Holding On and Letting Go

So, yesterday, in the midst of what might be a combination of reasonable fear of the future and a little pity party for myself, I stumbled across this page on the Tiny Buddha website about overcoming the fear of loss. The first question really got to me: What are you afraid of losing by letting go?

Well, the angry tears sprang right to my eyes. Of course, I'm afraid of losing EVERYTHING. I'm afraid of us losing our house if we can't pay the bills or the mortgage. I'm afraid of having to pull Colden out of a preschool program with a teacher and friends that he absolutely adores.

I'm afraid of going back to work in a field that is a terrible fit for me, but just happens to be the only thing I'm "qualified" to do on my resume. I'm afraid of losing myself in a job that I hate, just because I need to pay the bills.

I'm afraid of losing my sense of myself as an artist. I'm afraid that I'll discover that I was never *really* that good at beading, anyway, and that's why I wasn't much of a commercial success.

To combat all these feelings of helplessness, I started cleaning up my desk/work area/beading area yesterday. Two hours, and I put away hundreds of tubes of seed beads, bags of beads, strands of gemstones, and discovered that lo and behold, my pearl drawer actually isn't as feeble as I had previously thought. (All those pearls were in other bags, waiting to be used for projects that I never got around to!)

I should have taken before and after photos, I know, but I was totally in the moment. No time for the camera. I just wanted to sit and sort through everything and get everything cleaned up and organized for the first time in months. I've got ideas, dammit, and I need to sit my butt down and actually make them come to life. My Battle of the Beadsmith piece showed me that, yes, I am still capable of creating crazy good beadwork.

Then, I sat down while Tom was doing bedtime with Colden (or attempting to do bedtime, anyway) and did some serious therapeutic list-making. Like what I need to do to re-launch my VanBeads business. What I need to do to get on top of things so I can go to Bead Fest next week.

And while I managed to get seven whole hours of sleep last night and I even managed to kick the excruciating headache I woke up with this morning, this whole in-between-not-knowing thing has me prone to fits of tears periodically.

The only thing I can do is just keep calm and bead on.  I've got my lists made. I sort-of have a plan. I'll need help, and I'll need to just put my head down and plow through it all.

So, for today, don't stop bead-lieving, my friends.

To be continued...