Loosening the Grip

Dear Best Friends,

I’ve had an exciting month of more interviews, making art, making plans, and being sick in various exciting/disgusting ways. The last thing is the reason I’ve missed some of my planned newsletter issues - that, plus the fact that I always write at the last minute so any life disruption completely derails my schedule. I’ve decided to be a bit rigid with myself about posting, and just aim to post at least twice a month so I can leave room for the other things in life (I’ve also disabled paid subscription for the time being - I’ve very much appreciated all the support, and now I’m going to experiment with just giving everyone all the content for free).

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Previously, I was spending excessive amounts of time sitting down to write out my plans and goals, and very little time actually doing the things I was planning out. Now my pendulum has swung the other way and I’m doing things, but with no real plan and it’s feeling very haphazard.

But let’s enjoy for a moment what I have gotten done recently:

• 4 interviews beyond what you’ve seen so far, featuring some amazing women who I’m linking to here so you can get pumped for the conversations:

  • Amy and Katie of Kith and Kin Interiors

  • Kathayoon of Otter & Ink Designs

  • Whitney of Carrot Seed, coaching/consulting for life transitions and disruptions

  • Jenn Alvin, author of Stronger, Wiser, and Still Fabulous

• Started planning an event - a small networking/art get-together with Whitney of Carrot Seed

• Made some time for art while mentally spiraling about the entire concept of making art and my ability to do it.

On the last point - something I’m practicing is to not think very hard about my life decisions, my career plans, my self worth, or anything related to any of those topics, while I’m sick. Any kind of illness can be a downer, but particularly when I get hit by something autoimmune related (in this case I was glutened), I get instant depression. Not bad depression, but just enough to make me doubt why I’m doing anything moderately ambitious or difficult in life, and be very tempted to just stop anything like that. I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing these situations and not dwelling on these thoughts. But, they still happen.

I also realized that I have very high expectations of my artistic abilities, perhaps expectations that make zero sense, given how much time I’ve invested in practicing art so far in my life. So I worked on just making some silly drawings with colored pencil with ideas that came straight from my brain, instead of my usual practice of painstakingly trying to replicate things exactly. This was simultaneously more fun than usual and instilled even more doubt than ever in my ability to make good art.

Art I Made While Mentally Spiraling This Month

I also spent a lot of time doing some painting, and I won’t even try to describe the mental spiraling that happened there. Let’s just say I have another chair painting situation on my hands - a fun background with little-to-no desire to create a foreground, that will probably sit there for months before I make a decision on what to do next.

That’s all for my update this week - no weekly metrics or cash flow reports. I’ll update on these exciting things periodically, but I’m trying to remove barriers that make writing the newsletter more difficult by compulsively doing things that nobody asked for!

Art Events

For anyone looking to go check out some art (in Portland), there are several Can’t Not Create interviewees with upcoming attractions:

• Jenn Alvin (interview coming soon) has a book launch party on Friday, April 4 from 6-8PM, at the Community Wine Bar

• Colours PDX is hosting the opening night of CONES - a new art show curated by Caleb Jay Colours and Matt Perez, featuring a ton of Portland artists, including PDX Dinorama - this one at RollupPDX, also April 4 from 5-10PM

That’s all I have for you this week. As always, thank you for paying attention to me!

Your friend,
Colleen