I can’t believe this post marks the half way point of the 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women Blogging Book Group. This weeks chapter was about saboteurs, those things that keep us from following our dreams. I feel fortunate because over the years I have eliminated most of the external nay-sayers from my life but I still have a lot of internal saboteurs. Like a lot of people, I have those annoying gremlins that always seem to tell me my work isn’t good enough or that I can’t be an artist because I don’t have any formal training. These are not the saboteurs that cause me the most problems. It is the little voices inside me that seem to be constantly saying either “you should be doing this, or that” or “you have plenty of time, why don’t you relax and watch some mindless tv or spend some time surfing the internet.” I refer to these gremlins as the “over-acheiver housewife” and the “coniving couch-potato”. As I’ve talked about in my previous post about Secret #5, I am working on changing my internal standards in an effort to fight the “over-acheiver housewife”. Last night when I was having dinner with my husband and boys, we were talking about the start of Lent and what we were planning to give up in preparation for Easter. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to fight the “coniving couch potato” so I’ve decided to give up watching reruns (all those episodes of NCIS, Burn Notice, and Law and Order that I’ve seen before). So wish me luck on my battle and hopefully it will mean you will be seeing a lot more pieces of my work on the blog.

A few weeks ago I became aware that my blog feed was not operating properly ever since I switched my blog platform from Blogger to Wordpress. I finally got the problem fixed and everything should be working fine. If you are a subscriber and wondered why there was such a large gap between postings, it wasn’t because I was procrastinating (although I certainly have been known to do that). You can come back to the blog anytime and see any posts that you may have missed in the archive.

Several years ago, I was caught in the trap of saying yes to whatever people asked me to do. It started under the auspices of wanting to give back so I took on one volunteer opportunity. I was an easy sell due to the fact that I was pregnant so I was hormonally challenged. It wasn’t long before I felt I was spending more time doing all the different volunteer activities than raising my children, which was the reason I decided to be a stay-at-home mom. So I began looking at how to better balance my life. Between my ongoing battle with depression and a highly stressful commitment with our neighborhood association, I realized I needed to be selfish with my time and focus on what I needed to feel healthy. It was during that period that I rediscovered how important having creative time was to my health. I’ve noticed the longer I go without spending even a little bit of a time in my studio, it starts to get harder to make that time and be inspired when I do. That is where I struggle with self-focus. It is being consistent and treating my creative time the same as I do the laundry (doing a little bit everyday is easier than just once a week). I need to raise my expectation and priority of my studio time and lower my expectations regarding the housework. Not only do I deal with guilt for not taking care of the house and family to my internal standards but I also envy woman artists that I perceive are doing it (which I don’t even know to be true). I hold these internal standards (even though I don’t think I’ve ever met them) and there is no reason that I can’t change them. So my goal for the future is to not only continue focusing on myself (because if you don’t take care of yourself first, you won’t be able to take care of all the others) but also to give myself permission to lower the expectations I have of myself to some level below the “Martha Stewart” level I seem to think I need to achieve.

I have one last thing to share. I finally finished a project that I have been dreaming about for quite awhile. I had wanted to create a stamp or stencil of the angel statue that is in my header. After realizing that going the stencil route would be more complicated, I started on a stamp. This is a picture of my finished stamp, which is about eleven inches long, and the image that it creates when stamped

A couple of years ago I started seeing my creative endeavors differently. My skills had changed from just scrapbooking and rubber stamping to include all sorts of media. Although I didn’t really consider myself an artist, I did realize that there were times when creativity just flowed and other times when I couldn’t even color a picture with my son that I liked. At the time, a friend suggested the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. I have always been a book lover so I immediately got the book and read bits and pieces but didn’t really work my way through the book until I happened upon a local group through Meetup.com that was just forming to go through the book together and offer support to each other. Two years later, our group is still meeting and has worked through several books to enhance our creative journey. Currently we are working through “Walking In This World”, Julia Cameron’s follow up to “The Artist’s Way”.

When I was reading the chapter on Secret #4, I realized that I have been more accepting of the peaks and valleys of my creative cycles since meeting with the local artist group and accepting myself as an artist. Having the support of other creative individuals, regardless of their specific artistic discipline, has given me new insights on how to keep myself motivated and that everyone experiences those cycles. In this week’s interview with Leah Piken Kolidas, she referred to the concept of filling the well, that even when you are not creating, the things you experience everyday can inspire future creativity. Even the way sunlight falls on a dust bunny can lead to a creative idea. This week I also found out that you can not rush the creative process. I have been in an upswing in my creative cycle but last night I tried to finish a project quickly and the results showed it. It is now back on my worktable to be reworked. My new mantra is…

Trust in the process and it will never fail you in the end. There is no schedule for a reason. All of life’s experiences play a part in what we create, even housework.