I am an artist.

a declaration, a prayer, a spell

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I can’t identify as an artist.
Why i put “art” in quotation marks in the tagline for my newsletter.
Why i downplay my creative world by calling my drawings silly, little, weird ¹

Why i belittle the thing that sets my soul on fire.

I would never speak this way about my child or my partner—the other two great loves of my life.

So then, what the fuck?

Why has it been so hard to claim, own, embody myself as an artist?
Why can’t I kneel down and worship at the altar of my own self? No one else is going to. No one else is going to recognize this thing in me if i can’t even be brave enough to name it. This is not the path to empowerment or greatness. This path will not lead me home—I will wander the woods aimlessly forever without the incantation. Artist.

Parts of my brain understand what is happening. My shadow-self, stories that were told to me when i was young, utterings of miserable people taken as fact. A lot of unlearning has had to take place to get here. Re-prioritizing. Cracking open.

And of course there’s fear. oh fear.
Fear of the judgement that comes along with declaring yourself. That there is someone out there with a clipboard and a chart, on their way to see if I’m worthy enough for the title.
Fear that if I call myself an artist, and then fail, the world would know how badly I want it. The secret would be out that i tried so hard. And failed.

But.
Every move I’ve ever made, all the big choices in my life, I’ve done with fear whispering in my ear. And I gleefully flip it the bird and jump off the cliff.

So here I sit, feeling bold. Feeling like I need an invocation. A beacon. Like I need to cast a line into the swirling largeness of the universe, a thread for the fate I desire to slip down so it can find it’s home in the recesses of my body.

I am an artist.

I am an artist.

I am an artist.

<3

1. Not that they aren’t, its just that when I say it I don’t mean it as a compliment.