It's October, baby! My favorite time of year! This new collection in the shop is twisted and twee. (Great word, 'twee', which means sweet to the point of sickening.) While I was dismembering dolls for this vignette and holding plastic baby arms over the open flame on my stove, careful not to burn myself with molten doll flesh, I had to stop and count my lucky stars. It doesn't get better than this! 

My vocation requires hunting things down and then matching things together in unexpected ways. Once the objects are assembled, a new thing is created which has a little of 'me' in it. 

Which makes me happy. 

There are four very good reasons why I have arrived at this happy place. 

1. I know who 'me' is and how to put 'me' into each collection. I like who I am.  

2. I am not afraid of mistakes because I make them all the time. This collection might be a mistake because some of you will be offended by burned doll limbs and will unsubscribe. That's okay. I am not asking you for permission. I'm too old for that. 

3. This is what I'm supposed to be doing. Maybe not forever but right now, it feels completely right. Every day, I'm learning many things besides how to pop off a doll's head. (Much much harder than you would think.) I'm gaining hard skills. Photography. Writing. P.R. (Yuck.) Basic coding. Brand Imaging. E-commerce. Shipping. (Yuck again.)

4. Humans have walked the earth for 200,000 years and my existence -- a nanosecond in the grand scheme of things -- happens to coincide with the birth of the internet, which is an indescribable phenomenon that calls to me like the open prairie called to Pa Ingalls.  

Many women my age tell me that they feel lost or paralyzed. They are not sure of their purpose in life. They don't think they are accomplishing anything. They don't feel relevant. 

That's okay. I think the confusion, the angst, the discomfort is actually necessary. It's like the brain's way of forcing us to take action. Like birth contractions. Or how teenagers go a little nuts the last summer before college perhaps as a subliminal aid for us to part ways more easily?

The women I know who are happiest have banished the angst by combining two things: solitude and creativity. By embracing a creative activity that challenges them in new ways and then granting themselves solitude to reflect, they sweep away the cobwebs in their brains. They learn to love themselves all over again. They discover a path that was there all along. 

So start a foreign language. Keep a journal. Learn a new science. Throw some clay. Dismember a doll. Forget the end result and concentrate on the doing. The doing will do you a world of good. 

Photos of Happy Halloween Baby! by Renn Kuhnen. Click here for more information. 

If you enjoyed this even a little, won't you subscribe? It'll be a gift to me that makes up for the 'unsubscribes' that are likely happening right now as you read. Thank you my pretty.