This guest post was written by Linda Tennant, a US artist whose journey and thoughts will resonate with many of you. Thanks Linda!Here's what's happening in my painting life, right now. I've been tormenting myself the past few days with a neurotic approach/avoidance dance, and Louise's post about daring to use the word "artist" has got me thinking about how my story of myself as an artist has evolved over the past few years.The big growth spurt started for me about five years ago, toward the end of a meditation retreat. I looked at the vines I had drawn all over my journal pages, at the cartoons and the doodles, the meandering random line work and snippets of poetry, and wrote in an amused way about how my suppressed and smothered creativity was leaking out all over the place, and said to myself "That's what I want. I want my creative life back." Here are the stages I've identified that I have moved through since then:"I am not an artist" (In sad voice) through "but I can doodle."To:"Hey, I'm about to get a little free time, maybe I'll just get some paint and I'll play artist and have fun and screw anybody who thinks I don't have a right to do this."To:"Huh. Maybe I am an artist. Ha! Really? Wouldn't that be a trip?"To:"Who am I kidding? Art is all I think about. Obviously I'm an artist, in my heart."And recently I've begun to have some confidence in myself as a painter so now when I fall into a neurotic funk, my most current sad-self-making story is: "If I worked hard enough, I could be a good artist. That's out there, and here I am circling and dithering. I'm an artist and I'm not living up to my potential!"Good grief.My best, most liberating realization after I wrote all this was that as long as I make it about me and who I think I am, I am going to transport my neuroses from one stage to another dressed in different costumes. When it isn't about me, but about the art, it's joyful --even when it's a bit dark or weird-- and it is natural. I'm simply doing the thing I feel called to do.It's not like it's the first time I've had this realization! But of course the things we need most to learn, we have to learn again and again, until we really know them. So here I am, learning this some more.So. I will go into the studio today with a renewed intention to just learn how to dive into the flow, listen more attentively to the work, let it tell me what it wants me to do, and remember what I know about how life and creativity work. Not feel like I have to make it all happen, somehow, just open up my heart and my head and join the Universe's ongoing act of creation, and see what happens here in this little studio.This guest post was written by Linda Tennant.