In Deep: A dive into beginner-ing

Hi there friends. 

It's been a minute since I've written much of anything. It's a funny thing to be IN DEEP. 

I have been lovingly trying to embrace this chapter of creativity and career, calling it by name instead of letting it haunt my corners.  I've been calling it 'In Deep'. I feel my toes stretching for the bottom, and my heart flutters when I realize I can't touch, but that's part of the fun, right? At least that's what I keep telling myself. It's always been hand in hand that silver and stone and story all walk together, so here's mine lately. 

I started so many big new things this year at R&S, to the point where everything felt so new and overwhelming all at once, I kinda fell apart. The newness started to feel like drowning, and the math started to not math. I'm talking beginnner shit. Foundational parts of my business started to fail. Fundamental things in my creative practice started to sink.  I became, for lack of a better word, frozen. And mad. How could this BE?! I was 15 years a veteran, and the work and time did not show. I was forced to realign my most strictly-held convictions and I hated every minute of it. I had found cracks in my so-called base, and wasn't ready to handle their implications. 

In business, price points started to become lost. Profit margins shrank, or completely disappeared. Metal pricing surged, and as far as I can tell, that won't change. Catalog pricepoints in 2026 went completely out the door and I pulled nearly everything off my website for sale. I didn't know what to do. Debt started to creep. Cameras broke. Technology flew over my head. The list of things I needed to purchase for the direction I was headed became unsustainable, and bad habits were now glaringly obvious. Casting failures and a freeze in all things gold-fill put a chokehold on production. World markets started to show their own fractures, and my business savvy started to feel more like soup. A constant fear of losing my ass in how I had, for the last 15 years, run myself a business and a living, started to take over my narrative. And my ego was beating back the idea that I could actually be failing at this thing many people would consider to be a creative career success story. At least from the inside looking out. To say that I've been IN IT is an understatement, but the harder part has been what this means for the muse.

Creativity is a funny thing. It's a wild animal sometimes, and a whispering grass blade the next. Some days, it's gone like that baby deer you barely saw run from the road to a dark knoll out of sight. I know this force more as a practiced artist over the years, and we are good friends.  But we are not friends when fear and frustration and lack come to play.  There's no room for that. And it's hard to not bring it when that's what you feel, everywhere you look are mistakes and big financials and puzzle pieces that almoooost fit, but not really. I felt surrounded by too much, and not enough, and it was paralyzing. So I made nothing. Or crap. I didn't have enough nice-ness for myself in new-ness, and it showed.

I would say that deep down, I'm a pragmatic optimist. This unwavering belief that this creative well-spring and my career choice is exactly where I need to be, has been slowly restabilizing. That voice gets louder as the year presses on, and never really disappeared, but it was hard to hear sometimes, like a muffled kid in an over-head swim towel. It was like I had this notion of capacity, but didn't know what that meant, or where to look for it. At some parts of early summer, I felt the need to write a resume up based on my very-long-time-ago service industry work as waitress and bartender for fear I might actually have to use it, and that choice made me nauseous. Not because I would hate re-entry into that world, but it was more this last concept of failure beating me into submission.  For my whole life, my voice was valuable, but not profitable.  And I carried that shit with me. And it almost broke me. I haven't gotten a job with tips yet.  But I might.  And that's one peaceful thing I can lay down now. 

I would also say that I've known, for a long time now, that things in my studio weren't working exactly the way I wanted them to.  I wasn't making the work that pushed me.  I wasn't doing the parts of my job I loved the most, and honestly, I think it was because I forgot what they were.  I had all the tools to change my trajectory, but none of the why.  And THAT takes time to find. I'm not quick at the trigger. I'm not a fast learner.  I'm not chasing fads and I don't like all the things I've made.  But.  I am looking.  And I'm pushing.  I think, for the first time in a long time, I'm actually pushing myself in a direction that feels more than overdue, and sorta like coming home. That voice is easier to hear these days, and as I work through the crunchy kinks and wrinkles of fucking up expensive shit, I feel more alive than I have in a long time in that little building.  It's actually TWO little buildings now. One for me at my bench, and one for the casting. I may break expensive stones and mis-fire kins and forget to turn on the vacuum pump and ruin good new tools, but I am trying to be nicer to myself when I do. I am chasing that newness more than drowning in it lately, and I find myself having fun instead of torturing myself over what I don't know, or what went wrong.

For the creatives who feel adrift.  I know this feeling so well now it's like adrift is actually the aim.  I say we try to float a little more, and drown a little less.  Touching the bottom is actually just a part of the beginning, and we shouldn't feel so afraid to tread water when we know our bodies actually need it. Just kick your feet, keep your head up, and swim towards the thing you want, or just a horizontal distance that feels true.  If you need it, there's floaties and dogs to jump with you.  

XO Erin