My Work and The Near Future: Trust Me...

When I posted "Holiday Shopping and Coming Attractions" I talked about getting more content out in time for... well, holiday shopping... but not as much as one might expect at this time of year, and certainly not a flood of holiday designs. There are reasons for this that affect more than just the holiday shopping season, and I've given some thought to why I don't explain what's going on and what effect that might be having on the general perception of how serious I am about what I do. Even when I have addressed personal topics here, there's a lot I don't say. Honestly, my personal life isn't your problem, and this blog is about the art that I do. But my personal life is affecting my productivity, and I feel like I've strayed a bit from what I originally said I was going to do here. So before I make any changes to what passes for a "Mission Statement" on this blog, I want to explain things. It's a long post, and I won't be offended if you don't read it. (There is a "tl;dr" at the bottom of the post, though, if you'd like to skip down there.) But if you'd like an explanation for what's going on with Graphic Content by Rosa Amarilla, here it is.

What was this supposed to be "About", again?

When I started this blog, I put up an "About" page, both about the blog and me. Part of that page says,

"I didn't want to build a website to advertise my Zazzle gallery, and I didn't want to start what would essentially be a "spam blog". Nor do I want to Tweet myself to death about the gallery and lose all my Twitter followers. So I decided to start a blog where I could advertise my Zazzle designs and talk about what I've learned from doing this. I've made a lot of mistakes and learned from them. In fact, the whole "start a blog to improve your web presence" was one of the lessons I had to learn from having done this poorly for over a year. I also wanted to talk about the creative process... what inspires me, how I approach a project.

I want to strip down the personal aspects of how I do this and lay them out bare so others can see this is "real" work, but also very fulfilling work. You don't always see that when you only look at the finished product, all dressed up and pretty. What happens before that finished product is all... *drumroll*... naked pixels."

I don't feel like that's what I'm getting done anymore. At least not to the extent I meant to do that. There's a division where I talk about art and other artists, then I advertise that my stuff is in the store. I just don't seem to get around to talking about my own work as anything other than advertisements, though. And that is, obviously, not how I intended to do this.

So do it that way! What's stopping you?

This is where the personal issues come in, and I'm going to make this as brief as I can while still explaining how it's affecting my work. The two main things standing in the way are my own health, and my husband's health.

Due to a couple of chronic, yet manageable, health issues I keep a daily chart of things to help recognize larger patterns in my day-to-day health. Soon, I'll be going to the doctor to find out if some of the problems I've had with being able to "get caught up" this year are really due to slow recovery from psuedotumor cerebri, or if there is now something else affecting me. (Sometimes, one illness puts you in the risk group for another illness... ) Either way, it's something that can be managed, but we're going to need a different strategy. That's become apparent from going over the chart.

I am simply exhausted all the time. I'm eating well, getting an okay amount of activity, my blood pressure and blood sugar are good, and my doctor isn't unhappy with where my overall physical health is at this point and insists that I shouldn't be so hard on myself about my weight. I just can't get fully rested. I sleep well, and for a healthy length of time each night. Muscle aches won't fade, though, and even though I'm not sleepy I'm just always mentally tired. Depending on what I do in a day, physically tired goes with that. And it doesn't take much. Something as simple as doing my weekly grocery shopping becomes the one thing I can get done that day. Mowing my yard knocks me out for most of a week. Some days, I need to take an hour or so to sit down and rest after I get dressed for the day. Mental work does this to me, as well. My doctor already has me taking "rest time" every afternoon because I was stressing out to the point of chest pain over how much I'm unable to get done and how limited I feel.

Add to this my husband's health. He is a disabled Marine, and we've had a fight with the VA going on for a couple of years now. It's not so much a matter of proving our case, but being given an opportunity to prove our case. They've managed to completely avoid treating his condition, which has caused the condition to worsen over time. They've responded to inquiries from our Congressman with letters that essentially say they are aware that my husband has filed an appeal, they don't know when they'll be able to get to it, and our Congressman shouldn't bug them about it again for at least a few months. They've lost track of their copy of my husband's medical record from when he was active duty, so when they do address his condition they try to do so as if it were a new development. Then they realize it's not, that they don't have everything together, and that resets the entire process. They have him rated at a 20% disability level, even though at this point he goes through weeks at a time of being almost completely confined to bed, and he is severely limited in what he can do physically even when it isn't that bad.

In two years, because of the VA not treating him and making excuses for why it's not their fault that they haven't treated him, my husband's condition has gotten bad enough that, while we did expect he would eventually be this disabled, we had no reason to expect it to start getting this bad for at least another ten years.

