Coming Clean

*If you’d like to watch or listen, click here.

I’ve had people ask about the amount of money I make from this blog. As is my style, I’m going to be completely authentic with you and give you a dose of the honest truth.

When I began writing it, almost nine months ago, I had visions of what my blog was going to accomplish:

I could see it hitting home for many people who are struggling with our ‘picture-perfect’ world social media has created.

I could see it being shared with tons and tons of people, because they thought others would like to have some honest advice on how to live more authentically.

I could also see that because it was going to be so refreshing and so popular, I was going to get multiple writing clients.

The cold, hard truth is that I have yet to earn a single dime from my blog.

Since starting it, I have worked with a couple of new writing clients, but I don’t think it’s because of the blog; I think they asked me to do writing projects for them because they know me personally.

I would love to be able to say this blog has become my main source of income, but it hasn’t. What it has done is allowed me to tap into my creativity and cemented the idea in my mind that I’m a real writer. Knowing I am faithful to a project I began without any promise of income has allowed my mind to expand into other possibilities. Those possibilities DO offer an income and I hope to be able to tell you more about that in a few months.

Being creative is something I have an actual NEED to do. As I look back at my life, I can now recognize that when I wasn’t writing, I was always doing something else to feed that need.

​Way back when

There was a time when several of my friends would get together each month to scrapbook. Those were great afternoons and evenings, and I am still so proud to look back on the pages I made using my children’s photos. We may or may not have consumed an adult beverage or three, but we were productive and still have those books to look back on.

I also fondly remember a time when I worked in a flower shop. Creating floral designs is challenging. My coworkers and I attended a flower show and I came home feeling like a flower artist. I still can’t help messing with arrangements I receive. Remembering those days, I attended a workshop a couple years ago where I learned to make a holiday porch pot.

I’ve done other things to feed my creativity, too. There was a Christmas long ago when I made wood craft gifts, another where the whole family created ornaments of ourselves out of clay, baked them, and hung them on the tree. They always bring a smile to my face when I unwrap them from their cushy storage and hang them on the tree again. As for my Christmas tree, I love to check out the latest trends and see videos of how people are decorating. I usually take the ideas I love most and create a tree I’m proud of.

Creative = authentic​

I believe that part of the path to greater authenticity is being creative and sharing those talents with others. Recently, there was a sentence in a book I’m reading called Name Not Taken: A Novel, where a character confessed to creating sketches and paintings nobody asked for. I don’t think that’s true. I believe God puts those creative ideas in your head so you’ll share them. Someone is looking for that item, painting, or blog post. They may not know that they’re looking for that certain something until they see it and it nearly knocks them over with a sense that it was made just for them.

I’ve read that no matter what age we live to, we never use every single part of our brains. How sad. We get accustomed to using a certain area, like the analytical part, or the organizing part, or the problem-solving part, and it becomes scary to try something new, like the creative part. To live a more authentic life, I’d like to challenge you to jump into something you’re not necessarily comfortable doing. The idea has already been put into your head; you just need to act on it.