I finally took my own advice and bust myself out of my cell and left fear behind. After my sister hounding my ass, and my friend giving me a deadline, I finally set up an account with a stock agency and sent in my pics.
13 went in, 1 declined so far, and 3 accepted! The rest are still undecided. I’m SOOOOOOOOOO happy I screamed WOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO in my car on the way home. Yes. Out loud. In traffic. After years of sitting on the fence, my sister kicked me off it and it’s done. Why did I wait so long? It wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t terrifying. It was just a bit time consuming and oh, so worth it!
Whether they are successful or mediocre doesn’t matter. What matters is that they exist outside of myself and my hard-drive and they’re out there. If you’re sitting on the fence about your dream, just take a chance. Yes, it’s easier said than done but honey, if my pansy-ass can do it, then so can you. We can be shit-scared terrified together and we’ll celebrate on the other side when it becomes a reality.
I’m officially a photographer. Not a famous one, but my photos are finally out there, existing in public and that makes me a photographer. That makes me part of who I’ve always wanted to be and it feels so damn fantastic right now, I can’t stop smiling!
The first step really is the longest stride, but always remember, the time will pass anyway.
I started this blog at the end of last year, after I had my hysterectomy. A few weeks before that, I’d taken a trip to Scotland, but never recorded the details of that trip on this blog.
So I’ve gone back and done that. I’ve published it on the dates it happened, so back in November 2015. Looking through the photos and remembering the details of it all has made me both happy and sad.
Happy to remember the absolutely incredible experiences; sad to know that I’m not there right now. Tomorrow it’s off to the Consulate to take care of my legal name change so I can get my South African papers updated.
Once that is done, I can hopefully reapply for my UK visa and go home to Scotland. It might take 6 months, it might take a year. The Saffas work on Africa time – it will be done when it’s done.
If the prize is going home, I can be patient. Maybe.
Walking used to be a meditation for me yet I’ve somehow managed to avoid it completely for the entire summer. After a lazy day of cooking I dragged myself for a late afternoon walk. There’s something calming about walking the troubles right out of my head. There should be a prescription for this stuff.
After weeks of living in my head and percolating in stress, I’ve been somewhat overdue for a light bulb moment. It turns out it was waiting on the corner for me to pick it up. Maybe epiphanies are really little balls of energy, neatly packaged at random places and we need to walk through them to absorb them.
For years I’ve had this really annoying trait where I’ll sign up for stuff, I’ll pay for it, then I’ll sit back and do nothing. Martial arts classes, cooking classes, photography, travel writing, nutrition courses, exercise programmes, things; I’ll sign on the dotted line, swipe my card, pay for it, then let it gather dust in a corner and ignore every single reminder to attend. Let me assure you, 97% of anything I’ve ever signed up for has gone unused and ignored. Even Groupons to the spa. How stupid is that?
I like the easy way out. It’s as if swiping my credit card on another fad eating plan or online course will magically make me whatever it is that I just paid for. Instantly. No effort required. No risk. It’s probably best if I don’t tally up the cost of those things….
Fear has a huge voice in my life. Fear of failing; fear of not being enough; fear of not being perfect; fear of getting it wrong and making an arse of myself. I won’t attempt something unless I know there’s a 99% chance I’ll get it right on the first attempt so I’ve essentially shelved almost everything I desperately want to do.
I’m dumb, what can I say?
My brain jabbered on at me for 2.5 miles this afternoon. Last week I signed up for a class in photography; specifically how to sell photos and create an income stream from that. A few years ago, it was a course in travel writing. I’ve never written a single thing nor did I finish the course.
This time has to be different and I am the only one who can make that a reality. The nuts and bolts of it comes down to: what do I fear most about this? Do I even want to do stock or fine art photography?
For the first time it hit me that the reason I have avoided every single thing that could improve my life is because I hinge everything on it doing just that. Improving my life. I hinge my entire future happiness on this one thing saving me instead of doing a class for the pure fun of it. My career path has never brought me an ounce of happiness and I’ve spent close on 2 decades trying to figure out what I’d rather be doing. Anything but this! So I’ve viewed writing and photography as the sole escape routes out of my current misery. Talk about pressure….
You cannot remove air from a glass. You can only move the air out by filling the glass with something else. It’s the same with living. You cannot remove the negatives from your life. You can, however, fill your life with things that make you happy, which reduces the space available for the negatives.
