The past year has been a rollercoaster of emotional, financial, and physical tolls on my body and mind. I largely feel that not many people, not even people that I hold as dear in my mind and heart believe in me as a jeweler, artisan, business person, etc. Well, honestly, there’s little else in this world that I enjoy doing enough, and that is reasonably socially acceptable, (we can’t all be vagabonds, can we?) that would drag me away from making small decorative objects with my hands and tools, for very long. No matter what whispers, naysaying people might make either out loud or in their heads, I know that this is the place and moment I am meant to be, without a doubt.
I took a sojourn into the land of technological understandings, with a web development course in 2023. It was paid for mostly by the State of Idaho, and I was curious. Could I get into another field? Could I improve my life with a ridiculously high paying, work-from-home job? I did fine. Great even, perhaps? But I cried almost every day from the unknowing of it all, and my body ached to be bent over my bench with a light shining onto my work in front of me, instead of glowing in my face. I learned a lot about my computer that I didn’t know…revisited the long forgotten command line interface, which brought back awful memories from junior high…and learned html and CSS tricks that will absolutely stay with me and inform my online presence forever. But the places I ran from, and into the art room flooded back to me in so many ways. When I called to tell my mother that I was taking the course, she said to me “You didn’t know how many days were in a year when I dropped you off at college.” That was all she said about it, she didn’t elaborate…but what she meant was abundantly clear. She didn’t see how I could be intelligent enough to even consider web development. That’s how she’s always regarded me, and perhaps it has become a self fulfilling prophecy. Web development is one of the biggest fields where imposter syndrome reigns as a deterrent to progress. You’re constantly learning, relearning, erasing what you thought you knew, and looking up new, updated answers to the same old questions. Its a field that is constantly changing and evolving, and yet, you can get away with using deprecated systems for quite a while until things start to fail. That’s a bit much for me. It was overwhelming, all encompassing of my time, and very depressing for me. I watched the sun rise and fall some days, barely getting up from the computer. Its no way to live. I thought maybe it would get better, the more I learned, but the nature of it is, you can never learn it all…and that is deeply disturbing to me. So that’s that. Perhaps I will revisit someday, but this 42 year old brain had quite enough of it for now…
I’m enjoying being back at my bench, making pretty things to sell at markets. And I’ve worked very hard to get my website set up with a new SHOP, where everything that I have available will be listed for online sales. The hosting is through Go Imagine, a company that donates all of its profits (not my profits, but the money they make from my sales fees, and monthly hosting fees) to children’s charities. They are also fully committed to helping handmade goods makers thrive, and have strict policies about what they allow on their site. Fingers crossed that they manage to keep that mission strong. Its a great company and I’m happy to be working with them.
Stay tuned in the coming days for Market announcements and events calendar for this upcoming season. And I’m thinking about doing a giveaway soon…its been a long time and my IG following could use a boost.
One last thing, sadly, our beloved American Staffordshire Terrier, Rocco, passed away on April 13th. He was a beautiful, sweet boy and I miss him with all my heart.
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