Right vs. Left

So, even though I have taken a full dose of Ambien, I'm wide awake at 5am. It's going to sound funny, but I've got scrapbooking on the brain. I'm trying to get published and I have a deadline of the 31st. Before you laugh off scrapbooking as foofy, which it is a bit foofy, it's a great way to archive the past and tell your current story. Sort of like blogging I suppose. I guess it was too many years of looking through boxes of old pictures and not having a clue who any of the people are.

Most people now know me as an accountant, which is one of the most LEFT brained jobs there are. There are a few other careers such as auditors or actuaries. Unfortunately, I'm very good at my job. I say unfortunately because I never saw myself as numbers person. I knew there was a capacity for organization ever since I was little, but I hate math, and especially numbers. They scare me . I certainly didn't ever want to group myself with those LEFT brainers.

Throughout highschool I took nothing but art and music. Yes I was a band geek, but at least I played a cool instrument - percussion, no, not the bells or cymbals. I mainly played the bass drum, but I could play anything. Back on subject though.

I took general art, yes, but also I took 3 years or jewelry, pottery, and 4 years or interior design. Not decorating, but design. More traffic flow and floor plans, less furniture and paint picking. One of my floor plans won an award and several of my jewelry pieces were asked to be sold. I was sure then that I was really RIGHT brained. I had every intention of being an interior designer when I went to college.

Then the real world hit. I was taking my core basic classes and I accidentally aced my Accounting 1 class. I was shocked - I hate numbers, don't I? I had to take Accounting 2 and just about aced that as well. At the end of that semester, I sat down contemplated the truth...I am a numbers person. Ok, so actually I'm not. What I am is LEFT brained.

When people find out that I am an accountant, the first thing the say is, "Oh, you must be good at math." But I'm not. I still suck at math. If you really look at the job of an accountant, it is all about where you put the numbers. We have computers to do the math, which by the way rarely gets harder the adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division. The ratios really fall into the hands of Finance. What it really boils down to is that I'm great at knowing exactly where things go and why they should be there. And I LIKE rules. Just ask my husband, I'm not a rule breaker. Driving doesn't count. That's a race and I plan to win .

After years of LEFT brained activity, it's been a struggle to do the simplest artistic thing. All I can see is patterns for some reason. We have this great photo collage that I put together in our living room and it has about 30 frames of different sizes and looks. It took me three times to put them up because I kept making patters. UUrrgghh! It's supposed to look random!!

Why can't being both RIGHT and LEFT brained be easier? It seems like a constant struggle for me to be artistic these days. I have a business that depends on me being artistic now and I'm hoping that it will at the very least be a place that I can release some of my pent up RIGHT brained ideas...now, if I can only find them again??