It’s been a beat or two since I posted anything here. It’s not for lack of writing. I just haven’t liked anything I’ve written well enough to post it. So it goes.

My granny had this saying about how “it’s just a phase and this too shall pass.”. It was more in reference to kids, but I find it applies to just about everything in life. Over the years I have learned that my creativity takes on different shapes and forms, that it shifts from one area to another. Writing, sewing, cooking, even pickling is a creative exercise for me, so it makes sense that my attention shifts around between them. As I’m squarely back to what I call ‘freelancing my way through life’, I’m sometimes told I should pick a lane and stick with it. But I’m also told that I should have multiple streams of income, which would require multiple lanes, yes?

Everything that’s been keeping me busy deserve their own individual post: teaching sewing, writing about food, teaching cooking, editing, testing and styling the city market cookbook for photography, the garden, life with Daisy, judging the home preserved food entries at the county fair this year and more. I’ve been so busy that I forgot to give myself a day off in April and only did a little better in May. Even when I think I have a ‘slow’ week, my calendar is still somehow full. I hesitate turning things down because I view them all as potentially good opportunities. I don’t leave myself enough time to just fart around and be creative, which is essential. I need to remind myself that turning down what I think is an opportunity is actually making much needed space for creativity.

And that doesn’t even begin to consider the time spent learning things. There’s always a learning curve in taking on new-to-me projects, which has been a big part of what’s kept me busy this year. I’ve jumped into teaching sewing after doing it for decades. Being able to pull that knowledge out of your head and sharing it is harder than it looks. It requires time and space to develop an approach that’s accessible to newcomers. It’s made me realize that while I have long thought myself a competent-at-best sewist, I know far more than I give myself credit for. Which is true in more than a few areas of my life. I excel at shortchanging myself across the board. I don’t just do it with my own knowledge, I do it with the time and space it takes to be creative as well as learning. When you discount yourself, it gives others permission to do the same thing, which just feeds into your own internal self-doubt loop, creating a never-ending cycle of self-doubt and a wicked case of imposter syndrome.

It can be hard to step off that treadmill. I spent the last few years questioning myself and my worth in large part because I allowed myself to be surrounded with people who did that for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard from people in various tones of condescension, that I’m “crafty”, as if my need to make things was a bad thing or unforgivably weird. I still hear it from people who question not just my ability to do things like teaching and writing, but my approach to it as well. I tell all my students, young and old, in both my cooking and my sewing classes that things don’t have to be perfect, they just need to be. That making something imperfect is better than not making anything at all.

Life, like making things, is imperfect. It’s messy. It’s always changing and forcing us to change with it whether we like it or not. One thing I’ve learned in spades this year is that it’s okay to let go of absolutes, to open ourselves up to new experiences and new ways of looking at things. That’s where the growth is – the spaces we create when we let go of old.