FEAR OF BREATHING

Breath it in. Spring is near and with it comes the Neches River Festival, an annual reminder to myself that this is the time of year where my life story, for all intents and purposes, started. 

In 2012 I completed my first painting in five years after having been on hiatus from the art community for much too long. It was a rapturous moment for me. Beaming with pride, not at the (mediocre)skill or content of my work, but at the realization that work had actually been produced in completion; I hurried to enter it into the Neches River Festival art show at the Beaumont Art League and paid the admission fee of $15 with the quarters that I had intended to do laundry with later that day. I received a phone call the following week. “We need you to come to the reception, your entry has won second place.”

Second place meant the world to me. To place at all made me feel like an absolute champion---not in a challenge against my fellow artists, but against myself and my own habitually low expectations. The universe had set everything in place that day to shout into my ear one little message, “You can do this!”

For the next two years I pushed and I worked and I forced creation from my mind and hand, desperate to never allow a laps in production to occur again as it had those previous five years. 

While re-entering this beautiful way of life, old demons revisit me and crippling adolescent fears reemerge. A fear of facing failure. A fear of bringing creation into the world at the wrong place and time. A fear of drawing a blank---forever. A fear of constructing a mirror that teaches me that maybe I did not know myself as well as we thought I did; bringing into the world irrefutable and permanent physical evidence that I am indeed flawed.

But even greater than these types of fears is my desire and urge to contribute. To be heard and repeated. To breath in the knowledge and visions and ideas of peers and exhale my own. No matter how small or seemingly inconsequential.

All around this city I see the open sharing of ideas become increasingly more beautifully incubated by the emergence of social media and instant communication. There is a trend amongst genY and millennials toward a more intimate sharing of reference and recommendation that in decades past had fallen entirely into the grasp of aggressive advertisement. People all around are creating and producing and failing and recovering. Bravo to you. Bravo to the dreamers and the creators and the teachers and the talkers, and the failures and the martyrs and the learners and the rebuilders. Bravo for making this 85 square mile part of our world something great and something beautiful---and a place worth being in.

"In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak." -James Russel Lowell

If it has been a while sense you last created, whether for fear or apathy, please take a moment this week to fight yourself and win. And share it with your community. Cary sidewalk chalk to work, post a locally inspired meme, video yourself talking about your favorite bar, write something meaningful in a public place or online, yarnbomb a lamp post, ANYTHING! Just do it. And see how good it feels. Breath in the ideas of your peers and exhale your own. You may find yourself never breathing the same again. 

Deams for the future,

Betty