While in reality it was probably several years before it was worth
the money to enter telling a 8-11 year old child something like that,
rather than "maybe when you are older and you can draw better
pictures" will tend to have
a pretty nasty impact. Even worse when I was asked what I wanted
to be when I grew up it seems like by the time I asking about entering
an art show which was probably
between 8 and 11 years old (it may have been something that came up
as a consideration more than once) I had already given up on anything
that would involve drawing pictures
for a living because I had been so strongly discouraged.
The only thing more ironic was that until I was in my early 20's
and being introduced to the idea that I could start an online
business, and found some courage as a result of starting to learn
about some spiritual practices that I have long since learned other
things about that lead me to decide they didn't belong in my life and
had been a rather massive mistake. After all I spent so long being
taught (though I don't know if anyone ever explicitly said the words
that amounted to what I was being taught) that if people have the
choice to spend money on something I was willing to sell or not
spend money on something I was willing to sell they would never
choose to spend money on something I was willing to sell.
I won't go into what happened, how around the same time I destroyed
my health doing what everyone else wanted to see, and what I actually
thought I wanted to because it was shoved down my throat as the only
possible way to survive. When a person gets forced to accept that
the �only possible means of survival� is actually going to kill
them if anything, while everyone around them refuses to even acknowledge
the possibility that was what really was doing the damage to their health,
it can get very hard to deal with those people even if they weren't already
beating the living daylights out of them before they went and destroyed their
health doing what those people wanted.
In all honesty I knew full well I might never see a penny out of
espdigiart.com, in fact I was having
a hard time imagining I ever could. But there's a big difference between
doing something you don't even like and destroying your health in the process
to not be able to support yourself with no chance of ever seeing anything
more, and doing something you love that has no upper limit on what
could someday be possible to not be able to support yourself.
In my case that was all it took. I know that some people never get there. Never
feel that way. Or even if they do it's to scary to follow through with. I
won't lie, on Friday 2-10-2012 I was physically shaking when I finally bought my
domain name and uploaded my first gallery page,
and with my other creative ventures I can't say it was much less overwhelming the
first time, or the first time in years as the case might be. Going forward I
wouldn't be surprised to find I am going to go through something like that again
as I cross a lot more off my bucket list of creative projects that often start as
something personal and end as me trying to figure out (successfully or not) how
to turn them into a stream of relatively passive income. I can't even list everything
here because when if someone had told me that several of the things on that list were
things that would even exist by now, or be possible for me personally to do in any way
shape or form I would have called those people crazy probably not that long before
I actually did those things.
I don't know if or how I will get to do all those things, I don't know how many will
and won't pay off. Here's what I do know. While I will never know for certain
I probably I didn't miss that much for not entering that art
show as a kid. But as an adult I have had some amazing spiritual experiences
in connection with my art. So when I have one
of those dreams that probably everyone has at least one of but almost nobody actually
follows through with doing I have a lot of dreams I might shelve until I have a better
chance to do something with them but not to many I will write off completely.
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