Last night I had the pleasure to enjoy Left On Red (two beautiful, talented young ladies I am happy to call friends), perform at The Bitter End. As I sat there, bopping my head, humming along, I marveled at how my life had changed artistically.

I grew up in a home where the arts were not appreciated. My father truly could not have cared less. While my mother did enjoy a pretty picture, at least  as much as the next person, that was the end-all.be-all of her interest. Karma in, full bitch mode, lands her a daughter that adores music, creative writing and drawing. I was attempting pointillism and abstracts, metaphors and onomatopoeia a good decade before I ever heard the terms. Her favorite form of punishment was to break my pencils and tear up anything hanging on my walls. Eventually, I learned to stop  trying.

In fact, I learned it so well, that I was with my late-husband for about five years before he had any inkling I could draw. Still, I lived a relatively closed life at the time and really had no other creative people in my life.  Of course, being a mother, wife, worker etc., life itself got in the way. Okay, that’s not true, I let life get in the way. It was much easier to say I don’t have time for that nonsense, than to pick up a pencil and see if I could still do any of it. Other than painting a mural on a closet door (that’s how my late-husband final discovered my dirty little secret), I did practically nothing for nearly twenty years. Then one day in frustration with my life, I picked up a pencil and started writing. That writing turned into the first poem I had written since high school Somewhere. It was a start, but then — nothing.

It took a couple more years and the internet to finally kick-start my writing into high gear. I entered an online poetry challenge on a website that required you to write a poem based on a given phrase. I did not win, but for the first time in my life, my words were praised by people who were not related to me and whose talents I enjoyed and respected. The dam burst. Within, two years I had written nearly one hundred poems. Now I have no idea how many I’ve penned, I stopped counting after four hundred. Not all of them are gems obviously, but they are all mine.

Unlike some artistic types, I realize now I cannot live in an artistic vacuum. Like misery, my art loves company. Which is why it amuses to no end, that while my childhood was a dearth of creativity, my adulthood now overflows with it. In the past few years, I have found myself surrounded by artists. People with amazing talents and several with the guts to go for it as their life pursuit. Singers, sculptors, painters, spoken word etc. It is a complete 180 turn of events and I am loving it! Granted, I have not picked-up painting/drawing again, the way I picked up writing, but every now and then, I feel little tinges of that urge starting to take hold, so who knows…?

Someday you may own an original Raivenne artwork. You can show it off along with the hardbound edition of my poems. Go ahead and name drop that you knew me when I was just a simple web blogger among the masses.

I won’t mind.

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Visit the rest of today’s Slices of Life over at Two Writing Teachers.

SOL - Slice of Life March Challenge 2012