“Yay!”
Year three!
For year three, I’ve started thinking about who I’m writing for. {Better late than never.} I started this blog to post my recipes & thoughts on fashion & trends through mediums like Etsy, Flickr, & the growing community of fashion bloggers who I admired & wanted to be a part of. I also started making jewelry about two years ago, & wanted an online presence to help me meet other creative minds & to possibly help me launch a business – however small -selling my jewelry to people who liked it.
I got distracted, & let the blog slide, & lost a little bit of the voice I started with when I went back to a sales-focused day job. I stopped making jewelry, & I stopped baking. I lost track of who I was writing for, & so I stopped posting here, too. I’d like post here with those same inspirations, & focus on my jewelry work: creating a space, getting into a creative rhythm & finding a balance. I want this to be a maker’s space, not a consumer space. 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 down some stairs, & 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, & I needed to find common ground with all of them. This is harder than it sounds, & I know half of your eyes glazed over when you read that. When it comes down to it, we are a disconnected world of that doesn’t always talk about what matters, talks too much about what doesn’t, & mostly waits for everyone to finish talking so we can get to what we want to say. Waiting to talk, not listening.
Finding common ground among us shouldn’t be so hard, but it is, & it’s stressful when I also need to sell you something. In a retail space, I find myself building friendships & finding common ground with women in a social contract that lasts sometimes half an hour, & never more than two, but rarely survives the day, & it’s exhausting.
I originally wrote 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 second step should add that you should never admit it on the internet…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?
To illustrate how far gone I am, most recent culinary achievement was finding a good teriyaki place down the street. {I confess, I confess! This isn’t even my achievement. Shawn found it for me.}
After six months, I was still struggling to find a work/life balance between my 40-45 hour/week job & my marriage, building a home {in a rented apartment} & 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 & 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.
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 have to be better. I’m shocked that the house isn’t a disaster – I’ve actually been keeping up with the kitchen, something that was amazing enough before you consider that I’ve been doing it on one leg – I’m managing support systems throughout the house to get around, because the last time I tried to get something while on crutches I fell & gave myself a black eye. I still can’t put weight on my foot, which is also still in a cast-like structure. I’ve been told that I won’t be able to be on my feet the way I was for maybe two years, which is sobering.
I am looking forward to sharing my next year with better people who love & appreciate me, & finding my voice, then building my jewelry line bit by bit.
♥ Momo