At the shop, I was bored with the squares of balsa wood and tubes of glue they were poring over, but I was in rapture over a huge case of slim little phials containing beads in every color imaginable. I wanted those beads!

The boys were heading for the register. I stopped my father and begged for the beads. No, no, no. There was pleading on my part met by skepticism. But what are you going to do with them? MAKE THINGS! You won’t make anything with them. He was probably thinking I was too young, but I didn’t see it that way.

I WILL TOO MAKE THINGS! My father relented. Okay, you can have ONE color. If you make things with that, we’ll come back and you can get more.

How could I possibly pick just one out of that endless array of color? I hemmed and hawed. My father told me to hurry up while he tried to corral the boys, who were chasing each other in the aisles.

Finally I chose: orange.

I remember the car ride home so vividly. It was late afternoon, probably late summer. It was still warm but the sun had that orangey gold September angle that I love to this day. I was sitting in the back seat, holding my little orange phial before me as if it were a candle, or maybe a chalice. All around was that orangey gold light. I was so excited. This was just the beginning. Soon I would have a rainbow of beads and I’d be making all kinds of fantastic things.

It didn’t turn out that way. I’m not sure what happened. My mother probably didn’t want me to play with them out of fear they’d end up in my mouth, or maybe I just didn’t know what to do with them, I don’t know. But I didn’t have materials to make jewelry. And ultimately I wasn’t inspired by only one color of beads. What had inspired me in the store was the array of color, and possibility.

So the phial of orange beads ended up at the bottom of the family junk drawer. I remember unintentionally digging them up several times in the years that followed. Always they were a symbol of guilt and shame. I didn’t make anything with them. I wasted them. I didn’t follow through.

It never dawned on me to pick them up and make something with them when I was a little older. Instead, I felt I had already failed, which made me feel bad. And feeling bad made me want to push them out of sight.

Meanwhile, my cousins – sons of a high school art teacher – were growing up with all the resources of an art supply store at their fingertips. Oils, acrylics, canvas, cameras, tripods, clay animation equipment, sculpture tools, their own darkroom . . . plus every musical instrument imaginable. I was writing stories on notebook paper and illustrating them with crayons while they were making movies, performing their own music and having one-man art shows at the county art gallery.

I was a little girl with a strong creative vision of my own, and although I didn’t make anything with the beads, I was active creatively in my own right. But I couldn’t help comparing myself to my cousins and feeling inferior. Whatever I did and whatever recognition that brought me seemed rinky-dink next to them. My art was child’s play – it might be good for grammar school but it wasn’t good enough for the real world.

Time passed and I forgot about the orange beads. When I turned forty they came up in a meditation on my creative block. For the longest time, I’ve been feeling guilty and ashamed for “not following through” on my creative vision, for “being unproductive” and basically wasting it. Not for lack of trying, of course. Just not breaking through the wall.

I realized that everything I’ve been feeling about my “failure” as a writer, I felt as a child about those damned beads.

More than that, I’ve been stuck in that hobby shop story — longing for the freedom and array of possibility with which to create grand and fantastic things but meeting only skepticism and relatively meager resources until I prove myself worthy.

I haven’t proven as an adult that I will make things. Somewhere along the line, I stopped believing that I can.

Not that I have given up. Quite the opposite. I’ve been obsessed with the dream of becoming a full-time novelist. Unwisely, imprudently, incorrigibly obsessed. But I see now that my dream is the equivalent of earning all the beads in the case so that I am finally free to express my creative vision. In the here and now, however, I am always trying to make something with the orange beads. I’ve been so caught up in trying to satisfy externally set prerequisites that I haven’t allowed myself the freedom of opening the door to inspiration, allowing fallowness and flow in kind, and expressing whatever comes in. I haven’t allowed myself to enjoy my creative work in the moment and to just BE.

No wonder I’ve been stuck at the gate.

But I can stand now and look into the shadow of shame and self-doubt. My creative expression has been blocked. What has the block given me? Well, it has driven me to look deeper than I would have looked if my expression had flowed into the world without resistance. It has driven me to look within and to seek a transformative path. Maybe I have something more valuable to say than I would have said otherwise. Maybe the block has been an alchemical flame.

I accept the gift of the flame and release the idea that I need to fulfill prerequisites to prove myself worthy of expressing my creative vision in the world. Nevertheless, can we say that I made something with the orange beads by writing this post?