Secret #5 – Committing to Self-Focus

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