For all of the time I haven't posted here, I was off being my real self and it just does not work no matter how hard I keep trying to make it work. Too many people wanting to know everything I do.
It's really quite a peculiar thing to not feel comfortable being who you really are - and I do not mean that metaphorically.
March 27, 2017
June 16, 2015
Long Time No See
Yes, I've been away from being Kissy for a year or so now.
I had to be the other me as my artwork sort of took off which led to a bunch of art shows and orders and such.
It sounds great and all but in truth it was exhausting. I've actually had to stop creating (that specific) art for awhile now because I got so burned out.
Things got so hectic that I actually forgot how to do anything else but art-related things. For example, I have been a voracious reader for my whole life yet I found myself unable to finish a book for the last two years. Whenever I started to read it wouldn't be long before my mind drifted to creating artwork, posting it, talking about it, marketing it, making sure I was engaging with my followers on the Facebook page I have for my artwork, etc.
Whoa, that was bad.
It was almost like a....like a...JOB.
Heaven forbid. ;-)
Then there were these horrid art business people.
I could write a book about them.
They adore you one minute...
and then you're chopped liver the next. Bunch of phonies.
I abhor phonies don't you?
Additionally, I had the misfortune of doing business with some art biz people who will nickel and dime you over everything.
At one shop they were passing the cost of credit card transactions to the artist. Seriously, I was being hit up for a dollar or two in addition to the 35% commission this place was making every time one of my pieces sold. Pathetic. (I agreed to this at first because in my inexperience with such things, I thought it was the norm. It is not. I beg you to not compromise your art worth if you are ever faced with something similar!)
That was actually the final straw for me, the whole nickel'd and dime'd thing.
The joy I had once found in my art was mostly gone.
I didn't want to keep forcing myself to proceed because I knew my work would suffer. The best thing to do was to step back for as long as necessary.
Once I decided to put everything art business-related on the shelf, it was time to get back to my real life.
I found that because I had been so heavily enmeshed in my art life, that getting back to my real life wasn't so easy.
There were panic attacks and many nights of insomnia. Terrible self-doubts about having regrets, guilt over turning my back on opportunities that other artists would love to have.
But integrity matters more than any of those things.
I've always heard people say "I owed it to myself to..." and never really knew what that meant until I owed it to myself to do what I needed to do.
So now I'm mostly back to normal (whatever that means), back to doing all the other things I love and missed; in other words, back to being Kissy.
I had to be the other me as my artwork sort of took off which led to a bunch of art shows and orders and such.
It sounds great and all but in truth it was exhausting. I've actually had to stop creating (that specific) art for awhile now because I got so burned out.
Things got so hectic that I actually forgot how to do anything else but art-related things. For example, I have been a voracious reader for my whole life yet I found myself unable to finish a book for the last two years. Whenever I started to read it wouldn't be long before my mind drifted to creating artwork, posting it, talking about it, marketing it, making sure I was engaging with my followers on the Facebook page I have for my artwork, etc.
Whoa, that was bad.
It was almost like a....like a...JOB.
Heaven forbid. ;-)
Then there were these horrid art business people.
I could write a book about them.
and then you're chopped liver the next. Bunch of phonies.
I abhor phonies don't you?
Additionally, I had the misfortune of doing business with some art biz people who will nickel and dime you over everything.
At one shop they were passing the cost of credit card transactions to the artist. Seriously, I was being hit up for a dollar or two in addition to the 35% commission this place was making every time one of my pieces sold. Pathetic. (I agreed to this at first because in my inexperience with such things, I thought it was the norm. It is not. I beg you to not compromise your art worth if you are ever faced with something similar!)
That was actually the final straw for me, the whole nickel'd and dime'd thing.
The joy I had once found in my art was mostly gone.
I didn't want to keep forcing myself to proceed because I knew my work would suffer. The best thing to do was to step back for as long as necessary.
Once I decided to put everything art business-related on the shelf, it was time to get back to my real life.
I found that because I had been so heavily enmeshed in my art life, that getting back to my real life wasn't so easy.
There were panic attacks and many nights of insomnia. Terrible self-doubts about having regrets, guilt over turning my back on opportunities that other artists would love to have.
But integrity matters more than any of those things.
I've always heard people say "I owed it to myself to..." and never really knew what that meant until I owed it to myself to do what I needed to do.
So now I'm mostly back to normal (whatever that means), back to doing all the other things I love and missed; in other words, back to being Kissy.
April 17, 2015
Keeping It Real In A Festivus Kinda Way
For a whole bunch of months I went back to being the real me because I got mad at not feeling comfortable operating under my actual identity (online, that is).
This social media thing is driving me nuts. I have never been a public-type person. I have never been extroverted (unless I am among a very small group of people I feel comfortable with). Yet I desire to interact with people on some levels.
