APRIL 2022 | JOURNALING | PITTSBURGH ART

Vision Board: 
Resetting at 40 and Creating a Space for Creatives

By Mighty.Beautiful

Life changes in an instant, instant after instant after instant.

One instant, you’re 37 years old and your biggest worry is having to say goodbye to your elderly dog, who tips over sometimes when he tries to stand up. The next instant, you’re 39 years old and every part of you has changed, traumatized by a series of personal and global disasters you’ve just barely survived, wishing you hadn’t, trying to rewind time, wondering where in this mad, mad world you could possibly fit and what in it could possibly make life good again.

And then you’re 40 years old. 4-0. You’re supposed to have four whole decades of learning and wisdom and accomplishments and friendships under your belt, half of your whole life’s legacy underway. At 40, according to my childhood expectations, you’re supposed to be managing a team of people, living in your own house and married to the love of your life, telling your four-year-old stories about how you traveled the world and met Mickey Mouse in Florida (if four-year-olds even know who Mickey Mouse is these days). But instead, none of that is true. You’re in Pittsburgh, visiting a friend from college, manic with nostalgia, attending your younger brother’s wedding, wondering where all the time has gone and why you always seem to be moving backwards when everyone else is moving forwards, trying to plan out a life that can, and has, changed in an instant, over and over and over and over again.

What is the life I want to live? How can I live it? How can I protect it? How can I make the most of it? For months, I had asked these questions to the universe, and after a while, suddenly, the universe actually seemed to answer. All signs pointed in one direction: Pittsburgh.

the Climate Crisis and A Future to Invest In

I promised myself when I moved to Austin in 2005 that I would never move back to the bitterly cold, depressing Midwest/ North-anywhere again. I grew up smack-dab in the middle of nowhere between two of America’s most unpopular cities: Toledo and Detroit. Both cities experienced a “brain drain” crisis when manufacturing and industrial jobs disappeared and college graduates chose to leave the area for bigger, warmer cities with more high-tech career opportunities. As the Internet developed in the 90s and early 2000s and it became easier and easier to stay in touch with family and friends from anywhere in the world, that crisis seems to have only grown. Pittsburgh has not been left out of that brain drain. The city has struggled for decades with a decreasing population, thanks largely in part to this: Just like me, people just do not like cold weather.

“There is no variable that predicts urban population growth in the 20th century better than January temperature,” wrote Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser way back in 2009 in an editorial for the New York Times about the dying Rust Belt, comparing Pittsburgh to Phoenix. “While 19th-century cities formed in places where companies had a productive edge, generally because of access to water ways or coal mines, 20th-century cities formed in pleasant places where people wanted to live.”

But this is 2022 now. We are almost a quarter of the way through the 21st-century, and the world has changed and is changing. People can work remotely from anywhere. We spend a large portion of our lives online, where where we actually live matters very little. Our friends and family have all dispersed. We’re settling down less and having fewer kids. What factors will we be basing our decisions on now?

Answer: The climate and natural resources. The climate crisis is entirely unresolved and growing by the minute; housing prices in southern cities have skyrocketed, making the traditional American dream of home ownership virtually impossible for everyday working people all across the South.

Meanwhile, the entire West is the middle of the longest recorded draught in civilized history, making the availability of water in those cities a dangerously limited resource. Natural disasters from floods, fires and hurricanes uproot dozens, hundreds, even thousands of Americans and immigrants every single day. And these cities, states and people are, sadly to say, completely unprepared for the affects and consequences of a changing climate. Millions of Texans last year spent a week in January without heat, water or electricity due to a cold frontage that the rest of the country has been dealing with for since, well, forever. The economic impact of just that ONE disaster is an estimated $1.3 BILLION DOLLARS, to say nothing of the lives lost. In total, the country last year saw more than 20 natural disasters that cost more than $1 billion each; the total estimated cost of all natural disasters for that one year was $145 billion, according to a report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And that’s just the basic dollas-and-cents cost. It doesn’t speak to other costs, like mental health costs, which are rarely discussed but that I can personally attest to. “Sea-level rise, flooding, and extreme weather poses a mental health threat to Northeasterners. Impacted coastal communities can expect things like ‘anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder,” reads a Grist analysis of the National Climate Assessment. Putting a dollar sign on the cost of our entire nation’s mental health isn’t something I can do, but there are a lot of signs that we are a deathly ill democracy.

