Balancing act.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm attempting to sew together two separate lives.

One life involves someone who knows what trends are affecting art and design and who wishes she could still afford to shop at Anthropologie and sometimes secretly longs to wear pencil skirts and heels and stroll down a Parisian avenue. She wears makeup and has belongings that won't fit into a backpack... in fact, she has a whole closet full of clothing. This person loves art and orderly piles of art supplies arranged just-so on a desk and tall stacks of books and can spend hours in front of a laptop looking at images and thinking about art. 

The other life consists of a person who can no longer wear high heels for any amount of time, who doesn't wear makeup, rarely shaves, forgets what her reflection looks like because it's been so long without a mirror, and can barely keep track of headline news, let alone design trends. She owns a backpack and can fit everything she needs in it. This person barely finds time to sketch once a week, but can devote hours on end to just walking.

I want both of these lives to stay mine. Sometimes the constant tug in one direction or another is exhausting. Often I wonder if I'll ever be able to succeed at either, if I devote my energy to two seemingly disparate lifestyles. Am I wasting my money when I buy art supplies that sit unused for months on end while I live out of a backpack? Or does the money and effort that I devote to backpacking siphon away all my time and resources that could be spent developing a career in art? Both of these loves of mine demand that I give them my all. A successful artist works. Constantly. Promoting, sketching, networking, creating. A successful hiker walks. Constantly. With no time or materials that an artist requires, except for perhaps a sketchbook shoved in a backpack. So I keep holding together the two separate aspects of my life, hoping other people will see this and understand that it's not that I lack direction. It's just that sometimes I'm being pulled both ways.