But I don't desire to interact with people inadvertently. For example, I don't want the people who have chosen to be estranged from me to still have access to my life. I am actually horrified that friends of friends can see all kinds of stuff about me on Facebook - which means that if my relatives are friends with my estranged ex-relatives, the estranged ex-relatives can see stuff that I post or stuff about me. Now that is just wrong.
I also hate that people in my life only interact with me via Facebook. No phone calls, no text messages, no email (unless it's Facebook messaging email). I wish I could tell you that when I am contacted via Facebook it is almost always because someone needs something from me. That's a common theme in my life and is one that I will explore here in depth at a later date. But for now I will leave it at how much it sucks to be thought of as everyone's go-to person for favors and cash.
Did you ever think of how really weird Facebook is? I have this rule about Facebook where I only post stuff that will make people laugh or stuff that I would actually call someone on the phone to talk about.
I have a friend whose posts are almost exclusively about cats. I really like this person. She's cool, she's funny, but there's the cat thing. If she called me ten times a day to let me know what Whiskers is up to I would change my phone number. Then there's the Sally Sunshine friend. I'm pretty sure that nothing ever goes wrong in her charmed life and if it does she turns it into an opportunity to tell all of us in grand platitudinal fashion how the glass is always half full. Every single time. She has a zillion friends who 'like' every single thing she does and literally gush and fawn all over her in some weird Dear Leader or rock star/groupie way. If she does not buy a compound and create her own version of KoolAid she will be missing a fantastic opportunity. My house badly needs to be cleaned, the dogs need baths and I have a sinus/ear infection thing going on right now and if she called me with her incessant upbeatness I would hang up on her. I need people who complain in earnest from time to time. ;-)
By the way, anyone who has hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends does not actually have that many friends. What they do have is an audience. Really big difference there.
My problem with these people and their ilk is that they are too one-dimensional and if there's anything that drives me to the kind of boredom that makes me drink, it's one-dimensional people. I want to scratch theireyes out surface and call them out at the same time. Give me real, please - in all of its down and dirtiness and up and prettiness. Real people where are you?
Probably I just need to go to a coffee shop and strike up real conversations with strangers. I am not doing very well with people I actually know.
I went to see the author Anne Lamott recently. At the end of her talks she does a Q&A thing where people in the audience can walk up to microphone and ask her stuff or tell her how wonderful she is. This woman comes up to the mike, introduces herself, says she has two little kids, one of which is under a year old. She tells us and Anne Lamott that she is whacked out stressed, which is a theme that AL often writes about. Then she says a few months back she discovered her husband had been having an affair. Yikes, right? But she said she decided to work hard to forgive him and move on together with him, which sounds good and she's cute and charming and brave for telling her story in front of a thousand people and right away you hope he's learned his lesson and they can heal and be a family again.
Except she then says that they just found out that he has brain cancer.
Right then I'm pretty sure that someone in the very large audience dropped a pin and we all heard it.
Wait, what? WHAT? You want to talk about real life? That's it right there. There wasn't a person in that place who didn't want to rush up to her and wrap her up in our arms and then drive home with her so we could watch her kids and just let her at least get a decent night's sleep. We all would have given her twenty bucks if she had asked for it. In that instance we were one big room of community. I hope the woman knew that, I hope she felt it.
Community. I've seen genuine community only a couple of times in my life which really makes me sad because there are tons of opportunity for it every day. Anne Lamott talks about it often and refers to her church when she does. She has that; a little church where people know and love each other and they probably lend each other twenty bucks all the time but it's okay because....well, because they know and love each other.
Like, for real.
This social media thing is driving me nuts. I have never been a public-type person. I have never been extroverted (unless I am among a very small group of people I feel comfortable with). Yet I desire to interact with people on some levels.
But I don't desire to interact with people inadvertently. For example, I don't want the people who have chosen to be estranged from me to still have access to my life. I am actually horrified that friends of friends can see all kinds of stuff about me on Facebook - which means that if my relatives are friends with my estranged ex-relatives, the estranged ex-relatives can see stuff that I post or stuff about me. Now that is just wrong.
I also hate that people in my life only interact with me via Facebook. No phone calls, no text messages, no email (unless it's Facebook messaging email). I wish I could tell you that when I am contacted via Facebook it is almost always because someone needs something from me. That's a common theme in my life and is one that I will explore here in depth at a later date. But for now I will leave it at how much it sucks to be thought of as everyone's go-to person for favors and cash.
Did you ever think of how really weird Facebook is? I have this rule about Facebook where I only post stuff that will make people laugh or stuff that I would actually call someone on the phone to talk about.
