If you follow me on Instagram, you likely have seen these watercolor and ink blob paintings I've been making. I've called them Bloobies jokingly but I kind of like the term so it might stick. I'm not sure what these will manifest in but they've become a really lovely experiment in materials, playful making, and a nice respite from having to make representational work. 

I've said this a few times in different posts, but I'll say it again: Making since becoming a mother looks way different these days. And yet, I have had a better sketchbook and play practice than I have had in a long while! I am able to make in short bursts between naps, while my husband gets Mr. Baby ready for bed, and sometimes while Mr. Baby is quietly playing on his own. Because the time is fleeting, I find myself drawn to a practice that needs to start and stop at any given moment and with that comes a playfulness and a willingness to make ugly sometimes weird stuff.

May was a year and June was a rollercoaster! I've shared a bit on IG about some of what I'll be writing about here but I'll expand a bit on some things as this post will be a bit more like a journal than a thing with a clear lesson. I've been making a lot of work recently as I've found a way to play with watercolor and started doing meditative blob/spot/boob paintings and things since May. The inspiration came from my nervous system being totally overloaded after my son had a medical emergency that ended up with us staying a few days in the Pediatric ICU. Everything is fine now but the trauma and lingering anxieties of that kind of experience are what me and my husband are working through right now. In the midst of all of that, I'm also having *~*~deep thoughts*~*~ about my career, where I see my personal practice going and all those fun existential related things that come up when life forces you to see what is most important without your permission. As a result, I've "hunkered down" a bit more and am focusing on me and my family and stopped doing as much yearning/planning for community focused projects as I had. 

In the midst of ALL OF THAT, my work has been stolen and imitated and it's just made me reflect on all of the let downs I've experienced over the years and how to mitigate those into the future. It's also made me simply not want to work with or trust other people beyond what my job requires. My work has been copied or presented without my knowledge or permission a two times this year alone. And it's not AI or some foreign entity profiting off of it -- in both instances my work has been co-opted by people I know and trusted and who didn't take the time to reach out and ask or share their plans with me. I'm not sure why and I have reached out to these individuals and have either not heard anything back OR have had folks gaslight me. 

​In the past I would think, well maybe they didn't get the message or maybe I didn't say what I meant or needed clearly enough or maybe I wasn't nice enough. I would do a lot of mental gymnastics to make it somehow my fault for not being a good communicator but after years of therapy I finally feel done with that way of thinking. As much as I want to believe the best intentions were in place, the impact is more important and the impact for this stuff is that people did something unkind and it hurt my feelings and that matters too. 

Earlier this year, someone I know presented a workshop of mine (with my slides) and claimed that I taught them how to facilitate the workshop. That never happened, but I fear that years of collaboration and friendship may have been misconstrued to imply inherent permission to facilitate something like this. In this case, I know if they had reached out and said "Hey I have a last minute opportunity, do you mind if I share a version of this workshop I have paid you to facilitate in the past?" I likely would have had a quick solution that preserved my years of labor and expertise AND helped them have something meaningful to present. Instead my slides were used and my workshop presented without my knowledge except for a public post thanking me after the fact. I've reached out with no response and I fear that relationship may have been permanently damaged. I think about the fact that I am still paying off my college loans, I've paid and attended trauma informed facilitation workshops, and how much work and iteration I've done over the last 10 years and how that often gets missed when something like this happens. I can say, without inflating my own ego, that all of that time and effort I put in makes what I do look easy but that shouldn't be a license for others to say "I can do this myself" and proceed to do so in this way. It hurts and I don't know how I can feel comfortable working in community again after this violation. 

In the most recent case of my work being copied/imitated, my aesthetic style was co-opted supposedly unknowingly. What hurts about this instance is that the artist worked with me on a project and saw my process/practice in my home studio. The aesthetic of the mural they copied in a painting of theirs was co-created in part with the community I worked with for months leading up to the final design. While I don't own the specific elements, there's a context and nuance to the work that I did for this project that is being willfully disregarded. The artist and I worked together for months on this project with me as lead artist and designer. I am always open to input and they were critical of my style and yet, imitated it for their own project. I did reach out and received a response that really disappointed me. Rather than go through all the details of what exactly happened and when, I just want to focus on the harm and what could have been different. In this instance, I feel like they could have simply let me know that they had an idea that was similar to the style I created for the mural we worked on together. They could have asked permission or at least say they would credited me and the mural publicly so that all involved artists and community members were given the respect we were due.

