Confidence, Art and Life

I have a weird attitude. I may be giving bad advice sometimes by coming from a completely different perspective. Or I may be giving good advice where it's needed most. I could be doing both in the same paragraph, depending on who's reading it. So take this as an essay both in general about art and specifically on pastels, because pastel has become my heart-medium.

Pastels are instant gratification. I want to paint it, bang, I do. There it is. Big and bold and visible across the room. I paint small for a pastelist except on very good days but pastels make it possible for me to paint at all most times, because of that speed and power.

This essay is in answer to a forum post where a new friend said something that made me think. I had mentioned I didn't have the space to paint large complex still lifes, so I've been doing small simple studies. I'm drifting into the 6" square format of the Daily Painters and thoroughly enjoying it. This friend compared that to my dipping my toe in the pool, then wrapping the towel around my hips and walking away calling that my daily swim.

Well yeah, actually that is my daily swim. The fact that I was able to do it at all makes it a good day. On a bad day my daily swim would be a two inch long gesture sketch of my cat while he sleeps, something I could probably do without even looking at him because I've done it hundreds of times. He said it was a mystery because other painters with even less space managed to do larger, complex still lifes.

Well, the mystery is solved. I did answer and tell him it wasn't just space but disability. Because he's right. If I was abled, I wouldn't mind getting up and sweeping ALL the food stuff off the dresser, set up a still life, sketch and photo it, live out of boxes for eating for a while till the painting's done (or just work from the photo) and then put all the food back. About like the kind of vigorous housemate who lets the apartment turn into a wreck and then every month or two blitz cleans it over one weekend - and saves time for video gaming overall because that blitz was relatively easy for him.

Heck, I might still live in a place too small for complex still life and just go out to sit on the sidewalk and paint a window display in a shop instead, because that caught my eye. Even make more than one bus trip to get back to the antique shop to do that. There's more than one way to scan a cat.

I adapted to physical disabilities before I knew I had them. This has shaped my attitudes about everything in life and I was constructively lazy for most of it so far. Everything I do to make myself comfortable has an immediate self rewarding effect that I'll actually do more. Someone abled and overworked might find comfort irresistible and prefer to sleep or watch TV or socialize when they could be painting and would enjoy painting if they gave themselves a bit of a push to do it. But someone who's always in pain and usually too tired to live is bored stiff with just watching movies or laying in bed and seizes on any moment when activity's possible as a break in the misery. This is the truth of my life and why I always dive for my Comfort Zone.

It's in my Comfort Zone that I'm able to do anything at all. Add extra challenges onto the logistics of trying to live in my body and chances are I'll wind up using up what little body energy I have in creating the setup or getting out the materials.

So maybe Comfort Zone is a problem like weight loss. Many people are a little over and could stand to lose a few pounds, but you really do not want to suggest that to an anorexic. They might push it to the point of death if you do. It's never a temptation to just do nothing, it's always an unpleasant frustration. I cannot keep the pace of the abled and I find my limits in unexpected and unhappy ways if I don't follow my intuition on what I can do right now, this day, this hour, this weather and what I ate and who said what to me online earlier.

Stress comes into it too. Stress isn't good for people in general, but most people need a certain amount of it to be happy, a comfortable pace. Some people actually thrive on a moderately high level of stress and excitement, depends on personality and metabolism and culture.

Fibromyalgia means that emotional stress, even something like reading the wrong news story at the wrong time when it gives me a shock, will knock me into total exhaustion and physical agony. Crippling pain washes over me. This will also blur my vision, wreck my memory to the point I sound like an Alzheimers patient, leave me forgetting my phone number or not finding something right in front of me. In that state I don't paint well even if I push myself hard and try to paint.

There were some kinds of work I could do in that state but all were left-brained rote activities. The entire 1980s were my "pain robot" years.

That said, I think there's something strange that goes on between attitude and confidence.

I'm continually surprised at how the level of confidence painters have is almost disconnected from their skills. It's not like the best painters beat themselves up more than beginners. It's more that some people are really happy with their own art and others not.

I am usually happy with my art even when it's flawed, because there'll be something about it that I like. I may want to redo it later but probably not by reworking on the same piece. I'll probably apply the critique later to some completely different subject, but if I'm not happy with something I am as likely to be wrong as when I'm thrilled with it.

But I have also got other challenges in life a lot heavier than whether a painting works or whether it's finite perfection. I strive to improve overall so that my worst come out pretty well and someone will like them. I reached a point of liking my own drawings very early in childhood after a long life study of one pet and from there just assumed I'd keep getting better at difficult subjects, but I approach them slowly. I also don't even do them until I've got all the tools I need to do it right sometimes.

