A Look Back
Am I the only one who has nev­er real­ly paid much atten­tion to the “look back” fea­ture on Face­book? Appar­ent­ly when you check your feed, there is the occa­sion­al mem­o­ry from that same date a year or more ago with the option to re-pub­lish it on your wall again. I think it used to be an opt-in fea­ture but now Face­book push­es it on everyone.

Time always flies by faster than we give it cred­it for. Today Face­book remind­ed me that it had been a year since I was inter­viewed as the fea­tured artist by my friend and fel­low artist, Bob Ostrom, for an arti­cle on his web­site. Has it real­ly been a year already?

At this point in time a year ago, I was fin­ish­ing up my first year work­ing for myself. I had tak­en the leap of faith  in Jan­u­ary of 2014 with the belief that “if I can do it for some­one else, why not do it for myself?” mantra. I left behind a job posi­tion build­ing some­one else’s busi­ness to start my own; though slow­ly com­ing to the real­iza­tion over that first year, that there was a lot more to own­ing a design stu­dio than draw­ing pret­ty pic­tures! Despite the odds, my new busi­ness had grown each month that year. Through the ebb and flow of vic­to­ries and defeats, there were still many signs the busi­ness was going to con­tin­ue to build and grow into a sus­tain­able enti­ty. The encour­age­ment and respect of an accom­plished free­lance artist already suc­cess­ful in the field was one of the high­lights and vic­to­ries of that often chal­leng­ing and growth-filled first year in busi­ness for myself.

To have an accom­plished fel­low artist appre­ci­ate the work I was cre­at­ing enough to give me guid­ance and high­light my work on his site gave me a boost of con­fi­dence dur­ing a time it would be easy to lis­ten more to doubts. It was a reminder then and now, that I was on the right path, that I had abil­i­ty and every rea­son to be con­fi­dent and bold in the next year to come. I am lov­ing the journey!

My inter­view from 2014 on Bob’s site