Let me start by saying that if you really feel I need an excuse, here it is: I’ve been busy doing other things. We can go on and on about all my shortcomings as an artist or a professional go. This past year I’ve spent doing other things besides artist development, and I get asked often how I spend my time.

While I could say I am disappointed I don’t have more, better quality work to show, I could not say that what has consumed my time in the last year or so has not been worthwhile, at least to me. I’ve been learning about my voice.

I’ve been serving as a church service missionary in the Washington DC Temple Distribution Center. That has been my anchor of stability for the last 14 months–and I’m still in it for another 4. Every week, usually Friday, I spend an 8 hour shift as a retail clerk, selling sacred temple clothing. Aside from a week to go paint a playground at Cambridge Elementary, I haven’t deviated, nor have I left the area.

For a nearly equal amount of time, I’ve been serving as my stake’s YSA co-chair. That means I’ve been running a church auxiliary group for single people between the ages of 18 to 30, living in my stake, which is pretty much the northern half of Montgomery County, Maryland.

The rest of the pieces of my life have come to form around these two assignments. Like a part-time retail position at the local Kohls, my art, dating, career development (which is not the same thing as art); all of these things, and more, take up the majority of the rest of my time.

I want to explain that while this is clearly the beginning of a blog, it is overlapping a closing on this chapter. As I mentioned before, in another four months, my life will change again. At the end of July I will be released from my church service assignment, and in August, I turn 30, which means my time in the YSA program is coming to an end.

This will be good. I can feel it.