A few years ago, Texas went more than 100 days in a row with highs reaching more than 100 degrees — a misery opposite of but completely comparable to suffering through a long, cold winter up North. As someone who has “lost” my home twice in flash floods due to intensifying storms, I am very aware (or as aware as I know how to be) of the impact the climate crisis can have on a person, a community, the country and the world. So I’ve been asking myself: Where is “safe” in the climate crisis? Because it surely can’t be Texas, with its drought, heat, refusal to invest in environmental protections or mitigation and water management policies. And I mean, I love Austin, I love Texas, I really do hope they figure it out, but I just went through an existential crisis watching my 74-year-old mother die, and so I've been thinking a lot about it. Would I bet my life savings on it and my health care on it when I’m 80 years old and dying right as civilization is predicted to melt down in 2050?

No. And F*CK no.

Nobody can predict how the climate crisis will impact an area, though the world’s best scientists and computer algorithms sure are trying. Almost anywhere you look, the results are kind of terrifying, especially given the lack of investment we’ve seen over the last 10 years and the human behavior we’ve observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Floods, water wars, famines from large-scale farms drying up. Michigan, with its Great Lakes, could fare well, but the lakes are so polluted it’s questionable. Some scientists believe the entire Midwest will be a desert by 2050, while others believe Michigan will wind up getting so much rain that Lake Michigan will eat up Chicago via “meteotsunami” events, which I had never even heard of before just this minute.

But Pittsburgh? That’s where my money is going if I was a betting woman. The Northeast region of the country is expected to see “‘the largest temperature increase in the contiguous United States’ — 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the time 2035 rolls around” — which, when you take into account mans’ historic preference for warmer weather over cold winters, isn’t actually a bad thing. “Be warned that winters are projected to warm in our region three times faster than summers,” the Grist analysis states. “The assessment portends more intense (read: more Instagram-able) fall foliage and more forest growth.” And Pittsburgh has mountain ranges and distance sheltering it from the sea-level rise that threatens other Northeast coastal cities, like New York and Boston and Baltimore and Washington, D.C. If I had to make a bet about the safest place to grow old right now, if there is one? I’d say Pittsburgh.

And call me paranoid, call me crazy, but I making that bet. It’s already been made.

A Mighty Beautiful City

I’ve honestly only spent one week thus far in Pittsburgh. That’s crazy to say and admit, but it’s true: I actually, factually know very little about the city. But the same thing was true when I chose to move to Austin two decades ago: I spent one week here when I was 22 years old and knew it was absolutely meant to be. And that’s the same feeling I have about Pittsburgh now.

I feel a certain kind of kinship with Pittsburgh. The city’s slogan is Mighty.Beautiful. The city lives up to it. It’s a city that has the feel of having been through a lot, but still persevered. The city rightfully prides itself on having reinvented itself as an educational and cultural hub after the manufacturing jobs crisis. The greater Pittsburgh area boasts more than 40 different non-profit colleges and universities, including one of the tops arts universities in the world, Carnegie Mellon.

Location-wise, Pittsburgh is surrounded by truly spectacularly beautiful drives, including the three hour long drive west through the rolling hills of Amish country to Columbus to visit Other World, one of the country’s best collective art installations, or the five hour drive east to the small but beautiful town of Scranton. It’s just a four-hour drive to Washington, D.C. (or to my family in Toledo) and only three hours away from Canada, should anyone ever need to flee the country for some reason. And as far as activities go, Pittsburgh is home to the National Aviary, The Andy Warhol Museum, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, The Pittsburgh Zoo and PPG Aquarium, and the beautifully stunning Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, not to mention every kind of sports team known to man (don’t ask me). These are places that, when I’m inside, I literally never want to leave.