But, back to the physical. When I paint, it makes me happy. Especially when I go right into my Comfort Zone and choose a subject with bright colors like a macaw or hummingbird or flower or fruit, or a cat, any cat, a landscape without any other people in it or signs of human habitation where I know I'm not going to get hassled by anyone and can amble through at my own pace without running into those abled hikers with their huge backpacks warbling about "It's only another mile or so" to the water. Better not be or I'm dead. I like to see the water right in the scene.

I like those moments with wildlife where sitting still long enough lets them relax and understand I'm not hunting them, so they wander out and show themselves close. Wild cats especially but most wildlife too. I didn't get to do it often but I have had some moments to remember and love documentaries.

What happened is that because I couldn't run and play as a little boy, I got very good at reading, writing and drawing, the things that were still fun when you sit still for a long time. I did and do lots of little drawings that can be finished before I'm too tired to do it well. I learn a lot and over the past few years have learned so much more than I ever expected, WC is tremendously stimulating.

I get decisive when I paint. A mark is there when I've done it. Removing marks in any medium takes a lot more time and effort than just taking it for what it is and moving on, dealing with it by changing what I do next. That's just a physical fact. Anything that makes it slower and harder to finish a painting means I'm less likely to even manage to do that painting, so my reworking paintings usually isn't cost effective.

I have seen great painters brag about throwing away 19 out of 20 paintings they do. This makes me cringe. I can't count the number of times I hated something I finished, but other people loved it, and then years later I found out why and that what I thought was my worst was actually my best because I'd leaped beyond myself and intuitively practiced a principle I didn't consciously understand at the time.

The thought of wasting that much effort is horrifying too, but on body energy I'm on a budget something like a single parent of five kids working a part time Wal-Mart job. All physical activity takes five times the body energy given my skeleton, that's a limit I had from birth. I took much longer learning to walk than other children and was extremely clumsy being cross eyed on top of it, the eye operation helped but didn't change all of it.

So if I had to cross the room to get more paper, I did so five times. If I have to get out a different box of pastels, I did it five times. If I set up the easel or stand at it, I did it for five times as long and my scoliosis kicks in. Between pain and spasms, I can get too excited and push my back to where I'm stuck with days of bed rest. I have to stop at the first twinge, so slight it doesn't even register as pain, or I will pay bitterly later on.

But maybe for someone passionate and physically vigorous, brushing off a huge piece of Kitty Wallis paper 20 times till they're emotionally satisfied isn't a big deal.

I am currently trying to settle in and rearrange my life to be able to paint more, paint better, paint larger someday. That's a slow process and a good deal of it is a matter of literally rearranging furniture with the help of home care workers. I manage to paint when I can't even take a bath without help, because having help in the bath means I have some energy left to paint the next day. Literally the actions involved in scrubbing my body are sit-ups my back won't tolerate. I can manage two to wash my hair and if it ever gets so bad I can't keep that up, I'll get them shaving my head because I dislike other people washing my hair.

I live on disability for a reason. I'm hoping to get back to painting for a living, or more realistically supplementing old age Social Security by painting on the side. If I wasn't disabled at all, I would have made a good living as a painter probably from the time I was 20 and started getting cash money for little pen and ink dragon drawings. I'd have had the energy to do enough of them and most of all, paint them bigger and colorful and get to enough conventions, do the full sheet starscape and nebula beyond craggy moonscape astronomicals too, live in the sci-fi fandom but drift toward fine art on the side.

It's also screamingly funny to me to look at different art markets like the museums-gallery fine art circuit, the sci-fi fantasy fandom, the graphic novels and murals style of modern art, and see that each one has its own expectations about subject and ideas and "originality" which usually means "Do some old familiar favorite really well and be good enough at this style we can tell it's you without the signature. Share what the dragon or water lilies or mountain goat means to you."

Some people here like tough critique and most of all prefer to see flaws pointed out, because they are tired of compliments and lean toward perfectionist, get disgusted if they feel something's wrong and can't put their finger on why. Or don't trust it if it looks good.

Others blossom under the support. WC excels at both, the critique guidelines here are just broad enough to make it very comfortable for both the tough-critique "exciting challenge" crowd or those that thrive on support and encouragement. I got a lot of encouragement as a kid because sitting still made me get way ahead of any healthy child. I had the time and boredom to do it.

