December 1

Today being the first day of December (ahhh see how I roped you in with that title?) seems like a good day to pick up dropped projects.

Like this blog.

Ahhhh I make jokes about abandonment all the time, but I really do have a pattern of starting something and leaving it unfinished.

Thanksgiving has just passed and it was actually one of the best ones I've ever had. These last couple of years my family was split up, so most of the cooking was left to me and my dad. This year we all came together, broke the cooking up into three different days, and the feast is still being enjoyed! (I'm about to dig into some blueberry pie right now!)

But there's something about the holiday season that makes the highs and the lows seem more stark. The highs of celebrating are festive and cheery with lights and music, and the lulls in between become more noticeable. The space where my version of normal comes in to play. I always question this space.

What is normal for me? It's a normal day to see my family (hashtag blessed) as well as have a cup (or 3...) of coffee (or make a second brew.) We watch a lot of TV in my house, it's part of the bonding experience. It's always on in the background, usually football for my father or Turner Classic Movies for my mother. I flipflop between murder mysteries and sitcoms. So we each share stories, and then we go our separate ways. Today was a stay at home day (thank goodness, it's freezing rain!) and I've been learning how to edit on audacity for a podcast I'm playing with. Go me! Go go go! See it to the finish!

But these quiet days, days where the projects seem aimless and I don't have to go into work, they make make question what I'm doing in life. What am I doing in this life? What do I want to do? Sure I act, and I do comedy, I perform with my improv group Say What? NYC! (show coming up this Dec 7th!). I also write and play at stand up (I say play because I never seem to feel committed to a set and keep changing it up - look there's that abandonment again!) but these all seem like aimless tasks sometimes. Repeats of something I've done already. Circles.

And not everything I do is stage related. I love rocks! I collect crystals because I love the colors of the stones and how they feel against my skin. I make jewelry for myself and others, mostly as gifted talismans. They hold meaning for me. I read tarot cards and oracle cards for introspection, or for fun. The art work of each card holds its own symbolism, waiting to be unlocked by the reader. I talk to the plants in my room, hug trees outside, wink at gardens. And I scroll on instagram - endlessly scrolling, endlessly liking other artists work, their lapidary and jewelry, paintings and music. Watching. Listening. Observing from the lens of my phone. And then I write down my observations with the intention to come back, with the intention of making it into something. I have so many dimensions that sometimes I forget who I am and what I ought to be doing, because I feel like I'm constantly doing a thousand little things.

The little things in life matter, but it's important to remember that they snowball and add up to a larger whole. During the lulls of the season, I feel the low energy. I feel how thin I spread myself, and continue to spread myself. I try to live in patterns that fit my old lifestyle, but I'm not the old version of me any more.

When I write, I now ask, who am I writing for? Honestly the answer is mostly me. I have a room filled to the brim with journals - dream journals, shadow work journals, day to day journals, and so on. I write down these parts of myself, spread them through a dozen active diaries (I'll use whichever one is closest to me) and then stash it away, stow it for a rainy day like today. I write much more than I re-read, and my words are left in the dark, squeezed on a shelf or lost under the bed.

I don't want my words to be lost anymore. Even though I am an artist who spreads myself a bit thin, doesn't stick to one project at a time, and fails to see many of them through, I am determined that my words be allowed to live a life on their own, let them snowball into something greater than me, and let them leave the reader with something special and all their own.

So let's add up something bigger. Go sift through the ideas that are waiting to get bigger... and take a new approach.

And enjoy this pie!

Thanks for reading. The lulls aren't bad. They're just loud in a different way.

Lots of Love,

DanielleXX (Danielle Hernandez ya'll!)