Hello and welcome to my blog. My intention is to write about and discuss the duality in my life and how I reconcile it. I am an artist (writer, singer, dabbler in poetry), and a nurse (blood and guts always included). For years I’ve worked in healthcare while pursuing my creative calling. At times I’ve been happy, but often I’ve been enraged. I perceive it some kind of special injustice that I cannot earn a living as a full-time artist, and I will tell anyone who’ll listen that it’s wrong–it’s just wrong! (add stomping of foot here).
I know that I am not the first artist to feel this way and I will certainly not be the last. The need for a “day job” is the bane and savior of many a talented and aspiring creative. The trick is remembering who you really are. As I sit in yet another work meeting surrounded by people who look like they’ve worked in an office from the time they were born, it is easy to forget. These people are not like me. There is an air of the settled and resigned about them. They know their place in the world and are loath to try to change it.
But that’s not who I want to be.
Besides singing, change is the one constant in my life. I wouldn’t know who I was if I wasn’t continually responding to a shift in my reality. Most of the time I can roll with the punches. But every now and again, life clocks me in the beak and I crumple to the floor like a prizefighter down for the count. It is in these moments that I learn what I’m really made of.
And this is the stuff I want to write about.