As a creative, credit and communication is extremely important to me. All of my murals have either a document accompanying them that include all of my references or image sources if I did not take my own photos or use my own sketches. Any artist that works with/for me is paid or compensated in some way with the exception of large community paint days which I try to keep accessible and share snacks or something meaningful with the community that participates. I do so much work to make sure that I am leaving my community or the communities I enter feeling like they weren't taken advantage of. This takes an incredible amount of emotional labour and I have often been a punching bag, absorbing criticism of my work, of the city, of injustice etc and I know even before having my baby I was emotionally and physically exhausted from all of this. Having taken a bit of a break from my own community based work to start my family, I feel like what I would have wanted was to rest, restore, and redefine how I show up in my community to preserve my energy and mental health. Instead, I feel like these instances have really made me want to distance myself from community based work just a bit longer.

I don't mean for this to seem so depressing or like a cry for help nor do I want this to seem like a commercial. But I do feel like I have found at least one new resource that I want to share if anyone else finds themselves at this point of their career. I've been working with a career coach through National Art Strategies to help me sort through all of this. It's like career therapy and something I had started prior to both of these incidents. I'm so glad I made the investment to do this because I had been thinking about how I want to tighten up my own administrative practices to protect myself. My current homework is to make a list of things that worked and things that didn't in the past decade of public and community based art. By going through what hasn't worked in past projects, I'm hoping to better identify boundaries for myself and create agreements, contracts, and a "rulebook" for what it looks like to work with me. I think part of me is excited to do this. I like having a plan and I like putting words to feelings. But there is a part of me that feels saddened by all of the ways I've been taken advantage of or hurt in past projects including these incidents. I'm working through it and have support and that's what matters right now! In the meantime, I'm finding joy in playing with work that is wholly mine and invites more play into my life. I have some projects brewing that might invite some community work again but I think things will look pretty different and I will be prioritizing my sanity through the process. 

That's all for now! I'll likely make a post about my boobie paintings soon! 

I've been documenting my preparations for Mr. Baby's birthday! My mom used to (and actually still does!) DIY our birthdays and so I've continued the tradition with these hand drawn and painted storybook characters.

With shopping bag standards shifting in my area, I have a wealth of paper shopping bags that I've been hoarding. Promising my husband that I had a plan(I did not), we continued to keep most bags to use them for my grand plan...though I know he tossed some while I wasn't looking. As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, I settled on using them as a canvas for Mr. Baby's birthday.

This has been a super fun exercise in perusing our library of children's books and finding the images that would be fun to blow up onto the opened up shopping bags. ​

I usually lay down a white background to ensure the color's feel more saturated and less muted from the brown-ness of the bag. I've also been using the bags to create oversized pennants (not pictured) and those have been a fun usage of leftover paints and creating fun patterns and color relationships. ​

In my early postpartum phase I wondered often what my studio practice might look like now that I've filled my time with parenting a newborn baby and could no longer spend hours in my studio. I slowly converted my dining room into a third space: hybrid open closet, library, sewing space, and anything else we needed. The transformation has allowed me to actually create more spontaneously than I had when we tried to keep it a dining room and I'm so glad! Making looks different now: quick doodles between nursing and diaper changes, sewing a line or two while walking between rooms. While the breezy, long stretches of time are gone for now, something about these short bursts feels good, more productive actually. 

I'm excited to continue making these pieces for Mr. Baby and maybe even incorporate these recycled paper bag surfaces in my practice too! 

This weeks funspiration station goes to:
-Caspar Babypants song "Noodles and Butter"
-Grumpy Monkey
-Patchwork practice
-Lancaster County Coffee Roasters Whoopie Pie Coffee

It was a great experience! Was my social battery spent by the end? Hell yeah. Was I nervous as heck the whole time? YUPPP. But I had some good conversations with a variety of students all on their own journeys trying to figure it all out. Something that stuck with me is how little students know about Arts Administration as a pathway!

I also knew very little about Arts Admin as a viable career path. Learning about it unlocked a world of career possibilities for me so I want to share/reshare my journey. I might have shared this in different iteration through the years here, but here's the gist: 

I started at F&M as a Pre-Med student convinced that I would be a doctor. Then I quickly realized I prefer writing and analysis and pivoted to English Literature and then added Studio Art as a double major. By senior year of college I had interned at a gallery, worked as a junior graphic designer, and project managed for the College Dispatch as Editor-in-Chief (a non-fiction lit magazine) and President of the Art Club. I looooove project management but didn't know that there was a word/career there until after I graduated and was hit with the feeling of "I have no clue what to do".

