Life is better when I paint and it's ok for me to want to share the things I make so my creations spread happiness and don't accumulate in corners of my home. And the cost of a class I've been wanting to take for literally five years is acceptable especially if it helps me level up. My artistic practice is worth it regardless of nagging doubts.
thing checked off the list to give me a sense of accomplishment.Wow, thanks so much everyone for participating with me!
I did a couple rounds of the 5 whys, one more generally centered on WHY do I not get much creative work done?
And what it came down to was simply, I have two toddlers, to whom I am the primary care giver. This is the phase of life I am in. I chose it, and I do love it (when I stop to breathe.) This phase won't last forever, so for the time being, I just have to work around it as well as I can and be productive with the time that I do have. So this is very closely related to the whys that @Laurel-Aylesworth shared (except my husband is an engineer ;-). I'm glad we have @demotlj here to remind us that there will be a point when life doesn't revolve around kid's schedules ;-).
@ajillustrates I feel like we have a little bit of your loop going on in our house too, but we've started to get back into a schedule now that the holidays are all the way over and I'm starting to get my husband on board with the regular earlier bedtime thing... for the kids. I find that now I have to discipline myself to actually go to bed at a decent hour, since the kids are going to bed on time and therefore waking up bright and early. Sigh.
I did a second round of whys based on why, specifically, my dummy still isn't finished. The answer came down to the fact that I keep getting sidetracked by other, smaller quicker projects with actual deadlines (such as the Howl's Moving Castle contest I just entered, and now preparing my portfolio for the SCBWI conference I'm attending next month).
That actually brings me to why I wanted to have you all work through this book with me... I'm finding that I work best with an external deadline/expectation. It doesn't work for me to just say to myself that I'll do it by such-and-such a date, I need to actually feel accountable to people outside myself to do a thing.
This book, Growing Gills? I read the whole thing last year. Yep. But did I do ANY of the exercises or action steps? Nope. Nada. Zilch. I just went "Oh, yeah, that would probably be a great thing to do, I should try that..."
So I went and made you all join in with me, so I'd feel like I HAD to do this.
So far, it's working. 