And as beautiful as the mountain views and the botanical gardens are, there’s something even more beautiful about Pittsburgh — though it’s something that definitely won’t last long: It’s affordable housing market (please don’t tell anyone). All across the South and West and in the country’s most popular cities, the housing market is adding so much stress to every day people. In Austin over the last year, the cost of housing has increased by 50 percent and rent has skyrocketed up by 40 percent — meanwhile my employer is offering just 2 percent COLA increases. Suffice it to say, my job has stopped paying my Austin bills, and I’m not the only one. One of my best friends is the vice president of technology at a global shipping and security company, and even he cannot afford a home in Austin, and while Austin flourished in part because of its lively music and arts scene, the conservative state does nothing to support the musicians and artists who made the state so “cool” that the world’s largest tech companies all had to move here due to employee demand. Any tear-down home within 2 miles of downtown Austin will sell for $800,000 just for the .25 acres of land alone, and be resold after a new home has been built for $1.5 million, or more. Bidding wars are part of the process now, with many homes selling for 20 percent over the asking price. Meanwhile, currently, at this moment, in Pittsburgh, a decent 4-bedroom home can still be had for under $250,000, all repairs made, without any bidding wars.

Basically? Pittsburgh is absolutely perfect — or will be as close to perfect as reality will allow in the near future.

But that’s only half the reason I bit the bullet and bought a house there.

A Massive Post-Pandemic Reset

My mom, a special education school teacher who never afforded herself a single luxury and saved her entire life to make sure she’d be able to afford her retirement years, had left behind an inheritance that would either dwindle away quickly renting in Austin or that I could use to really try and set myself up for a future that was actually mine, while still honoring my mom for who she was, the sacrifices she made and the ways she would have wanted me to impact the world. And I really, really, really want to make the most of this one chance, because the world just seems too chaotic and unpredictable to let it all dwindle down.

But ever since my house flooded with four feet of water in a record-setting 500-year flash flood for the first time in 2013, I have struggled with making plans. Having everything I had ever worked for demolished by water and mud and soot was traumatic, but I thought I could bounce back, consider it a once-in-a-lifetime setback and move forward with lessons learned. And it wasn’t once in a lifetime. When the home flooded with another four feet of water during a storm just two years later, I realized just how easily anything and everything can be lost, I stopped even trying to make plans. PTSD may have gotten the best of me, but living day by day, week by week, month by month became the norm as I dealt with the setbacks, challenges and choices of the rest of my 30s — friendships, relationships, work, vacations. I planned as little as I could as a coping mechanism and instead tried to fall into a routine, safe, sound, stable, steady.

And that worked just fine, for quite a while. Even having bought that cursed but beloved flooded house, I honestly regret almost nothing from my 30s. My friends were there when I needed them, always up for a good time, kept life interesting; my job paid the bills and allowed me to have energy left over for my own creative pursuits; I traveled across the country on road trips in search of the country’s most beautiful mountain views and even managed to cross some international locations off my bucket list, like Galapagos and Scotland. I fell in and out of love, dated more people than I care to remember or count. I took risks, leaving an unfulfilling but successful writing career to transition into the arts, by any means necessary. I made mistakes and tried to make up for them. I went to the beach as often as I could.

But then I got that phone call in February 2020 that changed absolutely everything, though I had no way of knowing exactly how much it would turn my life upside down and inside out. It was from my mom’s cardiologist, in Toledo, Ohio: She had less than six months to live, she couldn’t take care of herself anymore, she wanted to die at home and wanted me to take care of her. She was crying when I first tried to tell her no, I was incapable of such a feat, and within minutes I had already resigned myself to finding a way, though absolutely frantic and panicked about it. During the next two weeks, I broke the lease to my tiny home, found a house big enough for the both of us, packed up my entire place, bought a plane ticket, made plans to move all her stuff, and was in Toledo for one last visit with relatives before moving her to Austin.