I’ve taken the things I enjoy doing; writing and photography, and I’ve tasked them with supporting my entire life financially. Given that very few people write a best selling book or sell a million dollar photo on their first attempt, I’ve written my creativity off as something that will never work because I can’t succeed immediately. I’ve played it safe instead of enjoying the hell out of it. I’ve left the dream safely locked in its box, undamaged, while I stare longingly at it every day. The risk of loss has been deemed too high to risk trying. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, having a passion outside of the office will probably restore my sanity in a similar way to what I’ve been hoping for all along.
In reality, the biggest loss already happened. I’ve forked out a pile of cash and the second I swiped my card, those funds were lost to the ether. Gone. I didn’t mourn the loss for a second.
So if the biggest loss has already happened, there’s nothing left on the line. Absolutely nothing. Creativity just wants to manifest itself into something. Anything. Taking that photo and writing the article/story/whatever, is all that needs to happen. There’s nothing else it needs to do other than bring me pleasure from doing it. That’s it. There’s no other sacrifice on the altar.
So what if I submit them to stock agencies and they’re rejected? What did I actually lose? Nothing. I had nothing before I sent them in, nothing after they were rejected; net result: same. If anything, the rejection will come with a lesson on what I did wrong and how to improve, which will result in a better picture next time. Bonus!
Not everyone will like what I write. It’s been like that for every writer since the dawn of time and it will always be that way. I don’t need to please everyone. Hell, I don’t need to please anyone. Gone are the days when we had to convince a publisher to give us a chance; we can self-publish or just fling it into the void like I do on this blog. Maybe people read it, maybe they don’t. But I wrote it so it exists, which is what writing is at the end of it. Goal achieved. Writing orders my thoughts and helps me understand myself. If it helps someone else do the same, great.
Fear is essential for self-preservation and our brains are exceptionally great at it. However, fear doesn’t need to be set to DEFCON 1 24/7/365. We can relax the settings a bit. Fear is the jailer that keeps us in one place for as long as we let it. Yes, the gate is locked but the key is in the cell with us. We can unlock it at anytime; we just choose not to. We quietly sit in the corner, plotting our escape but are constantly on alert in case our jailer returns and catches us mid-escape. Can’t possibly risk that.
Well, listen up people. The jailers abandoned this place decades ago; there’s no-one left but you. You’re all alone in that cell with no-one around for miles to stop you from unlocking the door and just leaving the fear behind. So stop waiting for an engraved invitation to take a chance on your happiness.
To celebrate my brother’s promotion, I’ve decided to make chocolate coffee cupcakes with whisky buttercream. No fear, I’m making chocolate buttercream for the kiddos because this isn’t England where the legal drinking age in a private home is 5 yrs old. (Seriously, check Wikipedia, I’m not making this up.)
I’ve taken my favourite 1 bowl chocolate cake recipe and instead of making a 9-inch cake, I made 24 cupcakes.
Preheat oven to 180C/350F
Ingredients:
2 cups All-purpose flour
3/4 cup cocoa
1.5 tsp baking powder
2 tsp baking soda/bicarbonate of soda (depending on what you call it)
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 cups sugar (I prefer brown, but white is also fine)
1 cup milk
1/2 cup oil
1 cup hot coffee
2 eggs
pinch of salt.
(The above order of ingredients ensures dry ingredients are measured first so you can then use the same measuring cups to do the wet ingredients without having to clean them in between.)
Mix all of the above ingredients in 1 bowl with a whisk or wooden spoon. No beaters/mixers required!
Either grease and line a 9-inch cake pan or line a muffin pan with cupcake cups.
Cooking times:
9-inch cake: bake for 40 mins, then start checking with a skewer until it comes away clean. The original recipe for this said to bake for an hour but it was a brick at that length of time. Start checking from the 40 min mark and go 5 extra mins at a time after that if needed.
If you’re doing cupcakes, 15 mins is all you need for the skewer to come away clean. If your oven is slightly cooler, check every 2 mins after 15 mins mark.
Buttercream:
2 cups unsalted butter, beat until fluffy
Gradually add in 4-5 cups of icing/confectioners sugar, beating after each addition until mixed in completely.
At this point I split the frosting into 2 bowls, to 1 bowl I added 2 tbsp of cocoa powder and mixed in completely with a hand mixer.