Between graduating and applying for the arts administration track at Drexel, I did a whole bunch more odd-jobs. The common thread being using my writing and organizational skills to facilitate workshops, programs, and fundraisers. I did a few public art projects and kept up my personal visual art practice the whole time. As I considered what my next move might be I considered going back to school.

An MFA just never felt quite right and I didn't have the language yet to know that what I was feeling pulled towards was social practice. Over time, I started to get to know artists doing social practice work and started to uncover the concept of arts administration. One evening I started looking up arts degrees and found Drexel's Arts Administration and Museum Leadership masters program and something just clicked. I applied and got in shortly after.

The program was amazing and mostly online which allowed me to grow my social practice work, study mural making under Michelle Angela Ortiz, and run for School Board. The common thread through these seemingly disparate adventures for me was my creative brain. I think the way I think is unique and deeply rooted in my arts practice. I also think that everything is political and that serving the community in any way is a political act. As I worked through my masters I started to hone in on the disparity between Latinx artists and our local "thriving" arts community. I completed my thesis which is a snapshot of Latinx creative placekeeping in Lancaster city in 2016-2017 and a proposal for what the future could look like. 

10 years and so many project later, I still find myself working within the same theme: making stuff that brings people together. My supervisor, friend and collaborator of many years, Natalie Lascek, now says of her work. "People are my favorite medium" and I am starting to realize that this is true for me too! Today, my 9-5 is as Assistant Director of the Center for Creative Exploration where I manage workshops and classes open to the community, supervise our certificate program, teach design thinking classes, and help facilitate community projects throughout the year. We are a continuing education department and so much more. I love my job! And it is soooo hard, especially in this political climate, to maintain hope when it feels like we as a culture do not value creativity. 

One of the things I shared with the students I met last week was that I knew early on that I just couldn't have a job that relied on my artwork. I needed to know that I can make weird stuff and that what I made did not have to depend on being sellable. Knowing this helped me pivot away from focusing so heavily on careers that might dictate my personal practice and towards things that were still arts related. I knew that I am happiest when I am able to influence and shape things and that I am a detail oriented person that likes organizing projects. I knew that I am also happiest if I could be doing all of that within a creative ecosystem. This helped me keep my eyes open for jobs like my current role in continuing education.

None of this is a straightforward when we think about a traditional "career path" but it worked for me! I think that's the most important thing to take away if you are in a position to consider career shifts/pivots or entering the field for the first time: it doesn't have to make sense to anyone else but you.

For me, I tried things and used a process of elimination: I tried working in a small gallery and found things I liked and carried that forward to trying a museum setting and then academic and then continued to bop around within academic settings until I found something that felt right. For now, continuing education gives me the best of both worlds: I get to be in a creative environment, I get to teach, I get to make stuff with the community in mind, I get to be involved in community projects, and I get to preserve my personal practice and do my own thing with public art and social practice when I can. 

If you're considering what a fulfilling creative career looks like for you, I think the biggest questions to answer for yourself are: 

• What do I love about being creative that I don't want to lose? 
• Do I feel okay making work with selling and maintaining an income on it in mind?
• Do I want my work to exist without the pressure of being sellable? 
• Am I up for the administrative tasks it takes to be a creative entreprenuer? If not, do I have the capacity to find supports here?
• Do I like reporting to a supervisor or boss? and do I like the. structure of working in an organization?
• Do I thrive on having more control of my time and where I work?

There's no right answer to these questions but it is important to consider them as you try to figure out what your creative career looks like. And of course, there are times you will have to take the gig or the job that doesn't perfectly align just to survive. The next step should be to game plan how you'll be able to move closer and closer to the work that aligns most with where you want to be. 

That's all for now!

This week's funspiration station is short but still fun and giving me hope: 

• The game Spiritfarer! Cathartic! Emotional! Why am I crying!
• The sun
• Warm breezes

Once upon a time not long ago I would sew...almost every day. I was convinced I would be fashion designer and at the time I was deeeeep in a Pentecostal/Baptist/Evangelical church cult (story for another day) so I was also convinced my modest yet fashionable aesthetic would be the key to converting souls for the kingdom. A lot of that has changed but what hasn't changed is the sewing itch that creeps up with a vengeance every couple of years.  As a visual aide: Here is 17year old me in my me-made prom dressed secretly inspired by MCR Helena but make it modest and ****PINK****. I love that version of me and have compassion for her. She was cute. 

