Mourning the lack of focus on a creative life due to my inability to balance it all

My head is spinning with thoughts, a normal occurrence for me. 
I'm loving the Olympics, hating the cold weather, wishing I were more organized and mourning the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. 
Late last night I watched PBS American Masters: Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, it really got my brain spinning about injustice and writing and people standing up for equal rights and living a life well lived and one I would call satisfying and fulfilling. I, whether good nor bad, am an all or nothing kind of person, and I'm afraid I have gone the way of nothing rather than all. I related so much with Alice Walker's total immersion into her creativity. She states, in her blog "Although I have tried many times to take a “sabbatical” from writing, I have never succeeded." I envy her ability to honor her creative gifts and write consistently throughout her life. 
I have constantly run from my call to creativity. When I have succumb to it I felt a sense of Zen that I knew was something I could easily become addicted to. When I put my head and heart into something I am passionate about I lose myself completely. My fear, now that I have a family, is that I won't know how to balance focus on family and focus on my passion, so I let my passion flounder...and it shows. It shows in the snippiness and the mood swings. It shows in my impatience and my inexplicable sadness. It shows in my panic attacks and my burst of down right rage. So why do I continue to torture myself? I am so afraid I will never be able to balance the two and be successful at both. One will surely suffer, so in the end it is I who suffers. 

Comments

  1. It's time to follow your creative genius to where ever it can take you. You need to feed your soul in this way. Don't worry about being engulfed by it, everyone around you will have more peace if you follow your heart in all areas of your life - including this one!

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  2. Colleen! A message from Pat FRyklund -

    Put it out there, girl! I so understand everything you are saying...I also constantly wrestle with insecurity and ambivalance reagarding my creative impulse.
    The feelings come from so many different origins. One thing for true - if you were trained to "caretake" others instead of having your needs met, it's so hard to get over the guilt involved in spending time creatively. Let's talk about big, dysfunctional Irish (and Italian also in my case) families and how we tend to pigeonhole our family members! Don't you be drawing and day-dreaming, get up and help get dinner on the table, girlie!
    I can tell you this: Now that my children are out of the house, and I'm not working full time, I finally have blocks of time when I can work on my paintings - and usually I piss the time away anyway!

    One comforting practice I've tried to adopt is to always try to "observe" in a painterly way, even if I'm experiencing a "fallow" period in my creative path.I do think our creative life is like a river - sometimes it's a waterfall and sometimes it's an underground trickle - but it's always there, flowing.

    Blessings, Colleen!

    I'll call you maybe later today with an AVa order

    Please keep up the blog

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  3. My answer is to eliminate everything but the top two priorities you named (family and creativity)!

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