It’s my birthday! Today I turned 31, and dang I’m still feeling some growing pains. I am in a season of growth. Growing in myself, my business, and my relationships. Remember those growing pains when you were a kid? Both the mental, and physical pains of growing up? It was so hard learning how to deal with new emotions, constant changes. I remember feeling so frustrated that I couldn’t make decisions for myself, longing to get past childhood and into adulthood. As I enter my 31st trip around the sun, I am quite literally feeling those pains again. I am re-learning many things as I reflect on past thoughts, experiences and traumas.
In this stage of my adulthood, I’m fully focused on self-acceptance and growth. I can see so clearly where I want to be, but how do I get there?? If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet you may be feeling some of the same. I feel stuck in what I’ve heard some call the “messy middle” or “the gap”. The past year, I suffered from some pretty bad burnout. I needed to let myself rest after working non-stop to make my art dream a reality. However, I think I over-corrected a bit. Instead of seeking more balance, I just shut down. I stopped taking care of myself, I ignored many things that needed attention in my business, I didn’t make much art and I didn’t like what I did make. I felt stuck somewhere between my past and my future goals.
I love this quote from Ira Glass, he refers to this struggle as “The Gap”. He says:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.”
Now, I’m not quite a beginner anymore but my business is still in its infancy stage (maybe more like a toddler, which is the hardest stage – right?) I am stuck in the tail-end of “The Gap” phase, I can feel myself getting closer to this breakthrough point and finally the stars will all align! But because I haven’t gotten that big break that I so desperately want, I have the tendency to get sucked down that hole of disappointment again and again. Like Ira Glass says, this is the stage where many people quit. I won’t lie, I thought about quitting a lot in the last year. This stuff is HARD. I think because last year was my first full year of working entirely from home by myself, I didn’t know how to navigate it, and I froze. Are you a fighter, flighter or freezer? I’m a freezer, unfortunately.
Here’s the thing though, I refuse to quit, so I need to be a fighter. That may not come very naturally to me, so I am teaching myself how. Willpower is a learned skill after all.
So anyway, I am trying out a new creative outlet (pottery!) to celebrate my birthday, who knows, maybe that will spark something new in me.
Love, Emma