"What am I doing with my life?"

So, I feel a need to tell a story. I wrote a long-standing (oh whatever, one-plus-year) photography blog called Words + Images at my personal website. My family knew about it (not true of most blogging projects, including this one) and I handed out business cards with the URL. I spoke at a press conference as the writer for that blog and represented the art blogging community of Baltimore.

On top of all that, I followed a whole slew of art blogs, tried to keep up with the goings-on in Baltimore's art scene, and generally made a point of being somewhat of an expert on my subject matter.

A few months ago my life became pretty stressful. My employment situation was weird and/or uncertain, I had way too much on my shoulders at the office (notice how well those two mesh together), and I didn't do a lot of photographic work during that time either. Adding insult to injury, I had failed to create a vibrant commenting community on the blog, which I had defined as a primary goal in working so hard on it in the first place. Combine all that together and you get a whole lot of me not writing in my twice-a-week blog.

The thing is, since my family knew about this blog, I started getting questions. "Are you ever going to update your blog again?" "Well, I enjoyed reading it."

Why is it that family can mean so well, yet make you feel so much like you're not living up to your full potential? The plague of my adult life has been my consistent belief that most of what I hold in my hands is just that: potential.

Part of me wants to accept my broad spectrum of talents (i.e. lack of focus) for what it is and write a new blog about that...which is what I'm doing at the moment. The other part of me, the little voice of self-doubt, tells me I'm accepting failure. I should have persevered and kept doing something that felt like an absolute chore instead of moving on to whatever excited me at the moment. For now, though, I'm going to try embracing the fact that I'm not just a photographer, painter, writer, or musician. I identify as all of those things, and if I write a blog about my life as a creative person it needs to acknowledge who I really am. Even if I learn my destiny is to experience many things and truly excel in none of them at all, that's not something I can deny.

As always, though, I'm caught in the war between these two voices. I honestly don't know whether to accept my natural state of being or to insist upon something different, a singular focus that is both easily comprehended and readily congratulated.