 Cell phone ringing in the midst of having a little discussion with y'all. All right. Where was I? Hi everybody, welcome to another episode of explorations of me. We are here this month, May of 2019 and our prompt for this month is, and I want to have a little talk with y'all, but we are going to do a journal page. Our topic is What's holding you back from your dreams or goals? I really need to put my reading glasses on, hang on, because I can't see. Oh, that's better. What's holding you back from your, from one of your dreams or goals? What are the obstacles? How can you fix it and will it make you better? You know, we all have things in life that hold us, that we let and allow to allow them to hold us back from what we really want to do in life, whether, and most of the time it's somebody else's expectations of how we should be or their idea of how we are, which is, oh, yeah. Okay, so we all have things in life that we allow to hold us back. Others, other people's expectations of how we should be or what they think we are and they usually have nothing to do with the reality of who you are as a person and there really is something to be said. I heard years ago from different people in my life, mostly well women that I admired, you know, that there was just something about getting to be of a certain age and you just stop caring anymore about societal conventions and what other people expectations of who you should be are. Not that if they're not close to you, you don't care about their feelings, but at the same time, you need to be true to who you are and that's so true going forward. We all allow, when we're younger, it's very easy to allow people to tell us that we're a certain thing or a certain way or we should do this and not that or we shouldn't, you know, do whatever and you know, we can take, you take it to heart and then you let go of what you really want to do or what you really want to be and you know, it's just so sad. Stop doing it. I'm trying to stop doing it. If I can, if I can try, you can try. I don't expect you to be perfect. We're all human, but let's try. Whatever your dream is in life, whether it's art or sailing around the world or starting a new career, whatever, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is, the time is now. We don't get out of this life alive. That's reality. At some point, we're all no longer here anymore. So if not now, when? While you still, as my dad would say, are on the right side of the dirt, it's a good time. So we're going to go and I'm going to show you a journal page with that in mind. I am going to prep you first before I show you the page. I haven't finished it yet, but I had all of these stickers and things on my table and I don't, honestly, they're not my thing. I don't really care for them. They don't fit in with my collection of ephemera. They're not something I normally would have used, but they came from different places. Some were out of magazines, some my daughter gave me and she said if you don't like them, throw them away. Some friends sent me. They just piled up on the desk because I didn't know what to do with them. And I just thought, you know, there's freedom in just letting things be, letting them happen organically, letting, following your dreams, following your thoughts. There's a freedom in that. So I thought to myself, what happens if I just take all of those stickers and put them all on a page together? What happens? Just let things go. Let them be and be you, the best you you can be with those ideas in mind. We're going to go to the table and I'll show you where I got with that crazy sticker background and where we're going to go forward with it because it's been sitting for a few days, but I think I finally have an idea. Let's go to the table. So I did have to put some matte medium over the top of them to make sure they were stuck down, made sure all the edges were stuck down. They didn't really want to stick to this paper very well. This is the cotton, rag, watercolor, whatever paper in the Dina Wakeley journal, which I like Dina Wakeley. Don't get me wrong. I love her paint. I love a lot of her products. This journal is not one of them. This paper in particular, I'm not a huge fan of, and you can see here. See, they just don't want to stick. So we'll probably go around and do this and stick some more matte medium or gel medium underneath there. Make sure I didn't miss any spots. But anyway, I think I know where I'm probably going to go with this. Now I got recently a, we are member keepers word punch board. These are all the parts. And it's a punch with alphabet letters and you put the letters in here and then you put the slide the paper in and close this and it punches, it punches the letters out, punches the word out. I love that. I don't like lots of letter things or alphabet things or I don't have hardly any word stamps or anything because I not the sentiment kind. I don't make greeting cards, not generally. That's not what I do. But this is very much me because I can punch inspirational words and use them in my journals. I love that idea. You know me and my words. I love them. I have this piece of handmade paper for my friend, Peg. I think that's going to work really well on. And I just, I love this because this whole page just reminds me to be open, to follow your dreams, follow your instincts and just be you. Which is for me what this whole month with explorations of me is about. So I am going to fast forward through finishing this page and we'll see where we end up and we'll be back at the end. Okay, holy cow. I will admit to you right here and right now I had no idea where that was going and a couple times I thought, holy moly, I need to do something different for this YouTube video because that's a hot mess. But you know what? I like where it ended up. I love it. It's dirty, it's gritty and yet there's a bright light spot in the middle that says be open. Be open to who you really are supposed to be, follow your dreams. You know I have a saying on one of my merch items. It's on a teacher among other things. It says be a rainbow and it has a rainbow in the background. You could take that a lot of different ways, but I'll tell you right now how I meant it. Be bright, be sparkly, be you, be a rainbow. Doesn't matter what anybody else thinks. All right. So go be a rainbow, go be you, follow your dreams and I'd love to see where they take you. Feel free to share over in my Facebook group, A Life of Art and Self Expression. Follow the other teachers and see what they do with this this month. I will put their links in the description below. And if you have any questions, comments or concerns, please do leave them and I will respond to you. I promise. If you want to follow me on social media and follow my daily art practice, which I do have, or you want to support the free content here on YouTube or over on Facebook, you can do that by clicking on my link tree list of links, which is in the description below. There you'll find Instagram, Twitter, my Etsy store, my Amazon affiliate store where to buy my book Patreon and where to get merch and all that stuff. So I hope you have fun with it this month. I hope you do something exciting. Let me know what that is and I will see you all later. Don't forget the most important thing. Y'all know what that is by now, right? Go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later. Bye, guys.