Then, of course, things got f’cking awful, really fast. Some news about a pandemic in China that I sure as sh*t did not have the time to pay attention to. We were in the Toledo airport, waiting for our plane to Austin, when I first heard that Mayor Steve Adler had made the extremely controversial decision (at the time) to cancel one of the city’s most popular international events, South by Southwest, out of pandemic concerns. Nursing home patients and home health care workers were getting sick and dying all over the news. People my age were suddenly becoming so sick they couldn’t make it to their front doors without running out of breath. My mom, unable to comprehend the media reports, believed the outside air was poisoned.

This is all largely another story, but the point is: The entire world crashed right when I needed it the most, and as much as I have tried to claw my way out of that trauma and the depression that followed me, it haunts me in various ways: through friendships that haven’t been the same since for various reasons, the way I had to change priorities in my life so abruptly and completely, the feeling of isolation that I can't seem to scrub off from my insides. Over the last year, I’ve tried everything I can think of to wipe that slate clean, to mend burned bridges, to put that experience behind me, but the truth is, it’s still here. I feel fragments of it every day — not just from how much I miss my mom and the memories I have of myself feeding her painkillers meant to kill her, but from friends who distanced themselves, the pain and shame of having failed at something impossible to succeed at.

If that feeling of isolation and existential loneliness is not going to go away, maybe I need to go away, at least for a while. Hide from the shadows following me. Hit the reset button. Go where I can be me again, where I’m allowed to create a better version of me.

I’m not the only one moving across the country right now, and I am far from the only person who has gone through these types of traumatic experiences in these last few years. This is happening en masse, and is the type of problem that escalates exponentially as individual happiness and wellness (or lack of it) spreads through families, friend groups, and communities. There is a growing number of Americans who are experiencing anxiety, depression and PTSD due to losing homes and family members in natural disasters and the coronavirus pandemic and just having the Boomer generation reach a certain age. We truly need to be doing everything we can to improve our mental health, if only to avoid a complete collapse of our economy. Mental health ties directly to important conservative concerns, like production and innovation and addiction and crime and pretty much every other problem that can be named. While it’s easy to tell people to “get help” and “see a therapist,” it’s much harder actually finding and affording a decent one due to the shortage of mental health workers and infrastructure. It’s like telling people to go jump on a rainbow. Okay, but where? How?

Art will save us

During the pandemic, as my mom was dying and in the months that followed, I had to dig deep just to force myself to get out of bed. I didn’t have the focus or energy for things like movies, or books, or television. I’d start watching something and almost immediately lose interest, my brain fighting a seemingly never-ending battle of negative thoughts and feelings and emotions and fears — except for when I was creating.

It was March when it started, wildflower season in Texas, and ordinarily, I would have spent hours upon hours in March walking through various fields of wildflowers, roadtripping out to Llano, hiking through Onion Creek Park, visiting the Wildflower Center. But there weren’t any signs at the time that those places were safe to go to, and my mom, terrified by the news, quickly just gave up and became too sick to go anywhere but to sleep. I couldn’t leave the house for more than a few minutes each day for fear she would try to get out of bed and fall and break something. I was getting my groceries and medicine delivered via couriers and good friends dropped emergency items off at the door with distanced hellos. The house I was living in became a bit of a prison or blackhole as time stopped inside and the world went on outside of it.