I have a friend whose posts are almost exclusively about cats. I really like this person. She's cool, she's funny, but there's the cat thing. If she called me ten times a day to let me know what Whiskers is up to I would change my phone number. Then there's the Sally Sunshine friend. I'm pretty sure that nothing ever goes wrong in her charmed life and if it does she turns it into an opportunity to tell all of us in grand platitudinal fashion how the glass is always half full. Every single time. She has a zillion friends who 'like' every single thing she does and literally gush and fawn all over her in some weird Dear Leader or rock star/groupie way. If she does not buy a compound and create her own version of KoolAid she will be missing a fantastic opportunity. My house badly needs to be cleaned, the dogs need baths and I have a sinus/ear infection thing going on right now and if she called me with her incessant upbeatness I would hang up on her. I need people who complain in earnest from time to time. ;-)
By the way, anyone who has hundreds or thousands of Facebook friends does not actually have that many friends. What they do have is an audience. Really big difference there.
My problem with these people and their ilk is that they are too one-dimensional and if there's anything that drives me to the kind of boredom that makes me drink, it's one-dimensional people. I want to scratch their
Probably I just need to go to a coffee shop and strike up real conversations with strangers. I am not doing very well with people I actually know.
I went to see the author Anne Lamott recently. At the end of her talks she does a Q&A thing where people in the audience can walk up to microphone and ask her stuff or tell her how wonderful she is. This woman comes up to the mike, introduces herself, says she has two little kids, one of which is under a year old. She tells us and Anne Lamott that she is whacked out stressed, which is a theme that AL often writes about. Then she says a few months back she discovered her husband had been having an affair. Yikes, right? But she said she decided to work hard to forgive him and move on together with him, which sounds good and she's cute and charming and brave for telling her story in front of a thousand people and right away you hope he's learned his lesson and they can heal and be a family again.
Except she then says that they just found out that he has brain cancer.
Right then I'm pretty sure that someone in the very large audience dropped a pin and we all heard it.
Wait, what? WHAT? You want to talk about real life? That's it right there. There wasn't a person in that place who didn't want to rush up to her and wrap her up in our arms and then drive home with her so we could watch her kids and just let her at least get a decent night's sleep. We all would have given her twenty bucks if she had asked for it. In that instance we were one big room of community. I hope the woman knew that, I hope she felt it.
Community. I've seen genuine community only a couple of times in my life which really makes me sad because there are tons of opportunity for it every day. Anne Lamott talks about it often and refers to her church when she does. She has that; a little church where people know and love each other and they probably lend each other twenty bucks all the time but it's okay because....well, because they know and love each other.
Like, for real.
May 27, 2014
Having An Alter Ego
It was sort of a long holiday weekend filled with a few "what do you want to do/I don't know what do you what to do" moments. Whenever that happens it usually means neither of us wants to do anything but happily stay at home but we're afraid that will disappoint the other. Used to be that we would frantically think of something - anything! - to do which would always wind up being disastrous. Now we're pretty good at getting to the point of saying how about we just do nothing. Très simple!
What a treat to have my husband home for three days with no obligations. I live for this. We do things around the house but mostly we play as we are doing what we need to do...and by that I mean we behave as silly as we want with the goal of making each other laugh. Put a price on that!
Despite my delight at having a 3-day weekend with my family, I do look forward to them returning to work so I can get back to doing my thing. Last week I was intensively updating this site and doing the same for my Kissy Lovestuff Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook pages and over the weekend I found myself longing to get back to it.
May 21, 2014
Keeping It Real, Again
I might as well get this out there right away: I have been working HARD this past week to resurrect and update this site and the motivation for that has a whole lot to do with Facebook.
Or, more specifically, my intense disdain for Facebook.
Or, more specifically, my intense disdain for Facebook.
May 1, 2013
Free Printable Stuff
Nobody likes free stuff more than me, y'all.
And I don't know if y'all have noticed but the Internet is just plain ol' rife with all kinds of freebies.
For example, I was meandering around the web this morning and I came across this free printable from Silverbox Creative Studio that I just lovelovelove.
April 29, 2013
So Much!
I have been fretting for the past week or so about where to (re)start since I was last active on this blog.
Obviously I couldn't possibly catch you up on everything that's happened in the past almost 2 years so the only logical thing to do is to start up again starting now!
I've been working on a whole bunch of designs that I'll be offering up on various partnered sites...just some really cool and fun t-shirts and accessories and stuff. But don't worry...this site WILL NOT turn into the kind that jams all sorts of for sale stuff down your throat. Grrrrrrr...I hate that whole BUY!BUY!BUY! mentality so there is no way that I would, in turn, do that to you.
Obviously I couldn't possibly catch you up on everything that's happened in the past almost 2 years so the only logical thing to do is to start up again starting now!
I've been working on a whole bunch of designs that I'll be offering up on various partnered sites...just some really cool and fun t-shirts and accessories and stuff. But don't worry...this site WILL NOT turn into the kind that jams all sorts of for sale stuff down your throat. Grrrrrrr...I hate that whole BUY!BUY!BUY! mentality so there is no way that I would, in turn, do that to you.
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