​I talked in other blog posts about you tube sewists I started obsessing over and the sew liberated Arthur pants. This past week I finally cut and started to construct my pants!! Something Carly B shared that shifted how I think about sewing lately is that doing the tried and true stuff is fun but it is also good to find patterns that challenge you to learn new skills. I've always wanted to be better at sewing flat-felled seams and generally finishing my work better and I am also on a mission to have more whimsical clothing with non-traditional fits (more on this later). The Arthur pants have been heavy on my mind and accomplish both of those goals! Here is where I'm at so far: 

I shared things I've learned so far on IG and will continue to do quick bloggy posts like that as I continue to construct my dope-ass pants. What this project has also showed me (and recently in therapy, go therapy again woot woot!) is that I have some *~*~*~*~*unresolved body issues*~*~*~*~ yay! I've known that I imagine myself to be a different size and shape than reality for a bit now. I think I've also been in denial about having body dysmorphia because I also suffer from the ol' "Well it's not that bad and I've made it this far" syndrome many of us have. I sometimes resist clinical labeling because I think it is rampant and poorly understood in the age of social media and self-diagnosis. On the one hand I think the internet has broken barriers we face due to generally caca access to meaningful and care-ful medical assistance in this country. On the other, it has created an epidemic of people using self-diagnosed mental health and wellness issues as an excuse for poor behavior. As it is with everything, there's nuance and I strive for balance. 

But back to my sense of self as I exist in the physical world. Those images of young me are always so jarring. I thought I was so much larger than my peers and I see now that that wasn't the case. I carried myself with a lot of shame about my size and shape in those years. Typical I'm sure of many teenagers, but heightened 100000% by being one of very few Latina's in a PWI. Recently, I thought I "grew out of" that but boy oh boy did pregnancy and post-partum body comments highlight just how insidious those thoughts are and have been! With the national coverage and un-coverage of all the awful ways pedophiles have shaped young girls sense of self and the re-examining of 90's and 2000's pop culture as well as the resurgence of "heroine chic" aesthetics. I feel anxious about how where we are going as a culture. I also feel heavy. I'm grateful to start working on this in therapy with more intention and with a professional to support exploring how dysmorphia has or has not impacted my sense of self. Not everyone has access to that and I am forever grateful for this privilege. 

The trauma of an unplanned non-emergency c-section scar, shrinking to a much smaller size due to breastfeeding, and getting complimented for how well I've carried my post-partum body along with my body just not being what it was, I feel a lot of complex feelings. I am so proud of my body and frustrated by it. None of my clothes fit and yet I know this might be a temporary size so I hesitate to go to hard on getting new stuff. I hesitate to respond to commentary about my body because everything folks are saying seems like a compliment! Not every interaction needs to go into the details about what I'm experiencing and experienced. There's no time and I know the intentions are good, but it's still poking at this old wound of not ever feeling like I know who this body is or what she actually looks like at any given moment. 

So in an effort to reclaim and explore my sense of self, sewing has entered the chat. It has been empowering to revisit this hobby and take care to pick things that play with silhouette and size and color with intention. Part of the language of making clothes for yourself is fitting things to your body rather than the other way around and for me in this moment, that is liberating. It also has been fun to be a bit of a beginner again with something that takes time and isn't as life or death as parenting lol. 

I'm sure there are more lessons here, but for now I'm holding both - fun and whimsy of revisiting an old creative hobby and confronting old ghosts - and trying to do so with care. 

Funspiration Station this week: 
-Mini semi-sweet chocolate chips
-The general vibe of 2000's facebook albums
-Emerging Writers Festival
-Edge Stitching Foot/Top Stictching Foot

The sentiment, however, comes from my general discontent with the state of the world. I feel like the national and global trend of highly publicized men of a particular age and class getting away with the most heinous crimes with little to no consequence makes me feel crazy. It can be easy to start to feel like nothing matters anymore. It's particularly maddening to see how the spotlight on these men has only made it even more possible for the lack of accountability to happen on the local level. I'm so tired of watching men and people with money get away with bad behavior or general ass-holery. This isn't new, but I do think there is a new energy/re-energizing of bad behavior and lack of accountability lately. 

