Let’s Do This (For Real)

By this I mean writing everyday. I lost my journaling mojo sometime in the past months. Heck, I may have lost it sometime last year after I finished the last journal notebook I had been using. I may have started a few new notebooks but they have been somehow abandoned along the long hard way of this pandemic.

So I want to restart before the year ends, and thus end the year on a more hopeful note.

I’ll start another notebook as a sketchbook journal, for both sketching/drawing/painting/collaging and writing. Just like my usual — something like a handmade illustrated book. I need the catharsis. I need the release. I need the refuge. I need a thinking and feeling space.

Most of this year has been a long transition. My household situation with my parents has drastically and painfully changed as I became sole breadwinner and having to support two senior parents with medical maintenance.

I have been repeatedly pushed to a corner so badly that I have now decided to seriously reconsider some form of dayjob employment. But on my own terms — remote or hybrid setup and the office must be within the business district closest to home. Flexible hours. Good pay for my senior-level expertise and skills.

One of the reasons that my journaling has fallen off the track is having to take on a lot of household chores and housekeeping tasks. I wake up in the morning already brimming with to-dos on deadlines — such as meals as well as running errands for medicines, supplies, laundry, etc.

It has taken me a long time to find some kind of groove. And even to this day I struggle with how to stretch my time and my energy.

At the heart of my constant anxiety is the stubbornness to keep being and becoming an artist. I cannot do a traditional full-time job because of it. Having opened myself to the call has fundamentally changed me in such a way that I could no longer live my days the same as before I heeded the call. Art and its making has become the core of myself, my faith, my life compass. I cannot take it out of the equation of any decision I will make for my life.

Writing my journal is part of my practice of art. By restarting it I am renewing my response to that call to be an artist. Even after I have repeatedly failed to sustain a regular practice I keep restarting. It is the only way for me to keep going — to keep choosing the path of the heart, the path of the spirit, despite all that say otherwise. It is the only way I can also be of any help to anyone. To give my best to anything I have to be at my best. And to be at my best is to feed that which keeps me alive, authentic, and hope-full.