Donna | Ōamaru, Otago

“I think something that I regret is that I don’t have enough time to see all the things that I think up wanting to do. I find it really hard to flesh out a lot of the ideas that I have.

I seem to have more ideas that I want to play out, but not enough time to do them. So, I end up selecting various projects and running with them, but just leaving things behind that I just never seem to find the time to get back to, and by the time I would, I’ve found something else to move onto. I find it hard to think in terms of regrets, because I’m always trying to school myself into thinking of things that I’m grateful for, even despite things like that.

I think it’s more just having lots of random creative ideas, I’ll have bursts of energy where I have lots of ideas for things, but then I find there’s this lag period where I just slow down and don’t have the energy to do those projects and things that I’d love to do. I don’t think I’m worried about failing. I’ve failed lots of things, and learned from it.

Well it’s mostly in terms of artistic projects, which are both what I do for a living, but also what I just do for my general wellbeing and sustenance. I do find it challenging these days to have ideas and then see them through. Something I really hate is all this bureaucracy and rules and things that have to be followed to make things happen. I find that really frustrating. So, I regret that we’ve come to a point where good ideas seem to have to be followed up by a whole lot of stressful rule-following, that seems a lot of the time redundant to me. It’s hard to be spontaneous when there’s so many little boxes that need ticking.

We’ve been hosting a lot of music at the gallery that I run, and that’s been something I’ve been really, not just proud of, but really happy about how it’s panned out in bringing the community together, to see live music and I’ve really enjoyed the response to that, and feel really good about it. But even that is fraught with quite a lot of stuff that needs attention.

It’s a real struggle for me to do a lot of the practical stuff that goes with creative stuff. It’s by default that I’m a creative, really because I’m not good at that stuff. I think I’d be a different person if I wasn’t. Maybe I regret that I don’t have more of a solid sense of practical things that go with that territory, but I think in my case they are mutually exclusive. It’s a kind of freedom that you need to have from the world to have those kinds of ideas.

I grew up north of Auckland, and then in the Eastern suburbs of Auckland, and escaped there when I was, 19 or 20, and came down South, and lived in Dunedin for a few years, and then moved here. I’ve been here half my life now.”