The best escape I had was to close my eyes and dream of those wildflower fields, and do my very best to keep them on my mind in every waking moment. I wanted to touch them, smell them, bring them home with me — but other than collect what I could from the rare 5-minute walks down the block I forced myself to occasionally take, I couldn’t. And so I started to paint, and then I just kept going, adding layers of flowers using the scrap materials I had saved from prior projects — dried paint, yarn, lace. I’d make flowers in my “free time” as my mom slept, music playing softly from my laptop. I’d always loved to paint even though I don’t consider myself great at it, but during the pandemic, it didn’t matter if I was great at it or not. Working on my wildflower field was literally the only thing I could do to calm my mind down, the only way I could focus on the present in a way that didn’t make me want to just… die. Sometimes I’d only be able to work on it for 5 or 10 minutes before my mom would wake up in pain, but sometimes I had hours to myself, working up new ways to add new layers of flowers into my field, cutting and folding different pieces of fabric into various shapes of various sizes, never gluing anything down but instead moving the pieces around each night like I was putting together a new puzzle, stretching the project on for forever just because I really needed it to continue.

One night, for the last time, my mom got the energy to walk all the way back into the living room, and I showed her my field, which was full of greens and purples and blues. I was hoping she would like it, because crafting had always been the way my mom and I communicated best: she had never been an artist, but she had always loved to sew and play with beads and our trips to the fabric store whenever I went to visit home were the most peaceful, best times. Crafting had always been the thing that had brought us together, the one thing we could agree on.

“It’s pretty,” my mom said, looking at what I was working on. “But it needs more yellow.”

She died at 11:15 p.m. on April 20, 2020. I had known the time was coming close — our hospice nurse had visited the day before and told me it was coming because her toes were turning purple; it was a sign all her vital organs were shutting down. Though I hadn’t been in a church in almost 20 years, I had planned a whole night of gospel song karaoke for her, since I didn’t know what to say. We had never actually been that “close” — she had always been a very quiet, private person and we spent most of our lives arguing more than we talked — and I wasn’t in the mood for a one-sided heart-to-heart given the state of things.

I guess she wasn’t in the mood for my karaoke. As I sang the last word to the first song — “Hallelujah” — her head and torso seemed to get a burst of energy, and her lips, which hadn’t spoken a word for days, yelled out a sound — I’m not sure if it was “Maria” or if she was trying to sing the last word, “Hallelujah” — and just like that, she was gone. Cold. I called the hospice number and told them my mom had died and played my tongue drum for the next hour until someone came to collect the body, which she wanted donated to cancer research. And then I finally glued down the flowers I had made for my wildflower field. It was over.

Because of the pandemic, there was no family that could come to visit. There was no service I could plan. I was too exhausted from just those two months without sleep, waking up every two hours to disperse the pain medicines that would ultimately purposefully kill her, to accept hugs and consolations without having a complete meltdown. I felt terrible for not having a funeral, but in the end, she hadn’t been expecting one and I just didn’t have the strength to figure it out. I had done the best I could, but it just wasn’t at all … normal. Not a single moment had gone the way I had envisioned it going just two months earlier. Everyone in my family, hundreds of miles away in Ohio and Pennsylvania, felt those two months went by fast, but for me, it felt like forever. I am still reliving those days; they are the most vivid memories I have of my mom. A friend came to isolate with me for two weeks, to make sure I was eating and bathing, but eventually he had to get back to his own place and priorities and I … got back to my couch. Where I pretty much stayed for months, just trying to get the words “my mom died” to come out of my mouth without crying. Eventually, I just gave up and tried to leave my house and see friends anyway, which backfired spectacularly because people don’t expect grief to lay there for months and months like that. It’s supposed to dissipate, but it hadn’t. It couldn’t. I was living in the house where my mom died, and I felt her presence there, her spirit there, the weight of what had happened, all the time.

All.

The.

Time.