To the other bowl I added 4 teaspoons of whisky and mixed in. The mixture was a bit runny so I added a bit more icing/confectioners sugar to stiffen it up.
The kiddos are getting chocolate icing and the grown-ups are sailing into cupcakes decorated with a divine 12-yr old single malt. Because that’s how we roll!
Last week in my quest to find creative storage solutions, I came across Marie Kondo’s book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. It was on special on Kindle, so of course, I had to have it.
Well, hot damn. Let me tell ya, halfway into Chapter 2 all I wanted to do was tidy up.
Now, a word of warning to Westerners: Marie Kondo was a Shinto shrine maiden for a few years and her book is written in a Japanese context. She refers to the energy and ‘feelings’ of inanimate objects, which may be a bit off-putting if you cannot view the book within the context of the culture it was written in. Easterners have an understanding of chi/energy that Westerners don’t always grasp.
Personally, I agree with the premise of it. Everything is energy, irrespective of what it is. She respects the energy of things, animate or not and often refers to things being tired or sad. Some readers take that literally and cannot get their heads around the content. That’s fair enough; different horses for different courses.
But I digress. She lists an order to tackling clutter. Clothes first, then accessories, then books, papers and then miscellaneous items. She also suggests doing your entire house in one hit; maybe possible in Japan but more challenging in the West where we sometimes fiercely hoard things in larger spaces like the world is going to end.
Her approach is to find every single scrap of clothing you own, and put it in the middle of the floor. All of it. If you have it in storage, wherever, go get it and add it to the pile. No item gets left behind. Once that’s accomplished, you need to physically handle each item and ask yourself if it sparks joy. This is where some Westerners lose their minds.
Yes, things have energy. Some people can feel it, others not so much. Anything that doesn’t bring you joy has lower energy. Whether that negative energy is from the guilt you feel because it was a gift from a loved one, so you keep it even though you hate it. Whether it’s something you loved once and now it’s threadbare, doesn’t fit, reminds you of a time when you were happier. Whatever the reason is, if it doesn’t spark joy and you don’t absolutely love it, it has to go. No, it doesn’t get to go and live at your parents’ house, or in storage until some other time; it has to straight up GO.
This is where some book reviewers go a bit postal. Obviously picking up a tube of Preparation H doesn’t ‘spark joy’ but you need it so it can’t go. You need to use some lateral thinking here. Obviously things like medication don’t rock your happy button, but you can’t toss them. She’s talking about optional possessions here; things that won’t physically kill you if you toss them.
So that’s what I did today. All the clothing went onto the floor in the living room and let me just say: HOLY CRAP!!
I had NO idea I had so many things. The same suitcase I took to my storage unit a week ago came right back to my apartment, along with 2 plastic storage boxes of clothes. The contents of my drawers and closet were added to the pile. For someone who lives in a handful of outfits it was shocking to see how much stuff I’ve surrounded myself with.
Going through each item, holding it up, ‘feeling’ it, it became easier to let things go. Clothes I’ve held on to for decades are now gone. I loved them in their time but I’m not that person anymore. There’s more of me. I don’t fit in them and probably won’t ever again. Feeling guilty every season when I packed them away because I didn’t lose half my body weight to fit into them; well that’s done. They were beautiful in their time and it’s time for them to make someone else happy for a while.
The sheer sense of relief after donating them and knowing I won’t have to deal with them again was bloody amazing! Not to mention, every item I’ve kept is something I love and wear and it all fits into my closet. I don’t need to switch out summer and winter clothing this year because there’s space for all of it.
Not to mention, her basic suggestions of hanging items from longest to shortest, making a line up from left to right makes me kick myself for not thinking of that sooner.
I had my longer stuff together but colour co-ordination was my first criteria. So it was long to short in the same colour. Putting it by length makes way more sense. I have 2 high rails in my closet but one has a lower rail under it so longer items can’t hang down completely straight. So I moved all the long items to the opposite side of the closet and they can hang uninterrupted. Why didn’t I do that sooner?!
I now have a rail of empty hangers and all that’s left are clothes I wear and love.
My clumpy sweaters that I’d had hanging up are all folded using her Kon-Mari method *there are You-Tube tutorials on that if you’re interested* and my drawers look a hundred times better. I never thought I’d fit all my sweaters and shirts into my limited drawer space and they fit perfectly. My underwear is sorted, socks are folded over instead of rolled to give their energy room to breathe after use and it looks like a new world in my closet.
