Being All In

Birth of The Pink Teacup

Making sure I’m “all in” with my life is perhaps my most important personal quest.

Overcoming my fears, accessing joy, being truly uncensored in my art practice, and expanding my courage to find out what’s actually possible in life is what interests me. I don’t want to be on my deathbed one day and realize I didn’t fully live my life here on earth because I was afraid to be disappointed or rejected or judged—or some other minor emotion that I’d given too much credence to.

And while I may often fall off that “all in” horse, I always want to get back on.

2023 was one of the hardest years of my life. For big chunks of that time, it was important for me to stick very close to home, and I wasn’t sure if that was going to be our ‘new normal’ or something that would pass.

At some point during that year, I also realized I needed to double down on treating my art and my life as truly my own creation and completely let go of any residual “waiting to get a gold star from some remote artworld-gold-star-giver” that still lingered around the edges of my consciousness.

Needing to be home a lot also showed me how committing more fully to myself and my art might require a contradictory mix of diving more deeply into the silence and privacy of a more personal art practice and simultaneously expanding what I put out into the world.

A newsletter on Substack seems to offer a way to try out that “expansion” of my public self in the privacy of home. To also include the writer side of myself; the cultural critic side of myself; the mouthy, wise-ass side of myself; the passionate political side of myself; the wide-eyed spiritual explorer side of myself; the terrible cook side of myself (okay, not that side) and how it all wraps around a life obsessed with art—making it, showing it, and selling it.

As a result, I’ve spent the last several months thinking about what kind of substack newsletter that I’d like to create—something that could both feed my soul and my reader’s soul. Is soul feeding as a goal too high falutin’? I don’t know, but if you stick around, we’ll both find out.

In the meantime, I invite you to subscribe below—it’s free and there’s nothing to lose by trying it out and seeing what you think!

Or visit my About Page to learn more about all I hope to explore with you in this newsletter in order to decide if I might fit comfortably into your email inbox once a week.

P.S. Here’s a short video from several years ago about my creative journey to give you a sense of the path to ‘all in’ that I’ve been traveling. Perhaps some piece of it will resonate with your personal experiences as well. If so, please leave a comment, I’d love to hear.