"Yay!"
Year three! New look, new ideas, new mission. I started out thinking of this as a time for another set of resolutions, which is just silly, because I’m in a constant state of change these days, and making new resolutions every time I blink: There is of course the usual stuff about cooking more at home, and eating less fast food, which is inevitably broken by a day where I don’t eat enough, work too hard, and then let the image of McDonald’s fries hang around in my head for too long. You know what that’s like.
I want to watch less T.V., and listen to Beethoven like I used to. I want to get back to two or three books a week, or one amazing book for two weeks, instead of the list I keep of everything I’d like to read…and on those lines, I’d like to veg out on my computer less. I want to make something. I want to make everything.
For year three, I’ve started wondering who I’m writing for. I started this blog to post my recipes and thoughts on fashion and trends through mediums like Etsy, Flickr, and the growing community of fashion and hipster bloggers who I admired and wanted to be a part of. I also started making jewelry about two years ago, and wanted an online presence to help me meet other creative minds and to possibly help me launch a business, however small, selling my jewelry to people who liked it. I got distracted, and let the blog slide, and lost a little bit of the voice I started with when I went back to a sales-focused day job. I stopped making jewelry, and I stopped baking. I lost track of who I was writing for, and so I stopped posting here, too. I’d like to come back to posting here with those same inspirations, but with more of a focus on my jewelry work – creating a space, getting into a rhythm and finding a balance. I want this to be a maker’s space, and less of a consumer space. I’m still going to succumb and post about awesome people who also make awesome things, but I want a little less commercial space. I think that this time of year, we all do.
My life has been all consumerism all the time for the last six+ months before I fell, and it took more of a toll than I was expecting when I got myself into it. Women’s sales exposes you to so many different types of people in a day, and I needed to find common ground with all of them. This is harder than it sounds, and I know half of you had your eyes glaze over when you read that. Seriously, we are a disconnected world of women who don’t talk about what counts, talk too much about what doesn’t, and we all have the same freakouts, stresses and insecurities. Fat, marriage, relationships, friendships, debt, clothes, shoes, sales, work, work relationships, work clothes, work danishes, whatever. Finding common ground among us shouldn’t be as hard as it is, and it’s stressful when I also need to sell you something. I’m building friendships and common ground with women in a social contract that lasts half an hour or more, but rarely survives the day and it’s just plain hard, on a very personal level.
I lost track of my voice because in order to do my job well, because while the core character has always been me, the wrapping changes for everyone I meet in the store. Friends tell me to just be myself, but they forget that my original personality before I started working professionally was more like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory with a little Bones just to make things awkward. To paraphrase Elwood P. Dowd, I’d rather be pleasant. Pleasant, of course, means different things to different people, and I aim to please. {This is something I’m working on, because it has to be possible to be pleasant without being a doormat.}
I had written an exhaustive post draft before this about what I went through in the last year, creatively and otherwise, but what it comes down to is that I’m not who I want to be today. You know that they say the first step is admitting you have a problem. The subtext should be that you never admit it on the internet, and if this were more serious, I think I’d just go fix it quietly and sneak back here as if nothing happened. But it feels disingenuous to just say that I’m Back! Creative! & Better than Ever! – right? I tore myself down first, and the public deserves to know that everyone hits a bottom of sorts sometimes. Seriously - my most recent culinary achievement was finding a good teriyaki place down the street. {I confess, I confess! This isn’t even my achievement. S found it for me.}
I realized that after six months, I was still struggling to find a work/life balance between my 40-45 hour/week job and marriage, building a home {in a rented apartment} and living a creative life the way I had planned when I began this blog. By struggling I mean focusing on trends and fashion by obsessing over the internet in my free time and zoning out with T.V. when I was too brain dead from work. I’d fill my time with Pintrest just to feel like I was accomplishing something. Face it, I was a potato, fueled by Amaericanos during the day and popping melatonin at night to get enough sleep to do another day. I was functional. Dark chocolate gives me headaches now – ask me how! – and I was dissociating most of the time to avoid facing how frustrated I was becoming.
I don’t know exactly what my next year will be like, except that as I’ve said before, it’s going to be better. I have to learn to limit my online gaming to a few hours on Sundays, and only after the kitchen and floors are clean. I’ve actually been keeping up with the kitchen, something that was amazing enough before you consider that I’ve basically been doing it on one leg – that’s harder than with one hand tied behind my back!
I’m sketching out what my new jewelry space is going to be like in the little slanted room off of our bedroom. One half is jewelry, and I’m trying to work out how to turn the opposite side into a closet, because my existing closet is non-functional. Once that space is clean and organized, I’m going to make the jewelry that I want to make, that makes me happy and that’s unique to me. I’d gotten mired in the ideas of what people wanted to buy, and it was just another thing stalling me. I’m giving up T.V. …S would tell you that I spend most of my time ranting about it anyway. I’m going to keep up; with the blog, with myTumblr expansion, with my Etsy sales, or maybe with another vendor site – there are so many – and I’m going to be happy. I’m looking forward to sharing it all with you.
♥ Momo