I’m knackered but really pleased. To move so many stagnant things out of my space has left it feeling new. The dead energy has left.
Next project will be my books. Yep, the same books I lovingly repacked a few days ago. I love books so letting some go might be next to impossible but if I can quarter the volume of clothing in my life, I’m open to tackling my books.
It’s time for dinner and curried butternut soup feels like it needs to happen so night night y’all!
There’s a great series on Netflix called ‘Chef’s Table.’ Each episode features a chef who has reached the pinnacle of chef-hood, if that’s a word.
While the food is epic & the artistry something to behold, it’s the common theme of memory that I’ve found interesting. Each chef has memories of childhood foods, family and a place that anchored their path in food. They’re recreating the memory of happier times while constantly moving forward towards the edge of creativity by reinventing themselves in the present.
Each one has stood on the edge of failure, questioning whether they wanted to keep following their dreams despite the uncertainty of success or walking away from the dream in order to stay safe.
Every. Single. One. Jumped. They didn’t stand on the shoreline watching their dreams sail away. Not everyone wants to be a Michelin chef. We’re not all dreaming of being the best of the best. Many of us are trying to find ‘permission’ to follow modest dreams.
Maybe the answer is lying behind us, buried somewhere in the memories of an easier time.
Writing and music were my anchors as a child. Those were the things that brought order and calm to the chaos of a broken family. Happier family times were anchored around meals. My grandmothers couldn’t have been more different. My paternal grandmother was Welsh and had no clue how to cook basic dishes but she made sublime Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, crumpets and minestrone soup. Ironic given that Cornish pasties are an art form in themselves yet cooking cabbage was a challenge for her. My father’s standing joke is that he didn’t know cabbage was green until he met my mother.
My maternal grandmother cooked in the traditional South African farm-style way. She had crazy baking skills and could cook anything from offal to venison to Sunday roasts, and all the random bits in between. She was the master of comfort food. Christmas fruit cakes, plum pudding, jams, preserves and rhubarb crumble.
I miss those foods and while I won’t ever have kids or grandchildren to pass those down to, those meals can stay part of the tapestry of my life in the present. So what if they don’t make it to the next generation? They can still live on in mine. Maybe somewhere between the kitchen and my computer is a creative answer to the eternal question of ‘what should I be doing with my life?’
I’ve had many homes in my life and if I take the best flavours from each place, it’s a unique tapestry fit for a gypsy soul. South Africa, England, USA. Writing. Cooking. Creativity. Photography. 4 art forms that are vastly different yet when combined create something new.
This could be the recipe for balance that addresses the first item on my To Do list: Change of career. Changing a job is simple. Changing a life path is a completely different project altogether.
My 3 part To Do list has been a work in progress lately. While it was listed as #3 on my list, it’s certainly the most important one for me right now: restoring balance and health.
Earlier this week I had another one of my bathtub epiphanies when I considered an old saying ‘As within, so without. As above, so below.’ This is one of the seven principal of Hermes Trismegistus.
I guess it’s similar to the principal of what you think, you become. What goes on in your head manifests in the details of your life. Well, lately my head has been complete chaos with my carefully laid plans being shot to pieces; this has definitely shown up in the details of my life. Everything around me feels cluttered. My body is off the reservation with no note on when it’s expected back. No matter how much I clear away the clutter, it comes back and brings all its buddies with it. It has felt like the clutter is just oozing out the walls while I sleep.
If I want to bring order to my life, I need to restore order within. So that has been the work-in-progress over the past few days. It means looking for wisdom in those who have done this before. Why reinvent the wheel when there are so many others who’ve already figured it out? An article I read recently suggested moving books out of the bedroom because the energy in words keeps your brain active, making it harder to sleep.
While that sounds like New Age malarky to many, I figured why not? So the bookshelf got moved to the living room. I slept like the dead the night I did that and every night since.
Cooking needs to be part of the road to balance for me. I love food and I need to find a way to include it in my life in a way that benefits rather than harms me. That means the kitchen needs to be a haven for me, not a war on clutter. I have a tiny kitchen but a LOT of cooking stuff and all the spices to go with that.
