Diary of a Trailblazer: Me and My Shadow

As artists go, I am not super prolific.  My excuse for this - the excuse I've been using for years and years - is that I don't have enough free time.  You know, because of being at work for eight hours a day (plus having to make lunches to take to work...and having to wash clothes to wear to work...and the time I spend on the subway going to and from work...).

It's a decent excuse, as far as these things go.  Even on weeknights when I don't have errands or plans of any kind, I generally don't want to work on any art projects: creativity takes me to my happy place - maybe even a bit of a trance state - and I really, really hate to enter that headspace on a time limit.  I know from experience that one of the following things always happens:

1) I force myself to stop and go to bed, but end up awake all night anyway, wired on adrenaline and endorphins, or

2) I fall deep down into an ArtTrance, oblivious to everything but the canvas in front of me, until a ray of sunlight creeps in the window, taps me on the shoulder, and goes, "duuuude, you're still up?  Seriously?!"

The thing is - and I've been kind of covering my ears and going la la la about this, but it's not going away - I haven't exactly been painting up a storm on weekends, either.  Even when those two days were completely and utterly free. 

So...yeah.

One of the scariest parts of this whole quitting thing is that every viable excuse to be a slacker is about to vanish.  I will have time; I will have money (for a while, anyway); I will have concrete goals.  If I still don't get much done, I'll have to confront the fact that the barrier keeping me from artistic success all these years has been...me. And then I'll have to pretty much recontextualize my entire life up to this point.

This hiatus is going to be a freaking cage match between me and my demons.

*GULP*