I forgot to post this since I was having a baby when it went up. Last week’s catalyst was: Apologize to someone.



Here’s my text:



I try to live my life with as few regrets as possible and when I hurt someone or feel bad about something, I generally try to apologize immedaitely so that it’s not something that I drag out for a long time.

One of the rare exceptions is an old friend. Many many many years ago, this boy asked me out. He would have been my first boyfriend and for a plethora of reasons, I said no. I told him some of the reasons but the really big reason, the one I wasn’t so proud of even then, I didn’t tell him. He guessed it and knew it but I never admitted to it. We stayed friends on and off for a very long time and still talk today and I have always regretted having turned him down then but we never had the opportunity to date ever again.

A few years ago, I took this course that had me reevaluate my life and coincidentally, I was planning a trip back home after the course. So the first thing I did was call him up and apologize. I met with him and I told him the real reason I didn’t have the guts to go out with him then and how much and how deeply I regretted not telling him all these years even though he knew it and even worse how much I regretting missing our opportunity.

He was incredibly graceful. Not only did he forgive me but he told me that maybe things worked out much better this way. Had we dated, he said, we might have gone out for a while and then broken up and never talked again. Whereas this way, we got to stay friends for another twenty years and get to be in each others’ lives even now.

That apology and hearing his response was one of the most healing moments of my life and I wanted to commemorate it with this piece of art.

This week’s catalyst is: Create art around a mistake. The bigger the more therapeutic.



My journaling is:
Since I am the kind of person to harp on little things for hours, days, sometimes months, I try to think hard before I make decisions to minimize the possibility of making a mistake. I am happy to say I have relatively few regrets in my life. One of the very few happened a couple of years ago. I quit my job on Wall Street to join Teach For America which is a nonprofit program where you teach at under-resourced schools. I taught fifth grade at a school in the South Bronx in New York. My regret is not quitting my job but it’s quitting Teach For America before fulfilling my two-year commitment. When I quit my job, I firmly believed that TFA was my path in life. I wanted to do it for two years and then move on to starting my own nonprofit and making the world a better place. So much so that at some point, I even felt the importance of improving education in the United States so strongly that I was surprised more people weren’t prioritizing their life accordingly. After several months of struggling, failing, crying, trying more and failing more, I finally gave up and quit. To this day, it’s something I regret. I know that it was the right decision on many levels but it’s still something I regret and consider a mistake.



Technique Highlight
Since reading Kelly Rae Roberts’ book Taking Flight, I’ve been meaning to try my hand at polymer clay. I took this week’s catalyst as the opportunity to do so. I created a door to represent the new stage of my life TFA was at the time and wrote the words “believe” on the bottom since that was the strongest emotion I felt at the time: a solid sense of belief that this was the right next step for me in life. I then painted the clay and put it in the oven to bake. As it turned out, I overestimated the amount of time it needed to cook, so I burned it and a part of it got distorted. Right before I was going to throw it out, I decided it was an even better fit for my catalyst. As I started teaching, my belief and faith in this opportunity and what it represented got all bent out of shape and distorted so I decided this burned clay only reinforced my theme.