A trip to IKEA for spice bottles, office supplies, a label maker, hanging baskets and a bigger bookshelf solved pretty much every kitchen storage issue I had. The bigger bookshelf meant I could put all my regular books in one place. That freed up the little bookshelf in front of my kitchen to be used for all the recipe books stashed in the kitchen cupboard. Freeing up an extra cupboard in the kitchen means clutter on the counters finally found a new home out of sight.
Getting hanging baskets that fit onto my pantry shelves doubled up the pantry space, making it look tidier instead of disorganised clutter. Everything is now neatly grouped, stacked and easily accessible. I even made space for a new cast iron Dutch oven for stove to oven cooking.
For less than $100 I have doubled my kitchen storage and restored order in a small space. Not to mention my living room looks more pulled together and the turquoise bookshelf goes really well with the sand-coloured sofa. I’ve always loved a beach/ocean colour scheme of blues, creams and browns. There might not be an ocean within 800 miles of this place but I can have the colour scheme!
I’ve lived in this apartment for almost 2 years and I’ve always treated it as a temporary stopping point. I’ve never put effort into making it a haven for myself and then wondered why I never felt home here. There’s no way of knowing if I’ll ever get back to Scotland; I haven’t given up. In the meantime I am here so it’s time I ‘lived’ here.
I read a quote a while back to the effect of ‘if you have more than 3 priorities, then you don’t have any.’ Legit. So health & well-being are item 3 on the list of shit to take care of.
Current situation is 17 lbs. to lose and zero motivation to get it done.
Tools available:
Eating plans from a holistic nutritionist – I have the info, I just need to pull my finger out my arse and follow her advice! Especially given that I’ve paid for it.
4 miles of walking a day as part of my commute so I am exercising to some extent.
Self-inflicted roadblocks:
Lack of willpower to follow an eating plan. I’m easily distracted.
Falling into old habits instead of making new ones.
Allowing myself to wallow in my misery instead of going outside and walking off the stress of a crappy day.
Turning to food/alcohol when I have a bad day.
Constantly telling myself that ‘I’ll eat better tomorrow so it’s OK if I eat crap today.’ Tomorrow hasn’t come yet.
Working through lunch and buying food downtown instead of prioritizing my sanity and taking a break away from my desk.
Not effectively managing my stress levels at work so I’m not getting restful sleep. This leaves me constantly tired, which means coffee.
Buying healthy food only to waste it by not eating it, instead wasting money on buying food at work.
Not planning my meals in advance and eating on the go.
God, I’m a mess.
Things I would do if I had balls and willpower:
Yoga. Always wanted to try it, never had the balls because ugg…. I’d have to meet people, be a beginner and have no idea what I’m doing. That terrifies me.
Cut out meat/alcohol/sugar/bread. Sugar has a tight leash on my willpower. The rest I can live without if I put a modicum of effort into trying.
Cut out coffee. Yep, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep.
Walk every day. Meh, Netflix on the sofa is easier.
Use all the superfoods and spices that apparently fix everything. Lack of imagination and being too tired to make the effort.
Meditate every day. I can keep this up for like a week, tops. Then I’m off the wagon again, doing something useless like Facebook.
I have a week off work coming up so time to pull myself together and start working on this list. Whether I do or don’t, the time will pass anyway.
If any of you have some useful tips on how to tackle willpower issues, that would be great! In the meantime, I have a huge stack of recipe books taking up an entire cupboard in the kitchen, so there’s no excuse for having no imagination on what to cook for dinner.
Relocation is another goal on the TO DO list and it’s time for that to go under the microscope to see what’s fueling the need to move.
The weather is right up there, probably taking the top 3 spots of reasons why! Humans aren’t meant to function at -40. Or 100F for that matter. How about a nice, middle of the road 50 – 80F? Shoveling is the bane of my existence and commuting in a blizzard feels a bit like having razor blades taped to the inside of your eyelids.
Medical expenses are ridiculous, not to mention the cost of living in Illinois.
I hate big cities. The honking. Yelling. Road rage. Pedestrians. Cabs. General mayhem. Constant bloody noise!
Would the weather be doable if I wasn’t commuting 2 hours a day, rain or shine? Maybe. I’ve never not had to commute since living here so currently I have no frame of reference for what not commuting would look like.
How about finding a job in the burbs instead of the city? That would probably make a huge difference to commuting, not to mention the cost savings of not taking the train twice a day.
