The days are getting shorter, and as my mornings darken so do my moods. I’m entering the part of the year where I suddenly wonder what the hell it is I’m doing with my life?
I have no time to feel this way at any other point in the year (thank goodness).
Enrollment for the summer camps starts in February, and from then on I’m aboard a runaway train of form filling, curriculum planning, researching, space renting, organizing, cleaning and buying.
May brings a slew of family birthdays that keep us all very busy, and the Spring markets, which I do a big printing and marketing session for.
In July and August, the exhilarating business of full time teaching begins, it is an all-encompassing business that doesn’t leave me much time to eat, rest, or look in a mirror, let alone begin any serious forays into self introspection.
Then comes the beginning of the school year in September, otherwise known as The Great Print to my family. While my rosy cheeked cherubs skip off to school daily, I go about the business of screen printing and sewing 1.5 million t-shirts on my dining room table, oh okay I exaggerate a little, but it does seem like that much at the time! This is when my family find me at my most annoying, the t-shirts take over the house, the dining room is inaccessible, there is an ironing board just where you don’t want it to be every morning, and bits of fabric and thread stick to the bottoms of everyone’s socks as they hobble around American Apparel boxes – I clearly need my own studio.
Then, all of a sudden the Fall festivals are done
The t-shirts are packed away, I have visited my bank, and…..hmm I’m not sure what I’m doing for a couple of weeks, I have stuff to do but it’s all unstructured. A couple of weeks of relative calm should be a good thing, after all it’s just a couple of weeks! But no, given a bit of free time and gloomy weather, my brain can be a dangerous tool.
“Oh god, what am I doing, why is it taking so long for my business to grow? Where do I go from here? It’s tough doing fairs with young children. Ugh, my website is terrible, I need to change that. I need to find shops to stock my products, how do I do that, and how will I manage to make enough shirts? Hand printing is so labor intensive, and I don’t have enough space, should I find a company to print them for me? I want a studio, Vienna is so expensive! I miss teaching right now, should I go back to teaching at a school? But what would happen to Noctiluna then? What do I do next? Hmm, where is this blog going? …And so on, and so forth.
See what I mean? I’m so used to having a deadline, that I crumble and lose perspective without one. So I’m not going to make a list or strategy for this one, I’m going to just BE. Those questions are there for a reason, so I’m going to stop asking them over and over, and spend the next few weeks answering them.
Oh, by the way, the Fairfax Fall Festival was wonderful, and the shirts did very well, so really brain, stop worrying!
