9/24/10

Are you putting too much pressure on yourself?

IDEAS! There never seems to be a shortage!

I always said if I didn’t get into the arts, I was destined to have my own Advertising Agency. Although, if you look at my lack of promotional skills…lol…you would wonder about that.

I say that because my whole life I have been the idea girl. I have probably accumulated 100,000 pretty good ideas that were not implemented by me. It’s like I have had this crystal ball in my living room, I see what the future holds, I go tell someone what the next big wave is and then I do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT IT! Hahaha! They take it and run with it.

But my ideas have been foiled on smaller levels too. (mostly due to me) I have stared at a crack in a wall promising to go to the store to buy some fill….and didn’t go. But more than that, I had a dream for the whole wall. I was going to resurface it with buckets of fill, buy knives to dig in designs and paint 1 foot of each color and hue from the entire wheel onto it. What started as merely procrastinating over a simple crack fix, turned into me setting myself up for a disappointment in not implementing my grand idea. Then, I would beat myself up. The crack wasn’t the problem anymore, it was that I abandoned my design, therefore I sucked at doing anything with my life. “Not only is my life bland, but I can’t even fix a simple crack…I must really suck.”

The people who take it and run aren’t really thieves, they are just self starters. It’s an enviable skill I have been trying to work towards. Now having had a long history with abuse and depression doesn’t really give you that get-up-and-go spring in your step. I sort of had to work out some demons first.

My depression was my crack in the wall. I needed to fix it first otherwise; all the weight of my extraordinary ideas would have created a gravitational pull that would have filled the floor below hardened putty chips. See for me, ideas on top of my sadness added to much weight. I’d sit in a chair completely bummed out, I decided my problem was that my life was dull…come up with a huge solution that would overwhelm me and then do nothing about it…still left with the fundamental problem of a crack in the wall too big to tackle.

I had to begin by focusing on getting better first. I wanted my broken car to compete in the quarter mile.

There is a right and wrong order of healing. It doesn’t mean with sufficient time and accidental fortunes it can’t go another route but I don’t know many people who become successful without getting in touch with themselves first. The definition of success if certainly up for debate, but my point is that once we are in touch with the inner child again, we can create with the freedom of a child. We’re asking for this freedom while locking ourselves up. It’s not working.

I know we all have dreams…and ideas…and become inspired from time to time. But how sturdy is your wall? Can it handle all the ideas you are throwing at it? Is there something about yourself you can be working on that creates a solid canvas for your art? Are you putting too much pressure on yourself to become something? Is guilt, anger, depression, sadness or loneliness making it impossible for any of your ideas to stick?

Lastly, are you putting a time limit on your healing? Don’t you owe it to yourself to invest in YOU?

Much love on ya!
Karen :)

“Adults are obsolete children.”~Dr. Seuss

1 comment:

  1. Depression sux. Still fighting with it & sooooo thankful music is there to help me "hold up the wall".

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