Eventually, I found the energy to get off the couch and start a new collage painting — this one to remember my mom, who used to love watching deer as they romped around the wooded area behind her condo complex in Toledo. She talked about them all the time in the year she lived there before coming to live with me in Austin; any day she saw them sounded like a good day. And she loved flowers of all kinds - when her own mom had died, the flowers had been so, so, so important to her. I had kept every single flower family members sent to us, dried and saved in jars and bottles, knowing that one day, they would become her ashes. And I always remembered some of the last coherent words she ever said to me: “It needs more yellow.” And that’s what I made to try and process my grief while I felt her spirit watching: A deer standing in front of a sunflower field. That, I felt, was her version of Heaven. That was where I wanted her, and that was what I would spend hours thinking about as I painted and cut and sewed away, slowly putting the new painting together piece by piece, finally finding an escape from my depression and misery as my mind focused on moving my hands in a state of creative flow.

And this is why I believe and how I know so strongly that creativity and creative flow are absolutely foundational and central to a healthy life — as central as eating food, breathing air, exercising and having shelter. It is not an “extra-curricular,” something that can be simply replaced with an hour of yoga. It is not something people are good at and some people are bad at, or that some people need and others don’t. Creativity is something that we all have, a tool that we can all use to process our feelings and emotions, to communicate with other spiritual realms, to tell the world about our experiences and the things we cannot say with words. Creativity is the muscle that connects our bodies to our souls, and without it, we are not whole.

“Typically, when people are creating something, whether it’s a software program, graffiti, or a quilt, they tend to get lost in the activity. The act of creating requires focus and concentration, and multitasking doesn’t work. Some psychologists call this state of creativity, ‘flow.’ The Flow Genome Project, an organization that researches human performance, defines the state of flow as “those moments of rapt attention and total absorption when you get so focused on the task at hand that everything else disappears and all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof,” states Dr. Brad Brenner, a psychologist and co-founder of Therapy Group of NYC, in a blog post for the organization. “The state of creative flow is caused by changes in brain function. Brainwaves slow down, and original thoughts are better able to form. Additionally, the prefrontal cortex temporarily deactivates, or “goes quiet,” making us less critical of our ideas and more courageous. Lastly, during a flow state, our brain releases “an enormous cascade of neurochemistry,” including large quantities of endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine. These are pleasure- and satisfaction-inducing chemicals that affect creativity and well-being.”

Creative flow comes with the same mind-body benefits of meditation and yoga — both increasingly popular among wellness communities — but with the additional benefits of having produced, learned, experimented, communicated and expressed something yearning to be released into existence. “It reduces anxiety, boosts your mood, and even slows your heart rate,” states career coach Ashley Stahl in a Forbes magazine article on the benefits of entering a creative flow state. That’s true even if you’re just coloring in a coloring book, tapping on a hand drum, or brainstorming plans to redecorate a room.

“The way the brain acts during creative activities is similar to the experience during meditation, mindfulness, and yoga exercises. These activities are designed to help you find peace, calm, and happiness by blocking out external stimuli. Like these exercises, creativity can produce a natural “high” or feeling of joy and contentment,” Dr. Brenner states.

The mental health benefits that can come from working on creative exercises are plentiful, but it’s not just mental health. The strength of our creative muscles impact every facet of life, from how resilient we are to how productive we are — but many people wouldn’t know it from the way their lives are prioritized around work, dieting, exercise, family responsibilities, drinking, sports watching, consuming and other 21st century “priorities” that have forced creativity onto the back-burner in many people’s lives.

”When we’re young, our lives are full of creative activities. We make shapes with clay, invent lifelike scenarios with dolls and toys, bang on drums or pots and pans, and color regularly. As teens, we may participate in the school band or take a photography or creative writing class as an elective. However, as we get older, creativity is sometimes crowded out by our educational and vocational pursuits, our focus on supporting our partners and families, commuting, and daily chores and errands that we carry out with mindless repetition,” Dr. Brenner states. “However, a 2010 IBM study of 1500 global CEOs found that the organizations that “masterfully” navigate change and are more innovative were those with creative leaders. For these CEOs, creativity was “noted as the single most important trait for navigating through the complexity” of corporate data, technology, and regulations. The study recommended that entire organizations, not just CEOs, should “be equipped to be a catalyst for creativity.”

