Carefully Curated Perfection – Or – Genuinely Straight from My Heart

As I sit in our hotel in Amsterdam, (Ethan and I are here for ADE!) while also ADHD’ing my way through four other tasks – downloading music, writing another blog post, updating the events I’ve attended in 2024 and eating dinner, I’m coming to terms with the fact I haven’t sat down to write a blog post since January of 2023.

This is partly due to the fact of a collaberation of a closely knit group of friends passion project (Altitude) and starting Collector Con that has taken up most of my mental space, but also due to a few other factors –

• Losing my blog posting streak
  • I know it sounds petty but man I was on a ROLL, but the content I was producing was not as from the heart as I want to provide for my readers.
• Losing my facebook page for SarahTonin due to someone reporting my account for being underage
  • I also lost my Trendyholm Creations page which I’ve had since 2012, which probably hurt the most as I’d just hyperlinked everything to match!
• Events I’ve had the opportunity to attend and organize
• Work
• Or it could be losing my beloved cat Kelly early this year,

However, if I continue to let reasons stand in the way of me writing, it will be years again before I create a post.

Since I last wrote, AI has become a major factor in the internet, and I want my readers to know that I will never use AI to write my blogs for me. I may use them to reword something my brain keeps tripping over, and if I do, I’ll put a note in the bottom attributing the help of this tool. We all use spell check right? And others, grammarly, (tbh, I’ve never used grammarly, but I’m happy it’s helping uplift our speech on the internet). Those are both tools, and if we use tools to help us write better, we may learn a thing or two – I know it has already taught me a few things, and I’m excited and nervous to watch it grow.

Same is to be said for AI tools in graphic art – As a graphic artist who watched the rise of graphic editing programs and felt the pain but also excitement new tools of automation brought, I feel the best way to approach these tools is with sincerity, honesty, and open mind – but to also remember to use caution and not allow plagarism, as we do already.

All that being said, writing the above has literally reignited a spark within – I missed writing, but, good things take time, and I couldn’t push myself – Everything happens when it’s meant to happen, is another saying I’ve picked up in my abscence from writing.

Now back to the beginning of this post – as I said we’re here for ADE, and those who follow my Insta stories have been getting snippets of this as we tried to take full advantage of my first trip overseas. Yes that’s right, I’ve travelled all over North America, but this is my FIRST TIME traveling abroad! We went to Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin and now finishing our last week here in Amsterdam!

This trip has inspired me to follow my loves again – writing, art, music – and I can’t wait to share all the things bouncing in my head with you in the near future.

Keep up with me on socials to see how this trip is going, and if all goes well, I’ll be posting blogs about the things we saw, events, etc as time goes on.

Much Love – SarahTonin