All Things in Moderation--even Fear?

I have to start with saying that I realize I'm mistaken. My blog has been read, and it is more encouraging than I knew. Thank you. I'll let the rest of this entry stand largely unedited, however...

My very first blog, that no one has read, mentioned that desperation can force us to go after what we want. Maybe it's fear, too. Most of the time fear has paralyzed me. Why, this time, it galvanized me makes little sense to me. Perhaps over-analyzing would be a waste of effort. Regardless, I seem to have done what I needed to get the word about my new business, Paint, Paper & Pens. I have had inquiries after just a week of having one ad and a bunch of flyers on tables.

Furthermore, the inquiries sound as if the women are excited about what amounts to playing with art. Playing. Not hardcore, serious art lessons. I'm going to have water-based paints, glue, good quality tissue paper, and treated water color paper as the backing surface. I'll be helping people quite simply to lose their fear of "doing it wrong." At least, I hope I'll be doing that. My idea of success, from the personal angle? If people laughed and lost a fear of exploration, and if people choose to go on and take "real" art lessons. Financially? I want, one day, to pay my bills doing this work and writing again for universities.

I never thought that, with the credentials of writing for Stanford and for Northeastern, that I would not be able to write for other colleges or universities. The economy is what it is. If I were to be honest, here, I have to say that perhaps I have not always written the proper inquiries either. I'm too informal sometimes. That being said, I miss the writing and stimulation of learning something brand new every week.

Still, I have not allowed myself to go all out with my own creativity in more than a decade. Like millions of women and men, I have deferred what mattered most to me inside for what I thought I should do. We women like to think men always do what they want. Bunk. They may claim offices in a home so we wind up working in the dining room... and if they want the garage, they claim it. I ask you, though, how many men, if what they want to play with is art, allow themselves to do that? Look at the painting classes in night schools and community colleges. In our culture, it isn't particularly acceptable for them in most areas of the country. It should be. Blogs let us throw those thoughts out into the universe.

In my case, there seems to be little chance even a random pair of eyes will see. (WRONG) Yet I write. I am trying to think before I write and say only what I feel no problem with the world's seeing--regardless of whether or not they really do.

I am terrified of what I am doing because there's no net. I have no safety net. I won't let my son be that--I'm too young and so is he. I feel I need to have another twenty years of independence, for his sake as well as my own. Conducting workshops will make me explore my own abilities again. The prep work already has. I had forgotten that I do interesting pen and ink sketches. I had forgotten that I am even good at that! I will at last have the space to spread out and finish two paintings I'd forgotten I'd even started, let alone that I liked them. I will charge a quarter in my workshops for every self-deprecating comment, and I wonder whether I may be putting more quarters in than anyone else.

I'm starting the business, though! For real. I have cleared the studio space. I have a couple of enrollees who are not people I know. AND, I have my own blog started. I hope I'll figure out what to do with this in a more constructive way, but for now, I simply write. I tell the virtual world how happy I am for the first time since I moved away from my home state for two years, to Central PA, a beautiful, artistically vibrant area of our country. I began a solitary adventure then and found what it was to be part of a community, instead. Now I start on a journey to create a community here, and I'm doing it all on my own. Life is good; it is scary, but it is good.