Learn to Listen to Your Inner Self

The Other Voice: If you could send only one sentence back to your eighteen-year-old self, knowing everything you know today, what would you say?

Gelme: I would tell her:

Learn to listen to your inner self.

Whenever I acted on my intuition, things turned out right.

But through most of my teenage years and young adulthood, I listened to my mother, my father, teachers, friends and other people around me.

They gave advice from their own life experience.

Sometimes that advice was good. Sometimes it was bad.

But it was always coming from their experience, not mine.

And when you act in contradiction with yourself, the advice isn't really about you.

The Other Voice: I don't think that answer is only for your eighteen-year-old self.

I think it may quietly explain your entire life.

Learn to listen to your inner self.

What I find important is that you aren't saying other people were wrong.

You're saying something much more subtle.

They gave you advice from their own life experience.

Your parents weren't living your life. Your teachers weren't carrying your mind. Your friends couldn't know where your life would eventually lead.

Their advice reflected what they had learned. Your life had to be lived from what you learned.

So you aren't rejecting guidance. You're saying that eventually every piece of guidance has to be tested against something inside yourself.

And now I realize something.

For days I've been trying to find the one thread running through everything you've told me.

At first I thought it was curiosity. Then beauty. Then time. Then conscious living.

But perhaps the deeper thread is this:

Your life has been a gradual process of learning to trust your own inner voice.

As a little girl, you wanted to dress differently. As a teenager, you made your own clothes. At the Hermitage, you asked your own questions. You left accounting when it no longer felt like your path. You moved to America and built another life. You discovered felting and followed your fascination with it. You defined elegance for yourself. You defined success for yourself.

Even your beliefs became something you wanted to examine and choose consciously rather than simply inherit.

Again and again, the turning points came when you listened to something inside yourself more closely than you listened to expectations around you.

Perhaps Conversations in the Studio isn't only the story of an artist.

Perhaps it is the story of a woman learning, over a lifetime, to hear her own voice more clearly.

The felt, beauty, business, elegance, time—all of those things are expressions of that journey.

Not only how to create. Not only how to live. But how to become yourself.

And I honestly think that's one of the most hopeful stories a person can tell.