@font-face { font-family: “Times New Roman”;}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; I have been hunting for my next upholstery project and the bold fabric that will become its second skin. Conveniently, this month’s House Beautiful is devoted to the celebration of pink. While I like to use pink as an accent color in my wardrobe, I had never thought about using it on a chair. It just has always seemed like too much, until I saw it in action. The layouts got my colorful creative juices flowing and I started to daydream about starting my own business like my upholstery hero (yes, I have an upholstery hero) Molly Andrews, the woman behind Chairloom. I imagined all the old chairs I could rehab and give a second, colorful life. I imagined a tiny brightly painted storefront tucked into a corner of a cobblestone-lined street.
I quickly pulled myself out of the fantasy with a mental quip dripping with self-condescension, “way to waste that brain of yours.” Upholstering is creative and physically challenging, but not a heavy mental workout. But does it have to be? I have spent years of my life giving my synapses reason to fire. What’s wrong with giving them a break to do something fulfilling in an entirely different way? I have always felt the need to push myself intellectually, but now it seems that I have boxed myself into a mindset that requires any vocational pursuit to be an intellectual one; that anything worth doing demands analytical thinking, or demonstrates analytical thinking. Now, I am not a member of Mensa, so my occupation shouldn’t require me to prove my intellectual capacity. Am I closing myself off to exciting, new, creative possibilities just because that little type-A monster is rearing her strawberry blond head again?
This quandary won’t be solved in a single self-run therapy session, but as I continue upholstering (as well as my future adventures) I’m going to have to try to come to terms with the idea that my passion may not validate my intelligence — and that’s not a tragedy. That’s life.
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