So what works for me may not work for you. Or it may work well for you. Please don't throw away your paintings! Just sell them to other people who like them, they may be right, they sure are for themselves and it'll make them happy. Let it go and use the money to get more paper. Remember that your worst is still way beyond what a lot of people can do at all and they'll still love it as much - just as they do still love the one they bought a decade ago that's not as good as what you do now.

There are always better painters. It's open ended. If you're up in that range you're already so specialized in your own style that the others that great are doing things you'd never think of doing, and so there's something cool to learn, including what you'll invent tomorrow. Or what happens when some chemist creates a new pigment or manufacturer an entirely new medium. There is more to learn about painting even in one medium than any one artist could learn in a human lifetime or even a dozen lifetimes because all of us are also always inventing. Art is not a zero sum game.

I think some ideas, like ranking it best and worst, are bad when applied to it because it gets so subjective and holistic. Your personal taste is going to apply to all of it and so does that of your buyer or gift recipient. Your skill at communicating with those art viewers is only going to increase, though sadly physical illness, pain and injury can reduce it. But that can be worked around. Skill can compensate for lost capacities.

I might get more detailed again if I got prescription glasses. Or I might not because I'm coming to enjoy working loose and concise. It's all fun.

What's the point of this essay? You have to judge for yourself. It's real obvious to me now that yeah, I don't do things the way other people do. What's easy for you is nearly impossible for me, but some things that would be hard for you are stone easy for me. I've had one major still life painting planned for almost a decade now and may well paint it someday - little by little by little and without actually owning any of the objects. It involves an expensive wooden sideboard, a lot of lovely crystal and glass, a mirror and a beautiful white cat sound asleep in the middle of it. Which of these things is going to destroy all the others? Guess!

If I had that stuff I sure wouldn't pose the cat in the middle of it but I may get good enough at planning paintings and rendering those objects to put it together entirely by design, capture my Siamese in the right pose, work out the reflected colors on the white fur and remember the exact hue all of it gets in the mirror because the slightly greenish glass cools everything. It'd be a fun painting. It won't be watercolor even if it'd work in watercolor because Getting Older is not going to make me more capable of stretching a full sheet of watercolor paper. Its most likely going to be pastel on sanded paper. It won't be realism. It will be impressionism.

It's simultaneously going to wow with its beauty and shock you with the thought of all that broken glass a moment later, make you want to reach in and gently catch the pitcher, pick up the kitty fast, if I do it right you will have about a 50-50 chance of saving the situation provided you know cats and that cat trusts you like your cat does. I could remove Ari from a pile of breakables on a good day and I'd move the at-risk pitcher before removing him - in that direction in case he decides it's Rowdy Cat Play Time.

But that's the fun of it. I see that paintin gin my mind and slides of it in watercolor, in oils, in oil pastels, oil sticks, oils by painting knife, pastel realism, pastel impressionism, all different ways, exist where you can't see them. And someday I'll have the skills to do it. Then sketch. Then get to work on it about once or twice a year till it's finally done. Not something I can live on, but it will get done or I'll die first. And that's how my life is shaped.

Know yourself. Know what you do and what you don't and why. Stop beating yourself up. Neither you nor your art has to be perfect. Perfection only exists in finite unliving things and art that's too perfect isn't, because good art has and shows the imperfections in life. Compensate for your barriers and weaknesses, play to your strengths and do what's right for you, because that's also where your style comes from. Past a moderate level of skill, others who know you can tell it's yours before you sign it.

Work and Play

Here's the quote from Harley Brown that inspired this entire essay.

“HOW IT HAPPENED
At the start of my adult life, I felt like I was thrown into the middle of a lake and had to swim for shore. Any shore. No time to worry if people liked me or my art; or if what I was doing was "worthy." I'll tell you why:

There were two things I knew for sure: I wanted to be a full time artist for the rest of my life. And I didn't want to "work" for a living. Whatever else has happened, I've stuck to those very goals. Yet, I really don't give myself a pat on the back; there are many who've worked as hard but had tougher obstacles to overcome. Many of them, my heroes.

In retrospect, I did what I did with a naive young mind that didn't, (thankfully,) understand the Real World. I still don't understand the real world. Thankfully. Harley Brown”

Gee, that’s familiar. His words are different, but I could swear that came out of my old spiel when I worked as a street artist in New Orleans. I’d grin at the tourists and say “I used to work hard at a real job in Chicago, then I moved down here and decided I’d rather play all day and paint. Would you believe it? I eat better and I’ve got more actual luxury than when I was living on ten times as much, because I’m not blowing it all shopping in order to get over the stress.”

