Monday, May 19, 2014

project 52:34


ink on watercolor paper
prints available here

Back on track and back on schedule - I missed a week, several weeks ago, and while I thought I'd be able to crank out two cards in a week, it didn't happen; rather, I managed to squeeze three cards over two weeks. Here's the second Woolf postcard of the summer. I've dogeared so many pages, and underlined so many passages that I could easily create nothing but Woolf cards for the rest of this project. I won't, of course, but I could. And I love how this self-portrait-with-Woolf turned out.

I loved this line, the sense of fullness and anticipation, and the idea of one's life as a kind of storehouse of days that must be dipped into, and run out eventually. But here, as I wrestle with the strain of unemployment (on our finances, on my self-esteem, on my happiness) and the frustration of the slow process of trying to shift career paths, I have recently been reminded that there are plenty of folks out there who look at me and see a person who is still very young. They don't see worries about the crippling six figures of student debt, they don't see exhaustion and burnout, they don't see grief over lost compass; they see a woman who has scarcely broken into her hoard. And I'm working to see that, too, to shift my own perspective as I wrench this train of my life onto a new track - or rather, perhaps I am shifting back to an old track. So much lately feels like settling back into habits, music, interests, pursuits, the person I was 10 years ago - the last time I was unemployed and searching for work, in fact. (And yes, once again, my fresh start began with freelance work. Hum.)

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