Art Therapy

"A Cordial Greeting" necklace - Bountiful Winepress

I don't know about you, but although I price my items as a business woman and I'm looking into more business practices, jewelry is primarily a hobby for me. I'm an anxious and fidgety person, with a number of destructive tics, so it's actually very relaxing for me to sit down during the evenings or weekends and make jewelry.

I compulsively search for new components and weed through all my favorites for sold and expired items or new listings from favorited sellers. I love looking through even irrelevant listings just to enjoy the colors, and sometimes I find surprising items that I wasn't looking for but now I just have to have. On any given day, I have 10-14 pages of primarily supply favorites.

It gives me a lift every time I see packages in the mail, even if there are only basic findings (shout out to my main findings suppliers, who I adore!). As my work days get progressively more stressful for me (for reasons I'd like to avoid talking about here), it's a real pleasure to come home to something beautiful. I see potential, and I start planning for my three-day weekend.

Then the weekend comes, and I sit down with all my jewelry components around me and a favorite television show marathon on the TV, and I think So what am I going to make today? Weekends when I can't do this are disappointing, although I sometimes make up for it with a spurt of writing creativity.

When I write, my mind is frenetic, moving from point to point, always thinking of new words. It's a creative rush, and I like it. But because it feeds off my anxiety, I enjoy relaxing with my jewelry. When I'm creating jewelry pieces, my mind shuts up. I'm extremely focused, and while I can sometimes become frustrated (wire-wrapping! not enough components! running out of head pins! what the hell kind of glue am I supposed to use!), when I get into a groove, especially the process of creating the above beaded necklace, for example, jewelry-making is one of the few things that can calm me down, as relaxed as a person like me can get. It may take a long time and a lot of money, and trying to sell jewelry on Etsy may be something of a thankless task, but the process of jewelry-making itself is the therapeutic part. In spite of anything, I can't imagine what I would do if I stopped.