35

There was a shift. Not like when two tectonic plates drift apart and lava violently shoots out in celebration of the divide. It's like uplift, wherein one expanse of earth pushes toward another and slides underneath, lifting the other half rippled and angled into the sky - a groaning, creaking force reshaping the landscape. Slanted, sighing.

I've never been a New Years resolution person, but there was something about the previous six months that made it such that by December 31, 2024, I felt like I needed to make some profound and lasting change. For six months, I had spiraled into insomnia, rumination, respiratory illness, heart arrythmias, high blood pressure, and hair loss. I was getting a lot done, but was a shadow of a person, burdened by what I felt was external pressure to perform at a very high level.

I wrote a journal entry about white-knuckling sometime late last year, and attempted to reconcile it as my lot in life. Something about perhaps it being true that the art I love looking at the most was certainly made with a light hand, but that the art I make wreaks of a chokehold. I resigned myself to that, saying there are people whose preference it is to look at highly structured and precise art, so maybe I exist to muse them if not people like myself. If you read between the lines, you really just find total dissatisfaction with what I'm capable of creating. On the outside, there was unwilling, obligatory acceptance.

That's the only way to sum it up, though. I had spent 34 years white-knuckling my way through life, trying to will things into safety, security, perfection, and beauty using tools like clinched fists, clinched teeth, calloused knuckles, tennis elbow, shoulder tension, sleeplessness, and profanity. Intensity. Manic intensity. And for what?

That's not to say I haven't been successful in spite of it, or that being uptight means you can't bear good fruit sometimes. It's precisely that because I know I can bear good fruit, that everything must be good. That runs the gamut from designing bestselling stickers to being an impressive weekend host to a friend. Don't let them see that you aren't on top of things, Cara. Don't disappoint them.

Well. That mindset started to kill me from within. Literally. I had driven myself nuts trying to perfect and impress and avoid disappointment to the point at which I spent my nights laying in the living room floor alone, with a heart rate of 180 and wondering if I should call 911 because I could feel it in my ears like a warden's footsteps stomping madly down a stone corridor.

The "why?" of the matter wasn't hard to sort out. I was trying too hard and cared too much about what other people thought of me - neither of which are wise uses of time, but they were my obsessions born of raging pride and inconceivable insecurity.

It was time to let go before I choked the life out of life.

The irony, I guess, is that over the last couple years, I had gotten pretty good at advising other people by telling them that the best life is lived by surrendering to God's will, and the biggest trouble you'll have is when you're the victim of having exerted your own will over a situation, or are at the mercy of another human's. Be brave. Surrender, and you'll be free, I'd tell them.

Surrender, and you'll be free.

My New Years resolution and my Lenten sacrifice was to stop caring about what other people think of me, and to figure out who I am outside of this person who has designed herself simply to be pleasing. Always. And remarkably, although this has been a lifelong issue, shedding it really began as simply as just giving myself permission and having my husband lay it out like a law.

It's amazing, really, what you're able to feel, see, and create, when you learn the word "no" and don't have other peoples' hypothetical thoughts in your head. By February of this year, I knew who I was, I liked her, and I didn't care if anyone else did. In short, I am what I call the Radioactive Babushka type. An old soul, a reclusive rebel, family-oriented, handmade, unafraid of the future and the machine and the man. You can pry the analog world out of my cold dead hands, and I will never sell out. I have a path. I know what it is. And you can't knock me off. I wrote about it here. While composing that piece, I realized what a pain in the ass I sounded like, and then decided pleasantly that for once, I didn't care. There is space for me, the real me, on this earth.

It started to become invigorating to go into situations with the freedom of not caring about someone's reaction to what I said or what I looked like. I wasn't speaking to be pleasing, I was speaking to be honest. I wasn't dressed to impress, I was dressed in what I loved. I never thought I had those freedoms - that it would be impolite, somehow, to reveal who I actually am. Unafraid. Eccentric. Sometimes exceedingly so.

Yes, what happens when you spend the better part of 34 years concealing eccentricity and whimsy in the name of palatability, is depression and a heart condition. Don't follow that lead.

This new lightness I was feeling ushered in a summer with the gorgeous gift of a real white sand beach vacation - the first getaway in 10 years. After spending three days watching tiny critters being carried along by waves and smashed into the sand against their will, but seemingly fine with it, I returned home even more inspired to enjoy each day and each thing as it comes. I was going to do my best with every responsibility, but give myself permission to mess up and do things with a relaxed hand. Not everything has to be impressive and elaborate, pal. You don't have to rewrite a whole grocery list because you bungled a single word. Things can be organic, simple, flawed, and yet still very, very good.

That's when I think one of the greatest turns happened. My hands relaxed. My brain relaxed. And after white-knuckling the pursuit for a distinct art style - the goal of every artist - for decades, it finally happened.

I make an observation and do my best at representing it without trying to replicate it or perfect it. It's not a photograph, after all. I block in colors, shapes and values with a lose hand and drop in details with a very wet brush. I then allow the pigments and the water to move where they want to go. Mix where they want to mix. Layer where they want to layer. Resist where they want to resist. I leave it alone. And then I come back later after it's all settled and dried, with a black pen and my white knuckles.

Those black lines.

My lot in life is not white knuckles...

I think, perhaps, it is emphasizing the beauty of that which does not have to be - cannot be - controlled.

Here's to 35 years. 🌻