For those who struggle with finding a creative flow or belief in their own creative power, there is an easy creative action plan or path a person can take to get started: Go on a walk. Change your surroundings for just an hour or two. And then find a repetitive creative activity to do, like knitting, crocheting, weaving, drumming, or coloring.

“Repetitive creative motions like knitting, drawing, or writing help activate flow, and are all tasks that create a result. And when you succeed at creating a result, no matter what it is, your brain is flooded with dopamine, that feel-good chemical that actually helps motivate you,” Stahl writes, adding that finding flow also helps decrease dementia, boosts the immune system, improves brain performance and helps process trauma.

A Space for Creativity

What I want most is to help other people recognize the importance of creativity in their lives. I want to live in a world where I never hear anyone say “I’m not a creative person” or “I just don’t have anything I’m passionate about” or “I don’t have time for that” or “I’m too depressed to do ….” While some people may need and benefit from anti-anxiety medications or mood-boosters, too many people rely on drinking, drugs and other depressants to numb their way through their days instead of incorporating creativity into their routines and daily life. They may do creative things often enough, such as cooking, but they do not think of those ways in a creative light and miss out on the benefits of creative activities.

But the truth is, there are barriers to entry for creative flow. One is space: while many crafts can be done in small spaces, others require more space or a dedicated space, which many people lack. Another might be money: Some creative outlets that might appeal most to a person require expensive equipment, and even if they can afford the equipment, they may not have a suitable space for it in which they can focus on learn. Another barrier to entry might be time: So many of us feel busy and exhausted and just cannot find 15 or 30 minutes of their days to carve out for a creative pursuit, something our culture seems to have largely deemed “selfish” or “worthless” and “unproductive” or a “waste” unless it makes money or receives attention and compliments.

So I’m hitting the reset button and moving to Pittsburgh, where I can afford the space to dedicate myself to living a creative life and spreading the importance of creativity to others, where I can afford to buy more art supplies and dedicate more time and energy to creative pursuits, where people can come to find both creativity and community, a kind of tiny little gym for the mind and soul. It’ll start off small — sharing my home and studio space with other artists and partners — but will stretch out into the Pittsburgh community with art classes and workshops and exercises until it grows with the inclusion of traveling creatives, rotating gallery exhibits and artists talks. Call it a live-work creativity cafe and retreat. Pittsburgh being the mighty beautiful city that it is, it surely won’t be the only thing of its kind there, and I would never want it to be. I just want to contribute meaningfully to the creative community and the mental health conversation.

I picture turning my living room and dining area into a working studio with walls filled with art, a painting space surrounded with cubby holes of various sizes holding art supplies and projects, sewing machines and desks lining one wall, a huge table in the middle big enough to hold classes and workshops for six people, talking around a table about our favorite places, our happiest thoughts, where we get inspiration from, making and creating and experimenting together, a soft-seating lounge area for weaving, needle felting, crocheting and crafting surrounded by potted plants and a hand-made garden of crafted birds and flowers; a reading and writing room adorned with floor pillows and coloring books and books on creativity and creative exercises; an overflow studio space in the basement for tenants to use; a sun room with a hammock swing and yoga mats and musical instruments to play with; a deck to enjoy the sun when it shines and sets; a ply board fence for people to paint murals on and over; an outdoor rock garden and land art space visitors can use to praise the beauty of Mother Nature.

Longer-term, I dream of adding a larger workshop space, a photography studio and a few tiny homes to host community members, outsiders and travelers needing a creativity retreat in the mountains to clear their heads and start using their hands more, meeting people from around the world who are feeling lost or stuck or trapped or down and showing them the path I took, and have taken time and time again when life has knocked me down, to get back from hell.

Will I succeed at my dreams? Only time will tell. All I know is, I’m about to start and I’m going to give it all I got before the next winter arrives.