What happened to that attitude? What happened to that feeling that left me so crushed I literally didn’t want to draw or paint at all until 2004 when I decided I might enjoy it again if I kept it strictly a hobby?

I fell down and I couldn’t get up. I walked too far dragging too much stuff because I didn’t understand that all physical activity takes me five times the body energy. I moved too far from my setup spot. I dreamed of getting an electric golf cart or something as a convenience when that literally would have saved my career.

I also fell down emotionally the very first day that I had no sales at all. Up to that point, street art was self reinforcing. I trusted that I would get at least one or two sales every day I got out there. I could budget anything I wanted by how many days I wanted to work, versus stay home and do something else including loaf around. (Read, sick days that I thought I was just being lazy.)

This week I made a very minor mistake that brought up that big realistic fear - that if I don’t do this right, I will get back on the Boom and Bust cycle. Do my best, fall down flat and be unable to continue. As well as so burned out I don’t even want to draw a cat gesture for years.

Thursday my prints rack arrived. I got excited and overestimated how much I could do. I was so excited about having my license and everything I need to go out and do street art that I was also trying to get several days worth of preparation done by morning and then get a full night’s sleep. I got all worked up about it, Thrills and Chills, adrenaline can be read either as excitement or fear.

Well, when it's a mix of excitement and fear when both have good sound reasons, that can get a bit stressful. Stress + Fibromyalgia = Sick Day.

Instead of a full night’s sleep, I was too stressed to sleep at all and went to bed at six in the morning only to get up at nine in the morning unable to sleep. I didn't cut any mats because resting till I felt up to getting up, I stayed up too late to get it done and still sleep that night. So I had to call it off and reschedule. No deadline now. I'll go out when I have everything done.

Instead of my glorious debut on the Street Artist Program, I had a lousy sick day in which I did nothing but sit around fielding panic attacks over everything that could go wrong. Then writing an email to a friend and deleting it over and over for eight hours.

Doing that solved the problem. I did not bother sending her the 30,000 word long version. I needed to pretend that my sensible friend would read it in order to be "thinking it through from another person's point of view."

This is a comeback trail from the biggest failure of my life - something that I threw everything I had into getting past the obstacles and keeping it afloat. I was happy in that job but I hit too many crises and bang, down I went. I have spent all the years since then figuring out why I couldn't keep doing it.

I left out one of the big reasons. Stress + Fibromyalgia = Sick Days. Art does not sell on Sick Days. Or on stressful unhappy worried days. Street art sells best when I am happy to be there, thrilled to see a customer, delighted with my project, overflowing with real contentment. My art is happy and has affectionate undertones. My portraits, while not flattering in any technical sense are emotionally flattering. I look at the subject positively to bring out the best in their personality, so they come out looking good with every wrinkle and wart because those became lovable.

I have to actually feel like being with people and painting, even if what I'm selling isn't portraits.

I didn't take morale into account. Street Art was self reinforcing. Instant Cash doing something that's legal and fun, goofing off instead of actually working and being paid for it, what's not to love? That's a daily reward. If I got even one sale, walking away with more money than I went out with made me happy and made me want to do it again. Because I got that money for nothing. I did not need to suffer for it. I didn't have to Care About The Money. I wasn't doing it just to Plod Through a Hated Day Job.

I was goofing off having fun and getting paid.

Then I sold art to people who by their circumstances have up to a year's spending money in hand that is now budgeted for Have Fun and Goof Off. We are on the same wavelength, me and the tourists.

Half the natives I knew in New Orleans grumbled about "God, I hate tourists.” They always ask directions and assume you know, they don't dress or act the way you do. Heck, they're on vacation having fun while you're stuck working for a living and then they demand your time. Oh and they're rude too. (Some of that is "They're not from here and their idea of Polite does not match yours.")

I met a few annoying people but I didn't categorize all Tourists as Rude. Most of them were nice to me. They at least complimented my art. They looked at me like I was a tourist attraction same as the famous churchyard where duels took place. Fair enough, that's what I was doing! This was great and I loved them. It took genuine extreme bad mood behavior for me to dislike a tourist.

I didn't get mad at "Where is the Cafe du Monde?" when it was right over there in sight from where I was standing. They never saw it before. That's a reasonable question. Not everyone's eyesight is good enough to read a sign from half a block away.

Then came the summer bad season, when I had a hard time making my nut - earning out my necessities at the top of the month. Summers were when I had zero sales days. Some summers I didn't have many because I still had that morale. I blew it off as “well, this is the off season and I have to get out more days to earn enough to make it.” I just didn't get much beyond necessity and had to physically overwork in order to make it.

