Image source: Merlina McGovern
I have been participating in Inktober for five years. This is the first year that I did not pink up my ink pen to create a drawing a day for the month of October.
I do feel a bit of sadness saying goodbye to this yearly tradition, but I have also entered a new phase of my creative life. After my layoff two years ago, I threw myself back into my first passion: writing. I have spent hours using my imagination to paint new scenes using words instead of ink, paint, and paper.
For a while, I was able to keep up both types of creation. Last year, I managed to finish Inktober while writing for my blog almost daily. I had this to say about that:
“I may not be out of breath, and my legs aren’t cramping up something fierce, but my creative well is dry. I’m mentally exhausted, and I’m ready to take a break from sketching for a while.”
“Mentally exhausted” is how I’ve been feeling quite a bit these days. It could just be me going through perimenopause. It could also be me being just generally being overwhelmed as a parent, as the surgeon general has warned us about.
Whatever the reason behind my mental fatigue, I have cut back on the number of blog posts I write a week: just two. And I fear that I just don’t have the energy to participate in a daily painting or sketching creative endeavor at this point.
I began my drawing and art journey more than five years ago. I began teaching myself how to draw before I had learned about the growth mindset. I used to think that art was something you couldn’t teach. You needed to be born with the talent. But working on learning how to draw and paint, making that a daily practice allowed me to see that becoming an artist is the result of putting in the hard work regularly.
And while I do feel my art skills growing slightly rusty as I have lost the daily habit of drawing, I do still draw and paint. Those many years of daily practice have planted an artistic seed within me that continues to grow even if I neglect it every now and then. I try, as much as possible, to remember that I can go to drawing if I’m feeling stressed. I can paint a postcard instead of buying one. I can create a painting for a friend for a present. And once I pick up my pen or my paintbrush, I remember again how wonderful it feels to create beauty.
It may no longer be a daily habit for me, but art is now a permanent part of my creative makeup, and it is something that I will never lose.
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