Learning to crawl

I am in a new era of my life, as a person and an artist. This place is going to be a place for me to share my thoughts and feelings as I have them from day to day about what it means to be an artist for me. I have a way of making art through language, through words. I am very interested in exploring this idea that I have stumbled upon of poiesis, the making of the world, the making and the doing as a person who is an artist. All that I do is art in this way. And this is a cultivation of a way of understanding events, desires, dreams, observations and theories.

I see the place of my dreams as a place of normal stature where I am pleased. Right now I am working as a store shift leader, essentially a middle manager, at a Goodwill thrift store. I am working there full time and it is giving me a way of occupying my time while making money that is purposeful and driven by an idea of the shared mission of Goodwill employees which is essentially to improve the quality of life and employment opportunities for the people we serve. Meanwhile I am wondering frankly very hard why it is that I went to school and studied art only to wind up at a retail environment for people with barriers to employment.

Much has happened to me in the years since graduating college and I feel like I gave up on art in form meaning like sculpture, painting, even installation, the making of things. I at one point also turned my back completely on the arts and tried getting into medicine. During that time, I told myself that people is all that matters. People are at the center of everything. And I came away from that exploration with a deeper sense of the human network, humanity, humility, grace, gratitude and more. My art meanwhile fell into the dumps and I threw most of my previous work away, including paintings, drawings, sketches, digital files, etc. Everything I could erase from my failure as a person, who was indeed becoming an artist, I did away with.

This was not a good thing for me. I lost me. I lost my sense of direction and taste, preference and curiosity. There was nothing left but to work for money that meant nothing to me. There was depression involved and even that paraiha (sp) mental illness. I lost my way, clearly and moved back in with my parents who have loved and sheltered me the best they know how given the circumstances. All the while I continued to almost beg that art come back into my life, that my powers be returned to me. But to no avail. I got placed through a vocational rehabilitation agency with Goodwill and have worked there since. It is going on two years now. And all the way I have thought alot about art.

At some point I made an apparent breakthrough with a therapist I had started going to out of necessity to unpack all of the sludge from my downward spiral. He offered up a book called The Artist's Way. It was about how to recover as an artist and about how to unblock yourself from not creating any work. It said to journal three pages a day and go on dates with yourself to get back into form as an artist. I journaled but could not get the dates going. I do not know why.