The year it started to take off, when my art was getting into galleries and I'd already put two years on the waiting list for an "A" license, I had a personal crisis with a family member. It knocked me back hard with fibromyalgia symptoms. I had too many sick days, so I was reduced to "force myself to go" on bad days during tourist season. Every time I got a zero sales day, it was harder to make myself get up and go. By the time summer came, I could not earn enough during the month to survive.

I moved farther away from my setup to have cheaper rent because I had less money. So I was putting in extra physical effort to get out and work with less joy in it every time after that crisis. I took in annoying roommates in order to survive because I wasn’t earning enough to live by myself. I didn’t have the physical energy to clean my apartment and got in fights with those roommates about housecleaning, when they included slobs.

Annoying things that had been tolerable, that I'd blown off as no big deal, became overwhelming depression. That became a vicious cycle. If anything bad happened, that day turned into a zero sales day. I was running on the edge in terms of physical energy and financial survival and I was way over the edge in terms of emotional resilience.

Friday was when I sorted all that out and figured out what happened.

I have figured things out like this before. I used to be able to live within my budget whatever it was, but never able to save up money either in general or to get something big that I couldn't afford on one paycheck or windfall. I solved that when I was living with Kitten in a practical way. I decided I wasn't going to buy any Terry Pratchett books - my favorite author - unless I put $50 into savings first. If I did, I could go to Amazon and buy a book with what, under $10 of my spending money?

The game worked. I lost my savings to using it for crises several times and would like to save up to the point where a crisis doesn't obliterate it. I'd like to have some savings beyond the "for emergencies" level. An arbitrary reward system does it.

I might not have been gradually demoralized by bad days or bad customers if I could have counted on a self set reward every single day that I had the will power to get up, grab my stuff and go do it. The natural rewards of "I get to paint in the pretty place" are real too but if I'm hurting for money, fear overshadows that simple pleasure. I have to make any no-sale days that are just Plein Air on the Wharf worth doing and play the averages between "good days" and "bad days" loading it for success.

Literally the happier I am, the better my art is and the more customers buy it. There's something beyond just selling in an art career. Every sale is a thrill, a reaffirmation that “I’m an artist.” I'm sharing that thrill. Tourists who do something else for a living and did not spend years learning how to draw or paint have met a real artist. They saw me start from a blank piece of paper and create a beautiful artwork from scratch the way a master does anything well. They came into my studio. If they ever had any fantasy of learning to paint and asked questions, they became art students on the spot and got a lesson with their painting.

We, me and my client, are both enjoying ourselves in that moment. A warm human memory is going home with them along with the beautiful painting, which has an emotional undertone of "I love doing this and you are so awesome, you have great taste for spotting how cool this painting is. You bought real art instead of just going to the mall, so you're refined and sensible. This is real value, not junk. Also, you have talent. Keep sketching. Remember how I did that trick with the eye highlight. You will draw that well someday too whether it’s for fun or you want my job someday. The more the merrier."

All the good reasons why people buy art, from the fantasy of "I might have just got a pre-famous Van Gogh" to "God, that was fun" associate with something that's already beautiful in its own right. It’s a place or a face that they love. All my happiness in the process goes into the color harmonies and shape choices and what details I chose to focus on whether I’m conscious of that or not. So it’s a face or a place they love seen at its best on a good day. No wonder they fall in love! They were already in love!

I've never been able to do a Hard Sell, to put the money first. That's antithetical to why I'd rather paint and write than work. I can't "Close the sale" when a customer's not sure. I take no for an answer, that doesn’t work for selling insurance or encyclopedias or anything else I tried in pure sales jobs.

What I can do is a soft sell letting the real beauty and my real good mood turn into reality. They fell in love and when they get home it's still the painting they love, so they're happy. They got good value for what they paid and had a happy experience. I think sometimes I made their vacation, sent them off in a good mood that made the fancy seafood dinner taste better and the music at the blues bar more fun.

I have to care about the experience more than whether that customer buys or someone else does, trusting that if I'm having a good time someone will buy. A lot of times people want to and don't have the money. They went to a bar last night or they bought something in the shops first. They dithered and wished, wandered off and didn't come back. I didn't resent that. Heck, sometimes they rebudgeted and came back.

Putting those two things together, I’m going to manage my morale as much as my time and body energy. The “conditional self reward” system of Terry Pratchett books for savings worked. So I’m going to choose something small that I want to enjoy very often. It should be something I won’t get bored with.

