Dispatches From Hellpeckersville- I Used To

Next month my little family is going to a wedding. My nephew Adam is getting married, and we’re all excited and happy to be going. An invitation that includes our kids? Oh, yes! I even got a new dress for the occasion. It is gorgeous, and I know just the kind of earrings I want to wear with it. I could make them, in fact, I used to. I used to make and sell them. Why don’t I do that anymore? What the hell happened to me?

So the dress is hanging there looking all beautiful and me, I want to go on the hunt for my jewelry making supplies that have been missing since we moved in here. We think we have it narrowed down to packed into the middle of the shitheap in the garage or just completely gone. I’ve looked before, but I can’t move the things in the garage that stand in the way of my knowing whether any or all of my stuff is there or not. It’s several hundred dollars worth of beads and findings, so as you can imagine, this irritates me, but it’s never been to any degree of urgency until now. I know I have some glass and semi-precious beads that would look absolutely stunning with this dress, damn it. Well…maybe I can just purchase a few things a make myself a set to wear. Off to Amazon I go. And from there I’m down the rabbit hole.

Beads, beads, everywhere I’m looking at beads. And I want them. But I can’t justify buying them, can I? No, no I can not. I want to replace what I’ve lost, but I haven’t sold my wares for years and years. I used to. I don’t now. My supplies used to pay for themselves, but that was a long time ago.

I still make things, but not to sell. I’m just a dabbler, and I buy just enough supplies to complete whatever I’m going to make. I think about maybe selling some of the things I make, I hear the old me in my head telling me–yeah, this is cool. People would buy this, but it’s too labor intensive, you would need to charge too much for this. Or-Man, do you see what they’re getting for what you used to charge six bucks for? You could totally do that again! Look at that. But I don’t.

I know why I stopped. I got too sick to keep up with it. I used to have a booth at a craft mall, couldn’t keep it filled. I used to haul my stuff to craft fairs and flea markets and that became un-doable as well. When my life fell apart and I ran with just two hefty bags, I was lucky in that many of my supplies were already out of that house, and my ex later sent some of the rest along, but I was in no shape to do anything with any of it. So everything got stored.

Over the years things got shifted around and some of it got lost, but I had my beads when we lived next door. I kept them handy because I would pull them out and make something any time I needed it, and that was when Cleetus was still doing gigs, so I would wear my earrings out a lot, and I got compliments. I got more than that, I got sales. Then we moved here, Dan got his diagnosis, we stopped going out, and nothing else seemed very important at all for a while.

Now? This bead situation has brought up a lot of issues I’ve been having with myself. I found an old notebook of mine the other day while I was on my bead hunt. It had diagrams of my earrings with each component priced out, it had inventory, sales, suppliers listed…I used to have my shit together. For months and months I’ve had this restless and frustrated feeling of wanting to be doing something again, but not doing anything about it, and I hate me for that.

I know things are very different now. I wouldn’t have to go out all over hell to sell, I could sell on etsy, right here from home. That should be so much easier, right? Right? I know my pieces look every bit as good as comparable pieces there, but the truth is I’m scared to death to even dip a toe in. Not just because these etsy sellers seem to know all the ins and outs of marketing and how to get their stuff seen and all that, but of course, “What if my stuff doesn’t sell?” is right up there. I’m scared I’ll put out the money and then fail to follow through. I’ve gotten really good at being a dabbler, a dilettante. I see something I love, I think that I could make it, I do make it, and that’s about it. Why? Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost sight of the endless creative possibilities.

Deep down I know that’s not true about my jewelry, but then I used to have a dazzling array to lay out and choose from. If I had that again would that do it? I don’t know. I do know that I didn’t used to be afraid to try.