Birds & Blossoms

If you read March’s blog post, you’ll know that I am on a journey to learn about and learn to accept my neurodivergence. One of the most impactful ways this neurodivergence has shown up in my life is an incredibly stubborn need for control – I think it has been my way of trying to get a handle on a world that doesn’t inherently make sense to me.

In the past, I would have described my controlling tendencies as a burden or flaw. It’s so easy to tie a need for control and a perfectionism streak together, right? If you’ve ever grappled with this, it might look like waiting until a project is 100% realized exactly how you planned it before sharing it with the world, or holding yourself back from trying new things unless you can already forecast the outcome. To an outsider, it might look like you’ve done nothing because neither scenario is really possible, but inside you’ve been waging a war against your own confidence and intuition. (Not that I speak from experience or anything…)

This is where I get really cliche and say that if you’ve been feeling like this, I can’t recommend a therapist strongly enough! It took a few tries, but I found a great one, and she has been helping me untangle the reasonable from the unreasonable in terms of what I can expect myself to handle on a regular basis. In short, you can control your own actions and to some extent your environment, but you cannot control how others will react to you. It sounds simple, but anyone who has spent time feeling rejected or unseen will understand how truly difficult it is to let go of the need to please everyone.

Without going into all the nitty gritty therapeutic approaches, I’ll give you the bottom line: I no longer see “controlling” as a negative. It’s merely an aspect of my personality that I can use to achieve what I want out of this one short life we’re all given. It’s an impactful mindset shift: instead of trying to guess what everyone else wants to see before I’ve even started creating, I’m looking inward and crafting my life and my art studio around what feels right to me.

So, what does that look like for you, friend?

Well, whether it was on purpose or by accident, you’ve stumbled across the blog of someone who cares deeply about the world we share and the people we share it with. Right now that world is in chaos, but I am dealing with that by controlling the details of my artistic practice. How? Here are a few examples and why I’ve started in these areas:

• Learning to make my own paper: I try to recycle everything I can for my household of four (plus two furbabies), but I honestly don’t love how much energy it takes to collect and process recyclables on a large scale, either. Makes it feel like it’s only slightly better than adding to the landfill. So this year, I started collecting paper scraps and I’m actually learning to make my own paper! I’m incorporating misprints, flyers from my mailbox, the leftovers of my kids’ construction paper projects, and paper-based packaging materials. I have to learn a bit more about strengthening the integrity of my resulting paper sheets, but once I get that down? I am envisioning SO MANY cool uses for homemade paper, especially as the base for new block prints. I clearly have a lot to learn, but this isn’t too bad for a first try!

• Shipping with recycled materials: If you order some art from my shop, you’ll find out that I have skipped the branded packaging and instead reuse shipping materials whenever possible. I go back and forth on this in my head all the time, because the artist in me loves the idea of making the box as pretty as its contents. But ultimately, it feels more responsible to work with the products that already exist and have plenty of life left than to print brand new boxes, tissue paper, etc. I do include a cute note to my collectors, though, to give it that personal touch!
• Saving yarn and fabric scraps: I don’t often sell textile art, because I keep it as more of a hobby, but I do actually sew and crochet apart from painting and block printing and everything else you see on my socials or website! For the past couple of years now, I’ve been collecting all the scraps left over from projects and repurposing them. If I crochet an amigurumi, for example, I stuff it with the remnants from a pair of dresses I made for my kids. If I need to coat a new gouache painting in wax to protect the pigment, I cut a strip from an old tshirt to use as my applicator. I won’t claim to be perfectly zero waste, but I’ve gotten a lot closer.

So to summarize today’s ramblings in a (hopefully) useful manner, my goal as an artist is to celebrate and protect the world we share. Art is by nature a form of consumption, since it does take materials and energy to create something that didn’t exist before, but it is definitely possible to be mindful of what materials are used and how that energy impacts our environment. If you follow me, chances are that it matters to you just as much as it does to me, so I want you to feel confident that I am doing what I can to support our future just as much as our present. Also, if you have any other eco-friendly practices you’d like to share, I’d love to hear about them!