So when I go out to sell art, I’ll budget five dollars for something from the convenience store. They have donuts and breakfast pastry, fruits, corn dogs, genuine Mexican Flan with Caramel Sauce in a little dessert cup, food treats. I can choose to stick the five bucks in my pocket if I’d rather eat hot oatmeal before going down and don’t feel like convenience food, that might stack up to pocket savings of another $10 Pratchett book.

Instead of making the treats specific, I’ll just budget some lunch money as a self reward. It also means that if I get hungry while I’m out there, a snack from a vendor on the spot to stay happy and have something to eat when I’m starting to get sick from hunger makes a sale later on a lot more likely. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt to also brown-bag it. If my sales even match what I did during the off season, they will become an important income stream to fund websites and self publishing and art supplies and business. If I like a restaurant down near the area I might save up my treats to eat out whether I sell or not.

I used to reward myself for good days by eating out before going home. I think that’s a good idea too. When I celebrated making my nut, I worked a little harder to get ahead. I did that as early as I could during the month so that I’d have the choice of either working harder for something big I wanted, or staying home to work on things that don’t pay as fast.

I honestly don’t know if I’ll “make my nut” within a month of starting the Street Artist program. It’s unlikely unless I count it by smaller goals. The first “made my nut” goal is “My license renewal is in the bank.” That’s minimal success for this season. Next level: business expenses and savings for contingencies at stepped levels. Then “a month’s rent in the bank,” and “rent plus bills in the bank” and eventually reaching the $2,000 maximum savings allowed by Social Security.

That is as much cushion as I can put between my leap to self employment and phoning up to quit my day job. It’s good for two months of minimal rent and expenses. Then either I’m making enough to live on every month and take the plunge, or I maintain that savings more or less around that level and keep throwing it into the business till I do earn enough to live on.

There are plenty of things I can invest in. A giclee printer and archival inks and paper, so I’ve got prints sales supplementing originals. Websites with affiliate links. Having my novels edited professionally before sending them to publishers or self publishing - a worthwhile expense either way.

I’ll decide the next milestones as I reach them, because I don’t know the details of my path to self employment. I’ll just keep moving in that direction until I get there and continue rewarding myself for every small achievement along the way. That will keep me going when the going gets tough and remind me why I love this lifestyle, why I’m goofing off for money instead of just going to work like a normal person.

When it’s a job instead of a hobby, that kind of planning and maintenance is one of my tasks. I enjoy it though. Deciding what I’m going to do always gives me a sense of empowerment.

I always plan for the worst case and the best case. Reality usually comes out somewhere in between. What could go wrong in the best case? I could earn so much that I’m bang, off Social Security in the first month I do it having to deal with working out my taxes and withholding and recalculating and changing my life in a major way without being sure if that level of sales will continue.

If I want to be sensible, I’ll pay attention to the seasons and make sure to have $2,000 in the bank. That’s either two months of so sick I can’t do anything or tap it to make up the difference in slow times and restore it as soon as things are better. Loans to self are repaid at a level with immediate business expenses like getting more mat board or more paper when I run out.

Whatever I’m doing, whether it’s keeping up a Nanowrimo word count or cleaning my room or building my self employment, getting ahead makes me want to do more of it. Catching up if I’m behind is emotionally hard and emotions affect this job. So getting ahead and rewarding myself tangibly for every step toward getting ahead will be my best shot at my year-goal.

I want to be self employed again in 2012. I don’t have to be over the poverty line, that’s another milestone and will take some planning to be able to get medical coverage. In that time I don’t want to worry about rent, food, bills or business expenses. That’s the big goal. It’s not minimal. What’s minimal on the Big Goal is “Closer to it than I am now.”

I need to know this market and its seasons. I need to learn my pace in this better climate, how many physical effort days I can do in a month with the rollator, later with a power chair. I need to find out how to pace a week and develop habits that let me get a full night’s sleep the night before an outing.

Yeah, I’m scared. It takes more effort to get up and go on a comeback trail than it does to tear off into a new adventure that might be wonderful. That’s okay though. If what I wanted was to never worry about paying the rent and bills again, I’d hang it up. I’d donate all my paintings to various charities and any proceeds of any of my books and just live on SSI doing whatever I wanted.

That’s okay though. Thrills and chills are both adrenaline and moving around burns that into activity instead of backfiring as aches. By the time I get off the short bus at the lottery spot, I’ll be ready. This is going to be awesome!