Creativity and Hyper-Focus

I've experienced a return to creativity lately. It began at the end of the summer when I threw myself into the preparations for my daughter's Harry Potter-themed birthday party. I busied myself making paper bag owls, milk bottle owls, flying keys and banners. My neighbor and I spent many happy hours painting and brainstorming and I was overwhelmed at how much I enjoyed myself. I have also been sewing more, I volunteered to make signs for a recent renaissance carnival at my daughter's school, I've been knitting and finally I am writing again.

One of many things I have learnt about  myself this summer is that I tend to hyper focus on things. On mentioning this to my other half, he rolled his eyes, to him it's a complete no brainer, "of course you do". Let me explain...

When I first started writing my blog, it became a complete obsession. Every second of the day I would be thinking about things to write, new design ideas, taking photos, looking for inspiration. I learned how to monetize it in different ways, how to increase readership, I shared ideas and feedback with other writers. I spent hours changing the layout of the blog, i taught myself basic html, learnt how to design functional buttons and banners, all sorts of things. Then all of a sudden, I didn't know what to write, and I just stopped. For about 5 months I have barely written a word or even checked in on my beloved blog, though it is still very precious to me.

Again when I started sewing, i got into making bunting and just churned them out. I would study different fabric patterns online constantly looking for the best designs. I even got 80% through setting up an Etsy store and decided what I would sell things for. Suddenly my sewing machine wouldn't work properly so instead of doing anything about it, I stopped dead and didn't sew for about 3 months.

Recently my husband gave me a kindle and I began reading a lot more. At first I read books that had been recommended to me by my now beloved therapist.  Soon after, I began to read for leisure, but then before I knew it, hyper focus kicked in again, BOOM, in the past ten days, amongst my usual activities of running a busy home, volunteering at my daughter's school and looking after two young children I have read all 4 of the Twilight saga books, Wuthering Heights and have started Frankenstein and Madame Bovary. I am fully aware of how ridiculous this is and unfortunately it leads to self-loathing as I can't feel like I have accomplished anything when I know other areas of my life aren't getting the attention they need.

As a natural reaction to rediscovering my creativity I have begun to miss dance intensely again. This time, now that my tummy has had a whole year to recover from being repaired, I am finally in a place where I can actually pursue it again. I have found a class locally that sounds great but have not taken the extra step to actually attend, and I have also made a date this week to meet with the student's from my neighbor's class so that I can start planning a dance workshop with them in the near future. This is huge for me. If I can pull this off it will be a major step forward as far as self-confidence and escaping inhibition goes. I've even found a circus class that I am very excited about, I just don't know if our budget can stretch to all this.

So that's where I am. I hope I can manage to balance my loves a little better and to enjoy them without the resulting feelings of self-loathing and selfishness. For now I am  happy to get back into so many things I enjoy so much.