“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness.” -Ginsberg

I’ve always known I would be an artist. Creation is written on my bones – etched in the marrow like ornate and intricate carvings. If questioned in my youth, I couldn’t have told you I would become a photographer. This medium was elusive then, slippery and wet and wholly unformed, still ruminating and gestating within my soul. I thought I’d be something, anything else, really. A designer. A poet. A writer. A teacher. Eventually my dreams gave way and I morphed into something entirely unrecognizable. A destined-for-medicority suburban housewife with a ho-hum career and a sport utility vehicle and a Kohls’ charge.

The carvings had been buried. Their stories were devoured by the mundane tedium of the shoulds and supposed-tos. Frozen dinners and soda cans and lawn mowers. Escrow accounts and backyard bbq’s and societal norms.

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One day, amidst the chaos of to-do’s and alarm clocks and business casual but-I-saved-twenty-percent attire I’d had enough.

I let go of all that bullshit prescribed and contrived normalcy and decided, instead, to grasp firmly back onto my madness. Onto the very things that bewitched me when I was younger. Story. Beauty. People.
Life.

I picked up a camera and a sewing machine and knitting needles and a sketchbook and a paintbrush and anything, everything, ALL THE THINGS I could fit into my hands and I made. I created until I was gasping for air from the effort. Until my body throbbed and my stomach ached and my head pounded and my heart beat steady onward; more. more. more.

Creation sprung forth from me, fully formed. Like my namesake she was birthed, alive again and ready for war. The artist within was prepared to fight itself into prominence, permanence, perpetuity.
She was here to stay.

I have found my moonlight – I’ve unearthed the stories buried deep within me and resurrected them. This time, they are here to stay.

This feeling, doing, creating, experiencing, loving, poet, romantic creature – every ounce of right here right now even the part where I unapologetically love Justin Beiber and use emoji’s more than words sometimes – is exactly who I was meant to be.
Exactly who I have always been.

This is not my swan song.

This is my birth.

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