Cost of living will be the same if I stay in IL, as will medical expenses if I stay in the US. To change either of those, I’d need to relocate out of state or out of the country and we’ve already had a huge NO on the out of the country option. For now. I’m not conceding defeat on that point just yet. So it takes me another year to get it done. Fine. The time will pass anyway.
Changing the weather will mean getting out of IL, plain and simple.
An immediate solution would be finding a job out of the city and removing my commute/big city irritations out of the equation then reassessing before moving out of state lock, stock and barrel.
Relocating isn’t a cheap hobby so if I can still pull off a move to Scotland, then I won’t waste money relocating stateside. If, heaven forbid, a year from now Scotland is still a no, then I’ll have a doable Location B picked out with a pile of research to back it up.
What you think, you become. Or so they say. For close on 10 months, my all-consuming thoughts have been of going home and yet, here I sit with a rejection on the visa that would take me there.
REJECTED. I can’t go home.
It’s difficult to wrap my head around it right now; I’m still in the denial phase of this train wreck. Of all the eventualities I’d planned for, NO was not one of them. It’s pointless pretending I’m anything less than devastated.
The logical thing is to regroup and come up with a Plan B to move my focus onto goals I can achieve right now. Narrowing down the list of goals isn’t too difficult; finding the motivation to do anything about them is proving to be more than a little challenging.
Top of the list of stuff to fix is my career. After 19 years in finance, I think it’s safe to say I’m overdue for a change. The question is: is the drive to change it greater than the fear preventing me from doing it? To date the answer has been no; so I’ve stayed, despite it crushing my spirit in daily installments. The time has come to look at that question very deeply and tally up the cost of NO.
Being a profit minion will always overrule any right I have to my own life and every time I sit down in my cube, I tacitly choose this reality. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that this is happening to me. It happens because I choose it. I get angry, frustrated and bitter and yet every day I put on my collar and lead myself to purgatory, all the while complaining about it.
Why do we do that? In varying degrees, we do this every day. That has been the cost of NO.
What would be the price of YES?
Starting a new job, not knowing if I’ll be any good. Ok… how many times have I done that in my life and survived without the world imploding in on itself? 9.
Meeting new people and worrying about not fitting in. There have been countless times of meeting new people, whether it was at school, college, jobs, new cities, social gatherings, etc. How many times have I not fit in? A few but for the most part, it turned out ok in the end. Uncomfortable, but not impossible.
Not having experience in a new industry/career. Yeah, welcome to every.single.job I’ve ever had. I’ve arrived knowing nothing, learned how to do it and then got good at it.
Uncertainty. Yep, that will be par for the course when changing careers but then again, I’ve lived in 3 countries, a few cities, had multiple jobs, tried my hand at sports and hobbies I knew nothing about and I haven’t melted into a puddle of goo. So what’s one more time?
Not being good enough. Aye. This ol’ chestnut. I’ve always been good enough. Maybe not on day 1 but I get there every single time. I’m not content with average so while I might be rough around the edges to start with, I will make myself good enough.
Not making enough to live on. Life is simple when you choose to make it so. The measure of how we see success determines the size of the measure used to determine ‘enough.’ What’s enough for one is not nearly enough for another. My ‘enough’ doesn’t require an 80 hour work week and 6 figure salary. 6 figures is a bonus but not if it comes at the cost of my peace.
Writing out all the reasons why I’m afraid to change has made me realize how small and pathetic those reasons are when measured against the cost of staying the same.
Fear has kept me living small until I was pushed past the fear; sometimes against my will, sometimes willingly.
Every time I’ve gone beyond my fear, I’ve gained experience and strength. If I’d let my fear of failing stop me from learning to scuba dive, I would never have met my best friend and I’d never have seen some of the most beautiful sights in my life.
Despite the perpetual fear of not being good enough, I went to art classes and learned to paint. I’m not Michelangelo but I like the pictures hanging on my walls.
Lack of experience has not kept me in a small box. I’ve taken the lack and I’ve learned, I’ve grown and I’ve pushed myself to excel each time because I won’t accept anything less.
Not fitting in is kind of my thing in this world. I’ve always been the spiky toy in the box, the one who has no filters and doesn’t conform on principal. What has that gotten me? Equally crazy friends whom I adore to bits!
Uncertainty? Yeah, every damn day. I hate it but I handle it because that’s what it means to put on your big girl panties.
Looking at these reasons dispassionately through the lens of logic highlights how high the price of NO has been. And how unnecessary…