🇬🇧 Self-acceptance and labels

Today I want to talk about self-acceptance and labels. I'm working on a piece of art that "talks" about this, and I felt like writing about self-acceptance and this process of recognizing myself, realizing things I want to improve, and taking action on them. It's good to celebrate my progress in this regard.

I'm Nycka Nunes, a professional with multiple talents (learn about the services I offer on the services page), and in this blog I talk about everything I want, because I see it as a channel of communication with people who admire my work and want to get to know the human being behind it. In addition to being a visual artist, I'm privileged to have several other skills that I also use to help people and companies, for a fee (and I have more experience in these other activities than as a visual artist). To learn more about them, read my LinkedIn profile.

The privilege of having multiple skills came at the cost of a lot of study and a focus on constant improvement. The ability to self-evaluate and curiosity about multiple topics are part of who I am.

Since the beginning of 2024, I have been gradually changing the way I deal with content creation and the organization of my work. The first step towards this change was to create a detailed plan for my artistic projects. The next step was to plan in advance the paid content on the blog and social media and create a plan of topics to be covered. I am working on changing the profile of the content without sponsorships. The change will scare some, but it is necessary.

I decided to write this text because I have worked in marketing for years, but I have always been very intuitive when managing my personal brand. I thought this was important to let innovation flow. Now I see that a dose of organization and direction are important, keeping space for new ideas, new opportunities. I decided to use my knowledge in my own work. And the strategic part is easy. What gave me the most work was visualizing ways to reconcile objectives and reality, seeing feasibility in what I had in mind. A constant challenge in the minds of innovative people. And now I can see this clearly.

At some points during this professional reorganization, I hesitated between making all my services available or just some. I decided to make them all available because I like to share knowledge with those who pay for it and I like to contribute to the success of those who contribute to my success.

I have read a lot about giftedness and this has helped me deal with these doubts regarding whether or not to make all my professional skills available as services. I do not seek a diagnosis of giftedness because, in my opinion, having a name to be the way I am would only be a way of justifying myself to the world. I do not need that. I am the way I am and naming it makes no difference in my life. They say that gifted people are born that way. I have enjoyed reading since I could read. But being the oldest daughter and having grown up in an environment where most of the time I had no emotional support, maybe I am like this because it was more interesting to seek support in books than in the people around me. Having Dona Benta by Monteiro Lobato as support could be better than having an adult from my real world. Paying a psychologist for myself without the adults doing therapy is nothing like emotional support. And if your opinion on this is different from mine, it is not of interest to me. What I needed from the adults around me, I didn't get most of the time, and that's a fact.

The artwork I'm working on right now speaks to this issue of how some people attach themselves to labels, as if we were products on a supermarket shelf. I generally don't mind others calling me this or that. I don't feel like labels describe me, because they're too reductionist. I'm a human being, not a jar of jam. We can only get to know human beings by talking to them, not by judging them based on our beliefs about the names we use to describe them. It's a shame that so many adults still don't understand this and don't even invest in self-knowledge, they just blindly repeat the "truths" that were passed down to them by their parents as if they were absolute truths, as if life were a multiple-choice test where there is only one right answer for each question. People like that are boring! I want more of the brilliance of people who seek to discover who they really are and to be sculptors of their own personality, like I do.

Nycka Nunes