Bitten

I don't know if it's the fact that I'm scheduled to go back to work in 3 months (almost to the day) or if I'm finding my life somewhat back to normal (thank you, Dr. Ferber), but there's been a niggling little voice in the back of my head for the last week or so, trying to encourage me to do some designing.

I have yet to actually do any.

For two reasons:

1. I don't have any decent design programs on my iMac. I've tried the free ones but I find them awkward and slightly clumsy. I do have an early, practically stone age version of Adobe CS on my iBook, but that requires me to actually use my iBook (I have one of the stinky ones). It's slow and old and in a small house with an 8-month old, hooking up yet another cord just isn't smart.
   
2. This part is two-fold, and has been mentioned before: I'm a procrastinator and I'm terrified of what other people will think of my work. The former is just a part of my personality that I haven't been able to solve in 33 years and likely never will; the latter is almost inconceivable as I've been producing work publicly for 13+ years now and never had a problem before. Now, though, because it's for a personal reason, worries about judgement and criticism (and not the constructive kind) are keeping me from sitting down and spending an hour even fooling around with what limited resources I have.

So, it sucks. I don't want to be the perverbial dowdy housewife who has no outside interests, or look back in 10 years and wonder why I didn't take a chance and do something with my half-assed creative skills. And if I complain about this one more time, I'll be that person, the one-note bitcher.

As tomorrow is my birthday (woo! 33! yay.), I'm going to take some initiative and set aside at least half an hour a day to work on some kind of designing, be it fiddling around with colour combos or figuring out how to use the new design programs I've got or even just checking out other design sites. I need to do something before my mind turns to mush and I end up smothering my child with overbearingness when she's 7.