it's all okay

and that should be fine; but it's never fine.

i am a pretty decent artist; but i can't just make art for my dnd campaign, i should be selling dnd maps and character designs and scene setting pieces. i can't just make my friends matching earrings, i need to get an etsy and ship them internationally and take bulk orders. i make pretty good props and decorations and use them to throw my friends parties - but i should be running a party planning business and start taking paying clients and networking and putting my skills to actual use.

for some reason, i never figured out the specifics of pottery. it was a fun class and i enjoyed myself - and still, i'm embarrassed, years later, that i put in all that useless effort. everything i make has to be stunning. stellar. i should have applied myself more. maybe i'm too lazy. maybe i'm broken and selfish and needy. actually creative people would have kept going; they would be bettering themselves at every possible opportunity.

we find ourselves in this trap, even accidentally: we need to commodify our time, because it is a commodity. if we spend our efforts and our time not earning, isn't that the same thing as burning free money? and god forbid you ever take up a hobby that ends up being more expensive than you thought. you sit in your car and you look at the receipt and in your head you hear a conversation that isn't even happening - your mom or your friend or your partner all saying oh great. not this shit again. it's always something with you, and it never actually means anything.

i have realized this horrible thing, recently - i'll get excited to start a project, pick up a new hobby. and then i just... stop myself. i start thinking about the amount of time it will take, and how it'll look in my monthly budget. what if i can't even produce a good enough final product. sure, it's exciting to think about how i could make my friend her own custom dice. but i'm just polluting the earth if i don't get it right. better not bother. better not try.

When creative bones live in your body, they begin to itch when they need to be fed.

For about 7 years I didn't write. I left college to pursue hairdressing. It took up all of my creative well, blocking ideas for other ideas and urges. It also took up my time and energy on top of that.

But when I started hair school, my father insisted I do something else as well. I think he was scared of me failing, or something. But he pushed me into a jewelry making class with real fire and tools and ideas, albeit beginner.

I still have a ring I made, stuffed somewhere in a draw or pocket.

I got to take a film camera class at one point. I haven't touched a film camera since, but i got to use my mother's old one. I still have the picture of my cat, now gone, laying on the front steps of my childhood home. A picture I got to hand develop and transfer. I still have the photo of the first new baby on the street since me on the day she was brought home. She's 14 or 15 now, just starting high-school.

The family still has a copy of the photo I got to put in the small exhibit for that class.

My grandmother made quilts. Award winning ones. But the only one I care about having in my possession is the one she made for me.

She did pottery. She made baskets. She sewed and knitted and crocheted and baked and cooked and was a home maker.

My father did pottery. When it was finally time to clean out my grandparents house to sell it, I went out the day before closing. I stood in the basement with my father as he went through the pottery still kept there. He'd pick one up and turn it this way and that before telling me who made it. He or his mother, or some other interesting find along the way. He critiqued his own especially.

I wish I could have kept every mug he said had imperfections.

Hobbies are hard to justify in the world of capitalism especially but also like. Sometimes your bones itch. My dad took up fly tying for a while. He doesn't even fish that much. Even when I wasn't writing, my well was still being emptied by something. Some people have deeper wells, some have them that they just flow over.