​This compounds with my burn-out with trying to do creative community work and having to hold the line when relationships fail, break trust, or simply don't gel. To be clear, I know community work is meeesssyyyy and emotional and I don't expect that to disappear. However, disproportionately, the mental load and emotional labor has fallen on me as a woman and Latina. And that part is what's exhausting when there are back to back projects to manage. I'm grateful to have been able to take about a year off of large scale projects and community based work outside of what's required in my role at PCA&D. I think that was necessary. I can feel myself becoming jaded and frustrated and that's not where I want my work to come from. These days, I'm slowly stepping back into large scale work now that things are a little more flexible with Mr. Baby. That said, at the edges, I can feel my anxieties about re-entering the creative community creeping up. 

I want to be better about holding my boundaries around emotional labor and to also be more strategic about building breaks into my work. I also want to only say yes to things that excite rather than deplete. As I "re-open my books" to potential projects, I hope to document my projects better and build in more time for reflection and flexibility. Past projects have had such tight schedules or ambitions to make every stakeholder happy and I think I lost myself in some projects or just didn't finish in the way that I wanted. So maybe I'm not breaking the rules, but I'm making a new set that works better for me. Here's to being pickier, seeking joy and meaning, and listening to the ol' gut.

Anywho, to keep my spirits up and creative juices flowing, here is my Funspiration Station for this week: 

• Listening to Best Friends Pod (hello Creamy Sisters!)
• Warm weather 
• The concept of the sun
• Re-watching The Bear in the Big Blue House with Mr. Baby
• This stretch 

I will be showing some new work in the Demuth Invitational coming up soon! Here is the work in progress. It is a watercolor based on one of my favorite photographs of myself just a few days after coming home from having Mr. Baby. I remember being tired, sore from tapering off my post-C-section meds (literally just motrin and tylenol wtf) and simultaneously proud and shocked at what my body just went through. The background is from the stiff baby blankets they wrapped Mr. Baby in that also likely held so many other babies and had been sanitized to be itchy, scratchy welcomes into this world. This is all on top of some gestural sketches of Mr. Baby.

I 
Imagine this
Arms stretched
Legs too
Holding on
To homes I've never met
The strain
As these islands drift ever further
Pulling muscle from bone from soul

II
The first poem I ever wrote about home
Was about my grandma
I wrote: 
"CAFE! Grandma screamed so that we all knew it was ready" 
Something about the smell
Something about grown-ups laughing
While I sat and observed
I read it out loud
And the love drunk smiles of my titi's and tio's 
Told me it was magic
I don't want to leave this memory

III
Ay vece que me siento tan sola 
Sin historia
Sin cultura
Sin significado
Como hay un cuento que yo nunca sabré
Como hay tan grande una historia
qu me va a romper mi espalda

IV
I imagine you
Blue suitcase in hand
Standing at the bottom of the ramp
Looking up at nineteen floors of bring and glass and steel
Sometimes smiling
Sometimes teeth clenched against the wind you didn't predict
Sometimes crying silent tears
And I wonder if you knew 
What was coming? 

V
In the end 
All I have
Are lazos de sangre
And that's enough

VI
In the end
All I have
Are lazos de sangre
And that's too much

VII
It will take a lifetime 
To find the intersections
The carefully placed knots
The twists
The interlocking 
The weaving
The unraveling
Of hilo and veins and blood
That make up
Lazos de sangre

VIII
If we are measuring
I am
One quarter Dominican
Three quarters Puerto Rican 
If we are measuring
I am American
(though this is a technicality
an imposition)
If we are measuring
I am the third generation to be born
In the United States
If we are measuring I am 
Of Spain
And Portugal
And Taino
And Cameroon
And France
And Ghana
And Mali
And Italy
And Andean
And Benin
And Ireland
And Senegal
And Sweden
And Northern Africa
If we are measuring I am 
the daughter of Omar Almanzar and Maritza Santos
Of Atabey and la Virgencitya
Of Lugos' and Cruz's and Montilla's and Rivera's
And names lost to the bottom of the ocean
And names lost to the stars
And names only love can unravel
And I am one hundred percent
Salina Mayloni Almanzar

Meditations for Aurea
I
How much have lost
Crossing el charco? 
And how much still
Is lost
Waiting at the bottom
Of the ocean
For one of us to go back
And fetch it
I am curious what the implications are
I am curious if
I can 
Handle it
Has my body evolved so much so that my fingers
Can't recognize
The feeling of a familiar
Tongue
Stone
Home

