To Etsy or Not To Etsy?

When I left my full time job at the hospital a whopping three and a half years ago, many of my co-workers expressed concern for my sanity. They know that I'm a social beast and inquired about how I would occupy my time and fulfill my need to interact with real people. My expectation, as silly as it seems now, was that I would create art during the hours my son was in school and be super mom and carpool queen when he was home. I had discovered etsy.com and wanted to open a shop within six months of having left the job, sure I could do that with nothing but time on my hands. That is NOT what happened.

What did happen was that I discovered that as a family, we have way too much stuff. That stuff is constantly being left where it doesn't belong, or it's dirty and needs cleaning, or that it needs to be repaired, returned, or replaced. I live the life of an around-the-clock personal assistant to the clan and spend too little time making art.

Yesterday was my birthday. My husband asked me now that I had reached the age of (choke) 51, had I any grand words of wisdom to share about what I felt about life, what I had learned, or some other silly thing. Actually, I had been thinking about it. My mother died at age 63, my younger sister just days before turning 47, my paternal grandmother in her late 60's, along with a few others that have rattled my emotional cage. I've spent too much of the little time we get in life planning or thinking about what I wanted to do, but not really doing much. It's time to revisit plans for the future.

With the success of the sale of the rocking chair and quilt, I thought again about the possibility of opening an etsy shop. It's incredibly inexpensive, the site is so well known that marketing isn't an issue (for the site as a whole, not for an individual shop), and I wouldn't have to be wed to a single type of art. I haven't made up my mind yet, but I have given it serious thought and spent a ton of time looking at prospective "competition." What I see are thousands of people who did more than talk about it and who are enjoying creating and selling their creations.

Here's hoping for just a pinch more courage.