!

Then if got worse – I found out that they had accidentally missed my picture and bio, so I’m not in the programs.

Total. Bummer.

Then it got comically worse – When I got home, someone was in my parking spot. When I finally got to park my car, the weather changed quickly and it started pouring, but the downpour only lasted for the exact amount of time between me getting out of my car and running to my front door.  As if a cloud had followed me and waited for me to get out.  I felt like Michael Scott.

I’ll be honest, when I left improv I was pretty disappointed, but the last part with the parking and rain was so over-the-top dramatic, like a bad teen movie, that it became funny.  Like the universe was mocking my inklings of self-pity over something so trivial in the grand scheme of things.  I’m still disappointed that I’m not mentioned in the programs with everyone else in the group, however, when I checked my phone I saw the background photo I put up yesterday (below) and was reminded that it really doesn’t matter if anyone else knows I’m on the stage or not – I’m proud of myself for my part in FE and that’s good enough.

Note to self: Put this sign in front of your eyeballs every day