This past month, I felt like I could momentarily breathe again. The first days after the election were a blur, there was a feeling of being suspended in limbo until the results from PA were announced. It offered enough of a relief to take a breath and finally begin to think ahead to 2021. But the relief I feel is precarious. It feels like a derailed train skidding towards a cliff has just finally came to a halt, hanging over the precipice. I can let out a breath that it has not careened into a canyon, but how the heck do we back it up and get it running again in a new direction?

Either way, things are beginning to feel a little more expansive. I am beginning to dream again, thinking beyond December.

November is also my birthday month, and this always has the effect of an early "new year" where I inevitably end up doing a lot of reflecting on the past 12 months. Needless to say, this year has been... unique. I am grateful that it offered so much focused time to work, to challenge myself, and to grow Punch Needle World. But after a long season of predictable routines and head-down hard work, I'm yearning for a new season of discovery. I'm ready to be inspired again, to explore, to be thrilled and delighted by people and places, conversations, things that I see, hear, read and watch.

There is this pattern in my life, where every 5 years or so I end up realizing that I've changed, but I'm not quite sure how. I feel the need to take stock of certain habits, likes/dislikes, perspectives and interests, and ask myself whether I'm still doing these things because I truly enjoy them or because it's just leftover habits from who I once was. I love change, I love the process of growing, self-discovery and seasons of life. But this has been a weird year, and right now I'm feeling the need to check in with myself.

I re-read Emerson's essay Self-Reliance recently, and a passage stood out to me:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think... It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great (wo)man is (s)he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

I think I've fallen into a bit of a trap of "living after the world's opinion" recently, though I can't quite put my finger on how. I do know that I put a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself to define what I "do" and "who I am". But I'm an artist, a designer, an entrepreneur, a writer... and the constant creative struggle of my life has been how to feel like I can present all these selves as one, when the world seems to want me to pick one. In the year ahead, I will be striving to continue living after my own opinion, keeping the independence of my solitude.