Inner Career Disagreements

Feelings and emotions regarding depression, anxiety and other health issues.

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CitM
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Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2012 12:45 pm
Location: United States

Inner Career Disagreements

Postby CitM » Wed May 31, 2017 7:27 pm

My mom told me when I first got here that I was retired. She meant it out of kindness because she was worried that continued stress would bring on an early dementia or that I'd drop dead, again. But it wasn't true for me and I certainly don't feel retired. So those fears should be set aside by everyone. I don' t know who people think I am, but I at least know who I was and the kind of person I was and am. I was a person who tried hard under enormously stressful circumstances and most of the time I was doing my best and the few times I wasn't it was mostly from exhaustion and burnout.

However, there was a need in my life even as a young child to have a balance in my day between chores and play and learning and amusement and arts and sciences. For whatever reason I have been fighting the 'art side' of myself as it has been SCREAMING, like literally SCREAMING to be heard, to be expressed (this is why I chose expression section).

I used to draw and love ceramics and arts and crafts all the time. I still do, but what had me scared was the fact that my cat was named Mary Cassatt (although I know where she actually went and with whom) and some other unusual experiences and that I love urban planning research as well as the discipline of GIS analytic research. Did you know, that I remember driving up Clark St on our way to a store called "Boyd and Jack's" and thought for the first time that I would LOVE to design a city or help my town have better development? I did. I wasn't even in elementary school yet. I'm a smart cookie when it comes to those things, as long as people are not swinging something at me like a yard stick. But I know he couldn't help it and I totally understand!! In other words, you're forgiven and in some ways there was nothing to forgive. We all got in over our heads sometimes. I loved the experience anyway.

Getting back to my sudden art phobia. Well, more and more pictures keep coming at me and they are fabulous the things that I see spiritually. And for once in my life!!! I had the BIGGEST gift from GOD ever because GOD let other people see it too, finally at an internment in Iowa. To put it simply, we interned the ashes of a man who loved collecting eagles. While waiting for people to arrive and when more than half came, 6 to 8 hawks and eagles flew over the cemetery, rising from the trees where they had been sitting and watching. Finally somebody realized that I am not crazy, and that is exactly the kind of world I live in. It's nice that He finally let family in on this. When the minister said, "There isn't a church, just God over head." I couldn't even look at him because people tend to have a bad reaction when there suddenly IS evidence of a Diety but said, "More than you know."

The other pictures, those are for me to paint, and I'm going to paint them for my family, for myself, for the Spirit who needs me to. I'm not going to worry about whether this means I'm 'retired,' or will never do the other more analytic studies or have income at either art or sciences or both. I have a feeling just because of how the world is going, that I'm going to.

Once I realized that today, and started painting my first painting for my youngest daughter's birthday, how right it all felt, the relief palpable as far as that pressure on my life. Artists rarely make a living but that's never been the point with artists you know. Plenty of good artists out there who should have made something from their art. But it doesn't mean that I'm Mary Cassatt if I paint. It means that I'm myself, the person who drew as a child and a teen, the person who took art classes at ISU as well as mathematics, engineering, psychology etc. The person who tried a sketching class and excelled at it at IPFW. The person who got on a team that made some difference in even this world for the better by first painting and sketching a concept transportation corridor that got people thinking what kind of world do they want to live in and behind NEW laws and methodologies. I'm not going to worry about who is really doing what anymore because that was never the point of it all at all. I am my father's and mother's daughter and I finally get what I'm supposed to be about now.

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