internal selves

The artist in me creates. That's what she's good at. Give her a stage and tell her to make it look real, and she will. Give her a bunch of paints, and she'll go to painting something. Crayons, chalk on the sidewalk, markers, any form of color expression.

But the creative self has limited concepts about business, she just knows it would be nice to sell her stuff someday. So she needs the logical me to kick in.

The logical self who says "You have to sign your work."
"You have to build a portfolio."
"You really should submit to more shows."
"You need to keep track of your receipts for your supplies, you can use that on your taxes."

So creative self sits there, listens to logical self, and then turns around and skips away. Sometimes, when she's feeling particularly feisty, she pushes logical self out the window, then goes about painting things.

Logical self feels put out that creative self isn't listening, that she's being impudent and selfish, and that logical self has to set the rules and be the one in charge.

Creative self doesn't really care, she didn't appoint logical self to be the one who decides, but she's not gonna fight it, because she doesn't want to be in charge either. She wants to paint, and draw, and write, and make the world a pretty place.

Thus logical self and creative self have "differences of opinion", and decide to leave each other alone for awhile. Neither writes or calls. Creative self doesn't, because she's thrown herself into her work, and while she respects logical self and her thoughts and ideas, she won't bow down to them.. Logical self doesn't call because she thinks she's right, and wants creative self to admit it first, so she'd rather let her stew for awhile and learn her lesson.

Eventually though, creative self admits she wants logical self around for balance, and logical self admits her world pretty much sucks without color and art and creative self around to liven the place up.

Originally published Nov 2005