This has been really hard...

I'm not sure if I should be posting this out there in the world for anyone to see. Usually I just put these personal thoughts and reflections on paper or on my laptop for me to peruse at a later date...or not at all. But I think it's okay to let this out a bit and express myself without turning this into a pity party.

I think I've made a big mistake in coming home. Not in the actual act of coming home but in the motivation. I feel like I've been recreating my life here and it's not a life that I want to recreate. I feel like I've compromised my ideals and my goals so much by coming home, not because I wanted to but because I was chasing something with someone that was a fiction. I was going after a relationship that I knew, deep down, was over. I just needed confirmation which I never (I still haven't in firm terms) received. I've believed for so long that if I worked on myself - worked on being a cultured, educated, creative, compassionate person -that things would turn out alright. That I would have a good life and find success on my own terms and feel...I don't know...fulfilled. I've worked very hard to live the life of an artist and, as I sit here to today writing this, I'm realizing that I've put that aside. I've been scared of being alone and not being intimate with someone. I've been distracted by wanting to feel attractive and desired by others. I realize that I've lost my way. This feeling of compromise has eroded my self-confidence and my feeling of worth and my ability to do what I want to do with my life. How can I be true to anyone, true to the world, if I can't be true to myself? How can I stand in front of a room full of students and tell them that they can achieve their dreams and goals if I'm not actively doing the same? How can I expect to be attractive to anyone who values what I think is important if I appear to be desperate to give up these values so I can feel affection? I can't.

I need to get back on track. I have to get out of my rut. I have to find value in me and trust in my abilities and resume the trajectory I was on before I came back home. I may be geographically in one place but that does not mean that my spirit and my work has to stay rooted in this one place. The life of an artist is hard. I don't want to let the world, societal pressure, self-doubt close in on me and prevent me from living my life; my full life. I'm sure there will be sacrifices that I may have to make along the way but I do not want to look back and say that I didn't put up a fight. I don't want to look back and know that I let things get the best of me. I want to look back on my accomplishments and feel proud and in the end, when it comes right down to it, I want to know that I was true to myself. I have to be true to myself. Whether I have a family or not, whether I have a primary intimate relationship or not, I have to do what keeps me alive and that is expressing myself with and through my art. Yes, getting paid for it is necessary to survival but being a creative person, an engaged person, is a state of being unto itself.

No more feeling sorry for myself. No more wishing that things were different and that I made different choices. I'm 32. It's time for me to grow up and take control again. I have to get off my ass, stop complaining and focus on what I can get done in the moment. No one else can live my life for me. If I want my life to feel full, I have to go out and fill it.