I’ve been focusing on other things than writing, immersing myself in embodying that I am an artist.  I’m a painter and a singer/songwriter. It took me a long while for my mind to let me ‘claim’ that, and I still struggle with it. And it is not about whether I’m good or not. It took me a while to realize that doesn’t actually matter as much as I thought. I acted like i had to be ‘good’ before I’d let myself start (or at least *know* that I could be), which is absurd since very few are innate prodigies at anything. It is about whether these things are a part of my life cadence. They are a regular part of my life and thus a part of me. And it feels good. And despite what my brain tells me, the fact that it feels good (and nothing else) is more than enough reason to allow it to take up some of my time.  It is about time, after all, that we treat time as precious as we claim.

Once I started acrylic painting, I couldn’t seem to stop.  The colors just lit me up in a way that … well, my engineering/computer/medical research kind of life never did. As if it came from an entirely different realm than the ordered one of accomplishment in which I resided.  That, or … I’ve just been learning too much about quantum physics and I’m just starting to think funny.  Anyway, now I’m drowning in art and I realize the energy is plugged up and I need to get it out there.  I’ve been meaning to post it online somewhere for more than a year – but, that sounded like computer work … which didn’t feel like art. So, I procrastinated.

I’d had the thought to maybe put my portfolio on Amazon, so that if I got into selling it’d already be ready.  I thought it could be fun since I already work there, it’d be ‘keeping it in the family’, in an ironic way.  But, I decided on Instagram because it just makes more sense for where I am at (and actually finally got it loaded up!).

Turns out I may not have been wrong in the thought though, I just didn’t realize I do MULTIPLE forms of art. Because I’m also into music, another thing that just was NOT remotely a part of my zero-creativity, zero-imagination reality. How insane is that? Me?! That had been as impossible as Santa Claus being real.  So now I’m not sure what to believe. 

I am starting to accumulate songs too. Eventually, I’ll want to post them, share them, because yes, I’m proud of my lyrics, even if the rest is a work-in-progress (WIP).   That’s not why I’m doing it. It’s, finally, no longer about needing external validation to get permission to do it.   Because, deep down in my Belief Onion, I needed to know it was validated to make it a valuable investment of my time.  But that’s not what matters. I finally SEE that I was looking at the wrong thing. The wrong measure.  What matters is how I feel when I do it, not how I feel when it’s done … not whether it becomes “anything”.  It’s not about what might be. It’s about now.  It’s about taking the FEELING of the thing you want, regardless of any measure of perceived skill.  I still feel like I suck, but MAN am I better compared to how truly incapable I started 3 or 4 years ago! Because, of course, I had spent no time on it in my life.   Whatever you spend time on, you will, actually, improve. It is pretty much a fact proven by quantum physics. The trick to win the Game, however, is that it’s not about getting good enough to meet some external metric. The external metrics are actually things only as a RESULT of other people spending time on it for the love of the doing of it.  Or put another way, those metrics are a side effect – the result of something else, not the focus.  What it is about is letting it out, allowing yourself the unknowingness of doing it. 

And it is not, in any way, that people that DO arts, or have arts in their life, are any “better” than people who don’t. (Though I sure believed that when I was someone who didn’t).  It’s because for some reason I ALWAYS WANTED IT. *Something* in me YEARNED when I saw visual art that lit me up, or the way I feel when I sang a good song from a great artist.  Something attracted me.  I’m a moth and it was my personal light.   And we follow the light (yes, Brain, I know a lot of moths die that way but don’t follow the rabbit).  Something in me wanted it and it never went away despite it being ignored for so long that it-was-no-longer-a-possibility.  THAT’S what makes it wonderful that now it is stuff that I have in my life … and doesn’t make anyone else remotely wrong who doesn’t and doesn’t care.  

But if you are someone like me who felt a yearning – however much unilaterally and completely impossible – stop worrying about where it could go, stop worrying about if you ever share it with anyone, most of all, stop worrying “how it will be an epic waste of time”.  That is your mind projecting failure first and then doing the math against your eternal judgement that you don’t measure up.

Just start. Just play. Just Be. You never know where it might lead…