What makes you come alive?

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive.” – Howard Thurman.

I found this quote in a Shabby Princess newsletter article by Christy. This hits me at just the right time. A part of this struggle I have with scrapping right now stems from me, having forgotten why I do what I do. For me, it’s not about the artistry, although that doesn’t hurt at all. It’s always been about the story. The memory. All the gorgeous photos in the world mean nothing if there is no story to them. Generations from now are not going to look at that close up of your deep-in-thought child and know why that photo was important. To them, it will be just another pretty photo of someone in the family tree. But. Tell the story. Explain why this photo grabs you, and years from now, someone will be able to look at that and say, Wow. That’s what that photo meant, now I get it.

So what makes me come alive? Right now, it’s the writing. There is a reason why I currently have 5 active blogs, and several mini-blogs. It’s the writing. I just love writing, letting the emotion flow through my fingertips. There is something so satisfying about pressing that little “publish” button down there. If you check out my older layouts (which you really can’t, because truthfully, they are so crappy by today’s standards, they aren’t available online anywhere), you will see that journaling took a prominent place in all my layouts.

So what happened? How did I lose that?

I began designing.

Designing brought the need to advertise. And you can’t show off all those nifty little elements you spent hours crafting, on a page of text. But I’m not an artistic scrapper. So the need to show off doo-dads and thinga-ma-jigs stifled my natural tendencies. Plus, I could never seem to come up with anything as cool as the stuff in the gallery. Which one? Any gallery, pick one, any one. These days they are all filled with CTMs trying to pimp their choosen designer’s product with awesome artsy-fartsy layouts. All that awesome artsy wowed me to a point where I gave up trying to compete. I never did hire a CT because of the stress factor. I just did not want the stress and headache of putting out content on a consistent enough basis to support a CT. I really did not want to deal with sifting through applicants and picking people out and refusing others. So that left me back to square one, the need to advertise, and scrap photos to show off my kits.

So now that I understand what happened, how do I get that groove back?

Guess I just gotta jump in with both feet and start all over again.

So what makes you come alive?

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