Happy.
The passion and the pivot
I’ve reached a milestone. It’s my birthday— and, more importantly, this is my first blog post! Gah. I’m taking a pause to breathe deep as I stare up from the basecamp of the mountain that is my “second act”. What is it they say — “If a blog falls into the internet and no one’s around to read it, does it make a sound? ” I feel that makes this is a safe space to babble on.
This time 3 years ago, after a soul-searching birthday trip to Mexico City, I formed a plan to kinda blow up my life. I’m a Pisces but with a Capricorn moon so if you’re into that shit, you’ll know I may daydream way too much, but I’m not impulsive. I waited for 3 months, a plan percolating. I took another short trip, this time to Sicily for a friend’s birthday where I wandered the ancient cobblestones with women I’d only just met who managed to lift me up, impress and inspire me, and confirmed my instinct that it was time to quit my job in magazine design to lean fully into a different creative life I’d long envied. Back in the office again, I swallowed my secret through brutally long meetings where everyone’s voice sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher and on work trips to LA where I was crafting silent farewells to colleagues over the last of my expense-account dinners. Finally, when I could bear it no longer, I told a whole room full of people — timed moments after sitting across from my exhausted editor in chief — that I’d come to the decision to leave a career I’d built over 25 years I thought I’d love forever. I am married to a self-employed musician, so I understood what fully inhabiting the life of a struggling artist actually costs. I said the words anyway. It felt like bungee jumping naked from a helicopter.
Everyone assumes that if you’re leaving but not fired, you must have orchestrated a fat severance, some masterful buyout, but nope. My paystub several weeks later was my last and my colleagues with whom I spent over a decade bonded in the trenches, threw me a little party and raised a glass, said some lovely things and then turned their faces back to their screens.
It was around this point that I also realized my fancy city dermatologist and I would need to part ways. Apparently when you leap naked from a helicopter, along with your vanity, you leave your wallet behind.
In short order, my family and I let our apartment’s lease lapse, packed up and returned to our home upstate. I set about fixing up a proper spot to build on the skills I was practicing nights and weekends to transform raw, incomprehensible materials into the jewelry designs I could see clear as day in my dreams at night. I stood in my former office in the attic and unboxed tools that set fire to metal. I’d made do over my ten years in the city with workspaces in basements or closets but now I had light and a view! And I could look out the window across the lawn to the hub’s music studio and wave if I wanted to.
It took a solid year before my nervous system began to reset.
Flash forward another two, and I am here in my studio on my birthday yet again, with a trip to Oaxaca* upcoming. I’m sitting in front of an array of gold and stone components waiting their turn at the bench. In the three years since my pivot to pursue goldsmithing, I guess I’m doing it! For community, I’ve joined what I call my “support group” for jewelers looking to start or restart their businesses. My semi-regular trips into the city for deeper instruction keep me grounded and growing. For the most part though, it’s just me— alone in my little attic atelier I like to call it— tapping and soldering and forming and pickling away at a little collection of rings and amulets that bring me enormous satisfaction to see born. Some days I acutely miss the absence of urgency and energy supplied by my former job but, honestly… I most often feel profound gratitude. I wake every day filled with ideas I get to see worked out with my hands, under my own steam, with no employees or bosses or hoops to jump through to feel rewarded and validated. The privilege is profound. I’ll take it over being able to afford micro-needling and overpriced clogs any day.
I have a photo on my “wall of women” I like to look at: It’s of the artist Ruth Asawa. In it, she’s seated on the floor surrounded by four of her children, working on one of her exquisite woven metal sculptures, some of them hanging around her. Her youngest tips his head back drinking lustily from a bottle. Ruth’s head is dipped down with both hands wrestling sharp wire into form. This image fills me with wonder and respect. Her focus, and two of her passions taking up equal space in the frame, motherhood and art, moves me deeply. I am a mother (to my precious daughter). I am an artist (there, I said it!). Just those two facts alone, and the complexities of them provides most of what anyone needs to know about me and what I value most in this moment. Both coexist in equal measure. Both can never be denied or ignored. Both are my mountains. There will be others to come but for now, that’s enough.
Today, on this birthday, I’m right where I need to be: at the bench, in my socks, my back a little tweaked, making wonderful things out of raw gold. Also hoping said daughter remembers to call me from college.
Not holding my breath. Or maybe I am. And that’s ok.
XO, AD
*Say, what is it about Mexico? I’ll save that for another post. Juicy psychoanalysis stuff awaits.