This does not mean we haven't had help! Someone from the Wounded Warrior Regiment has done everything he is able to in his position to help us, and continues to work on getting representation for my husband in his appeal. My parents loaned us what was not a small sum of money to be able to buy a mattress that has helped decrease the frequency of "confined to bed" days, and taken the edge off of the general pain level. My sister has been amazing in helping us make the trips we've needed to for VA appointments, since those drives aren't possible for me and my husband's condition has rendered him unable to drive at all. And my mom has spent extra days on "Grandma Duty" with my neice and nephew so that my sister could make those trips with us.

If you ever want to do something to show thanks and support for the men and women who should be held up as our Honored Warriors, please support the Injured Marine Semper Fi Fund. They also help those from other branches who become wounded while serving with Marines, and there is just no way my husband and I will ever be able to adequately repay the help, kindness, and respect we've gotten from them.

So life is slowing me down... what am I going to do about it?

Part of the problem around here is what I've been doing to try to compensate for how things are slowing me down... I've been trying to hide it. I'm trying to keep putting out content as regularly as I can, even when that means that I delay working on a new piece by choosing to write a post. Or I delay that "Mysterious Other Project" I keep teasing you all with by choosing to put out something that won't take as long to get ready. Or I delay getting things I need to catch up on at home done because I know doing them will set me back even further on my art, and I don't want anyone to think I'm burning out on this and end up taking my work less seriously. Not when what I have done is starting to get noticed more! Trying to cover up my shortcomings is making me fall further behind.

My solution to this is I'm going to ask you to trust me for a while.

Updates to my Zazzle store are about to become even less frequent, and they'll mostly be new items in already established product lines when they do happen. Trust me when I say this does not mean I'm running out of ideas, or running out of steam when it comes to the whole Zazzle thing.

I'm still not revealing what this "Other Project" is yet. If I say I'm taking time to work on it, please trust that it does exist. "Working on the 'Other Project'", is not code for, "Spending a day being lazy while pretending I'm working on something". :-) It's just not something I want to explain until it's ready to be made public, and while there is a lot of groundwork for it that I'm working on laying, it should really help condense the amount of work I need to do each week and allow me to keep pushing forward with my art and do the Zazzle thing. If I spend a little more time on that, and a little less on what I have been doing, I believe I can have this ready for January 2010.

I've always made an effort to explain why I'm not writing a full post on the days that I've had to skip here. If I start skipping days and not explaining, please trust that I'm not losing interest in writing this blog, and that regular posting will return. There will always be at least one post a week unless something happened to our internet, my computer, or me. If anything like that did happen, a way would be found to post a notice.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

I enjoy what I do, but I do also take it seriously as work. That means I'm not abandoning it, and I do feel I sometimes owe people an explanation when I need to cut back or change the way I do things. One of the strengths of doing this on my own, as opposed to traditional employment, is that I can adjust things when they need to be adjusted. If work and life are getting in each other's way, I have the power to move them around and get them to flow together again. And that's really what this post is all about... making sure that it's clear that this is an evolving thing, and that I sometimes need to make changes to keep it going. I'm not burning out or giving up. Trust me on that. :-)

Comments

[Gymshoes]

Don't be too hard on yourself. People understand---even before you wrote this explanation---that things happen in life which sometimes puts your creative plans on a back burner, simmering. The people who are avidly following and buying your creative work are *just like you*: they have lives that get way too complicated at times, that don't allow them to keep up with everything they want to do (and be). They have sick kids, sick pets, deadlines that are impossible, bosses that are impossible, schedules that have them two places at once, cars that break down, appliances that break down...and they suffer when they pay less attention to their health than you do to yours. ;-) Life isn't perfect, it isn't perfectly paced. Artists have all the same stressors as everyone else, but ultimately they have their art and the joy in creative expression, which never goes away. This also buoys up non-artists who are given a lift by your designs. :-) Even if you don't have something new *today*, the work you've done on Zazzle is finding new fans and continuing to give a lift to those who've bought stuff. They may have bought the tees and sneakers last month, but they're wearing them *today*, so your designs are going places and doing things even if you're having an "off" day. :-) Zazzle travels: it affects the people wearing it and seeing it. You may even see one of your designs walk in one of these days when you're sitting in a waiting room thinking about how you'd rather be zazzling. ;-)

[Rosa Amarilla]

Sounds like things my husband and doctor say. :) More than anything, I'm suffering from "Sick and Tired Syndrome"... sick and tired of being sick and tired. So, yeah, I'm probably being too hard on myself about it. Being honest about what's slowing me down and making some changes should help with that, though. Adjusting things so that I can manage it all better will mean not beating myself up over not doing better. :)