II
What does it mean to read myself into you? 
What does it mean that I only know you through the words past|passed down to me
Through the cloth
of my mother
of my father
of my father's mother
of my father's father
I remember most clearly your voice
The way you would seem to sing
When you saw us
Like music was the only way
That you could make me understand
Love
Cariño

III
I want to feel the way your voice sounded when you saw me
I want to feel the gentle brush of your fingertips on my face again
The way you held me like nothing else mattered
I wonder if you predicted this? 
If the hours of planning to trade
One island for another
To cross el charco
To settle in where everything is cold and gray and hard
If you knew all along
That someday 
Someone would pull on an hilo
And reveal the lace that is our 
Lazos de Sangre

IV
I made this so that 
It was worth it
So that the things that were shed
To hide a little bit better
Were lost for a reason
I always imagined that behind your closet door
The one you would disappear behind
To fetch treasures to 
Tuck in my hand as mom and dad guided us out one last itme
I imagined that all of your secrets hid there
That maybe you're still there
Waiting for me to come back
That the last treasure you will tuck in my hand
Will make it all make sense

V
When we look back will we be satisfied
With how we honored you? 
In the end everyday was Christmas for you
Everyday was an excuse to listen to music
To dance
To sing along
Even if you didn't know the words
Or maybe you did
I worry we discounted your beautiful mind
To make it easier
To see you transform
To see your cocoon harden before you burst free from this life

VI
In the end all I have are Lazos de Sangre
Y nada mas
For five years
I have said these words over and over
It has transformed from a lamentation 
To a hymn
Y nada mas

VII
La lengua de mi mami senti
Como 
Marbles 
In my mouth
Smooth 
Round
And so ready to choke me
I want so badly to replay every memory where you sang to me and
Understand
Translate 
Something

VIII
What happens, then
When layers 
Of mistranslation
Misunderstanding
Missed opportunities
Missing you
Distort who we are
Who I am
Who I have built myself to be
What happens, then 
When a diaspora
Re-places
Meaning
Reimagines where we are from
Meaning
Comes back together
Meaning
Rematriates
What happens, though
If we can't 

IX
There is a story I remember
Of Tainos drowning
A colonizer
To prove that he wasn't a god
I constantly wonder if I am drowning myself
In the same way? ​

Natalie crafted a giant mouth that was our creativity creature and I created a zine about arts advocacy. We spent the day wearing satin red gloves and rewarding participants with knowledge (our zine) and a little alien friend. The whimsy of the project was both in the performance and in witnessing people stop and agree to be part of our weird experiment. Like most things I find myself doing in the play-o-sphere, adults said they would come back when they had time whereas kids could stop and jump right in. In my year of no, I am trying to be like the kids and jump right in. 

In that spirit, I wanted to share some un-precious water color sketches I made. I say un-precious because often I overthink my work, wanting every bit to be meaningful and precise. Instead, most of these watercolor sketches were more visceral in the sense that I had a thought or sometimes half a thought and went for it. Many of these were made as I was recovering from my miscarriage and just needed to do something with my hands. 

This year of no has also been part of a larger cycle of me reclaiming my childhood self. I've been doing more things that young me would want to do including embracing angst, obsessing over owls, and bringing bright and bold colors back into my work. My murals are generally colorful and bright, but my personal work wasn't for a while. 

What I've learned in my journey through play is the following: 

• Embracing play is embracing ambiguity
• Embracing play and ambiguity leaks into areas of my life where I can afford to be more loose and less anxious about outcomes and control and that is good for me
• Embracing play means I get to try new mediums I otherwise wouldn't try AND I get to experiment with how mediums interact
• Embracing play also means I can do other creative things like start line dancing! watch more cartoons! play video games! literally play with my nieces! These acts have not only brought more joy into my life, but they've reignited my desire to make in a whole new way
• Embracing play also means I get to take myself less seriously. As an enneagram Type 1, oldest daughter with generalize anxiety disorder, I know I need to take myself less seriously lol
• Embracing play has allowed me to connect with others and be more forgiving. Not everything needs to be perfect
• Embracing play has also allowed me to advocate for myself and my time. Saying not thanks and holding that boundary to keep my play-time is imperative

Take this as your sign to get a little weird! Start drawing even if you don't know what you're going to make! Find a felting kit and get stabbing! Play with paint just because it feels good gliding on paper! Learn a dance on YouTube! Schedule a play date with a friend! Go out and play!