Take a Second Look at your Passions…

Welcome to Tuesday’s with Chel.

Each week Chel Micheline of Gingerblue will offer her perspectives on our Bliss Habits. Please enjoy the wisdom and clarity she offers.

The last year or so has been filled with a very big question: “what’s next for me?”

My daughter is going to turn six in the fall, and I am finding my role as her mother has evolved a little bit. In the last year I’ve made the shift from being a hands-on parents to a toddler/pre-schooler to the less demanding role of a supportive parent to an independent and smart school-age child.

For the last few years, my “passions” played second fiddle to other demands in my life. I was incredibly determined NOT to lose those things during that time period, so I managed to balance both daily life and time for myself in a relatively rickety way. I’d have months where I’d do no creative work at all, and then months of endless creativity on borrowed time, where things just flowed out of me.

To be honest, I just went where I was needed. Some days that was in the art studio or at my computer, but a lot of the time it was at school functions and doctors appointments and just wherever Gracie was.

And now I find myself returning to a schedule with more time and more flexibility. And even though I have been sort of craving this for a while, I don’t know what the heck to do with it! Nothing feels exactly right, nothing feels as perfect as it did before. It makes me very nervous because the one thing I fall back on – art – isn’t making me feel the same as it did. And what the heck do you do when your PASSION in life burns out a little bit?

The more I have agonized over this, the more I realized that the “automatic” answer to the “what’s your passion?” question ISN’T always the true answer, even the answer that feels most authentic and true and in alignment with everything I feel and do and gravitate towards

I’m learning that passions change as people change. And that it’s necessary to RE-EVALUATE your passions often, and re-evaluate them honestly.

The more I tiptoed around the painful idea that “art” may not be the answer anymore, I realized that just because it might have to share some space with some other things doesn’t mean it is banished from my life and heart. I still am obsessed with art and creative expression, but there are other avenues I want to explore alongside with it, to give some time and awareness to.

And it took me a long time to come to terms with that- in fact, I still am. I am sitting here writing this in a stocked art studio full of things that sing to me- vibrant paints and inks, sheets of textured, thick paper beginning for expression, jars and jars of brushes of all sizes and markers in every color of the rainbow. And all of it makes me happy- what I do with it makes me happy. Art makes me happy.

But art is not the end-all-be-all it used to be. I used to be able to rely on art and expression to heal most any hurt, to provide me escape, to give me something to focus on.

And it still brings that to me, but I’m coming to realize that other things are also creeping up and challenging art and creativity as “passions”.

For instance: Writing. This has been a very strange discovery for me because my years and years and years in school turned writing into something I defined as a chore.

HOWEVER, when I was at my most stressed in graduate school I didn’t paint or sketch or do collage- instead, I started an online journal. It was 1997 and there were only a handful of us writing online- this was WAY before blogs. And since there were only about 30 or 40 of us doing it (really!), we became very close to one another. And most of us are still close today.

When I was a child, I was writing without even realizing it- even though I wasn’t sitting at a typewriter, pounding out paragraphs, I was writing stuff down in journals, writing letters and notes to friends.

And from the moment I can remember, I was creating insanely emotional and dramatic stories for all the Barbie dolls in the neighborhood, and later I concocted stories for friends (and myself) centering on a crush or celebrity of choice and we all “swapped” plot ideas whenever we gathered. In college I kept myself entertained by creating a mystery novel in my head- I NEVER wrote it down, but every day I would add to it a little. I have always been writing stories, I just never identified it as a passion.

So here’s writing, storytelling, creative expression through words. I never identified writing as a passion, or invested tremendous time and resources to writing or storytelling. And if you asked me for my list of passions when I was 8, 18, 28, etc., writing would not have been on it. However, art would have always made that list. And I do remain rooted in art and expression and creativity.

But I am also trying to learn how to open myself up to other possibilities. And that is SO hard after all these years I have INVESTED myself in the idea that art is my only and true passion. It almost feels like I am breaking up with it. But I’m not. I am just trying to figure out a way to open myself up to more possibilities, more ways of expression and ultimately won’t that help my art?

So, what’s next may NOT be related to my paintbrushes and my markers and my paper. And I’ll be honest -that scares the CRAP out of me. But I’m working to realize that just because I open myself to other passions doesn’t mean I am denying myself as an “artist”- it means I am growing. And isn’t that what life is about?

So today I challenge you to RE-EVALUATE your passions. REALLY think about what you loved as a child, as a teenager, as a young adult, right now. What you spend your time doing. How that translates into life. It may scare you, because things you believed about yourself may come into question, and that’s tough stuff and takes a lot of time and heart to work through. But I promise you that there’s some very rewarding stuff for you along the way.