Acknowledging Your Creative Self

That is the first secret in the book The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women: A Portable Mentor
that I'm reading as part of a virtual book club Next Chapter The book begins with the author's (Gail McMeekin) personal story of overcoming Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to completely refashion her life with the aid of her own creativity. I find this so familiar and still very inspiring, as it is basically what I am right in the middle of trying to accomplish for myself.

I especially liked this observation that she makes: "I had transcended the New Age distortion that I was to blame for my illness and stopped trying to regain my old life. Every time I pushed myself to do work that was overly stressful just to earn money, I relapsed immediately. I finally understood. It was time to redesign my life in line with my limitations and with total allegiance to my truth."

Oh my goodness does that ever ring true for me. I had the experience a couple years ago where it literally took me months after reading "The Secret" to call bullshit on that particular nugget. Of course I am not to blame for my illness. My illness may be present at this time in this life for me for a reason. It is definitely a teacher that I am learning from (like it or not), but there is no way that anyone can convince me that I chose this illness. That is how I define being able to assign blame, there has to be a choice involved. Nothing I did in the past gave me this illness, I was born this way. period.

After finally jettisoning that particular burden I felt freer to work on the next part: Stopping trying to regain my old life. Regret, shame and despair were the themes here as I replayed the litany of how I used to be, what I used to be able to do and what I thought my life possibilities and plans were, yadda, yadda, whatever. Not a fun part of the journey there. But once I was able to accept that the old life I lived is not where I'm headed, I was able to let that go. I'll be honest that I still re-visit this particular lesson over and over again, but it is getting easier each time to get through it and let go of the grasping on to "how it was supposed to be".

So with all this energy no longer focused on fighting the reality of my circumstances I was able to use it to start in with harnessing my creativity. A sweet plum to enjoy at the end of this period of trial and tribulation, but it was so worthwhile in reaching it let me tell you!

I'm looking forward to the rest of this book, mainly for advice on how to accomplish the next steps, now that I've acknowledged my creative self, so fully and completely, now what to do with that next? The picture accompanying this post represents my creative self, much bigger than me physically, undefined, amorphous, but still attached to me right at my own feet. That sentence makes me realize that I can then step this way or that and my creativity comes with me, no matter where I go. A good thing to really know isn't it?

Wardrobe Refashion, Beginning Again

I've been participating in this Wardrobe Refashion challenge kind of haphazardly for more than a year now. But I thought I'd give it six more months to give it another try, and follow-through on completing some of the refashioning projects I have started, planned, dreamed about, or not thought up yet.

• There are several t-shirts that have been over-dyed, but didn't turn out too well, and will be re-re-re-dyed at least once more.




• A few shirts will be stamped with some of my hand-carved stamps.




• One of said t-shirts I'll be using potato starch resist on, to see if I can get a similar look to one of my favorite pieces of fabric I've ever dyed.




• There are several skirts that I'm modifying, to make them wearable once again.




• And some shirts that I'm rehabbing or transforming with additions or substractions (oooh mysterious eh?)

I'll admit it. I'm just too stubborn to throw out this pile of stuff. I just know that it is worth spending not tooooo much time on to get something unique and cool out of the whole deal.

The Next Chapter

I'm joining in on a group reading/blogging of
The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women: A Portable Mentor

And conveniently, it starts this coming Friday. There will be a weekly post about the reading and exercises I'm doing from the book here on my blog, hopefully they'll be interesting or useful to some of you.

After reading the first chapter I'm quite excited, it seems like exactly the type of book I need to read at exactly this time. I'm hopeful that the act of signing up for reading it together with other women will be helpful in getting me to actually finish reading it and to follow-through (my theme for the year!).

If you might be interested in checking this group out, you can find the info here at the Next Chapter blog.