Starting over, again...will I ever get this right?

Hello world. If you are here through my previous blog, welcome and I apologize for my chaos. I am working out the kinks in my own system and hope that you can follow along as I get it right. I am tweaking both my intention and focus behind this blog and felt a new address was warranted to help me transition and let go. Its been a year of struggle for me to find my motivation and momentum to propel me into my dreams, but I have finally built enough disdain for my own waste of time dreaming and doing nothing. I am tired of dreams and ready for life. real life. the messy, put myself out there and allow myself to be seen fully even when it makes me very vulnerable. so here goes... sometimes its just best to start over again.

I have been struggling to find myself today. such a lame excuse for laziness, i know, but still... its like a have a sock in my brain, dulling my senses, clogging my neural pathways, making words come more slowly and ideas crumble apart when they are only halfway created. I have a creative-void in my heart. an inattention to detail, a lost of interest in interesting things. Adulthood does it to me, fills me with socks that is. Could I just get lost back in my childhood, when I knew nothing of expectation, responsibility, deadlines. or judgment of talent. I am 31, nowhere near childhood these days. Stuck smack into adulthood, feeling so small and ill-prepared, today I am a mother, a wife, a home owner, a pet owner, a daughter to aging parents, a sister, a friend, a mentor, a grad student, and where in all of that do I get the gall to try to be an artist? I have been waiting for transformation, but the adulthood keeps shoving more dirty laundry at me to clean. My husband, my partner, is supportive, loving, sweet, and totally doesnt get the Me that is the Artist. He loves to watch me create something new and artsy, but in the end if I try to talk to him about it, he listens, nods, smiles and says "thats great, hun", then moves on. I show him prints from the latest mixed media artist that I just discovered. It moves me, inspires me, makes me want to freak out making gloriously chaotic creations, but he apologizes and says he just doesnt like that kind of stuff = my kind of stuff = a section of my soul that he loves but will never completely understand. So here I am now, trying out the internet for size on my body, will it produce people from the unseen closets in webspace that "get me", share that head space for creating something beautiful from something unexpected and experience the same war with self that I feel, to keep the adulthood from smothering the artist within us. I am many things, and I am an artist. I have to be or something really important and beautiful will die inside of me. I felt it fading those years in between when newly married, swamped with grad studies, and then pregnancy swallowed me up. I am working to reclaim it now, but have a lot of cobwebs and lost socks blocking my process. I want to be creative in some manner every day, to bring my soul alive! To feed it and grow it back from the shriveled size that I have rendered it over the last 5 years. I started exploring art journaling, mostly because I felt less pressured to produce something incredible, but can still keep trying to. I make art journals to sell and fund my art supply needs, and hopefully to help someone else discover the smothered artist within them as well. I spent the last year seeking my own spiritual journey, along with my husband and young son, we traveled across the nation, seeking a mentor and community to guide us to our own awakening within our life journey as followers of Jesus Christ, but dont fit into the model of church that our nation promotes. What I found along the way was that it is my times of creating/making art that I feel closest to God, NOT in a church pew. It is in the times that I am surrounded by friends doing a collective art experience, and NOT in my singular prayer time. This is meaningful and must be paid attention to. Could it be that the ultimate Creator meant for us to be creating as well, both making art with our hands and bodies but also enjoying the art of others to inspire our own process!? This connects for me. This makes me believe in God and love Him even more. So I believe that if I keep trying, as clumsy and untalented as I feel, I will clear the dullness and find myself as my Creator intended me, in a beautiful mess of paints, paper, string, fabric, markers, and glue.