Jessica
There’s something that has always been a struggle for me – reconciling the kind of artist I want to be with the kind of artist I am.
In my dream-life, I am the type of artist that can launch an independent career. Not a career that’s beholden to the publishing industry or the cycle of acceptance and rejection, but the type of career where I create my own opportunities for publishing. In my dream-life, I can manage creating, promoting, publishing, and selling my work in some form or another.
In reality, I struggle to make a regular space for my creative life. I squeeze creative activities into the smallest crevices. If I had to answer to customers and marketing plans and all the other myriad tasks that come with being a successful creative entrepreneur, I would implode. I work very hard in my day job and work very little in my creative job. In reality, my creative life is a release for me, a way that I can express myself and lower stress. I often wonder if I turned my creative life into a career and pursued it with the kind of zeal necessary to be successful, if it would still fill that relaxing space for me.
I’m lucky in that I love my day job and my career. I am happy and fulfilled through my work in higher education. I don’t want an artistic career that supplants my education career. In my optimistic-winter-break-brain, I want an artistic career in addition to my education career.
Honestly, that’s part of the reason that I chose “resources” as my word of the year. I want to see if there is space in my life for regular creative practice. I want to create a “clock-in-clock-0ut” mentality for my artistic work. Then, I can build on that regular practice and find the next step.
As I begin this tracking practice, I can see that it’s difficult to add this time to my life. It’s difficult because I have grown different habits over the past months, patterns of behavior that I find comforting. But I also see a tiny sliver of the possibility that I could add more. It’s this little slice of optimism that makes me pause. There’s part of me that wants to try for a larger creative life and then another part of me that wants to be satisfied with what I already have.
Tonight, I just want to mark that I am waffling between these extremes (again). I’m chaffing at adding more to my creative life, just as I begin the process of regulating my practice. I can’t (and won’t) make any decisions that will commit me to more work than I can handle. I’ll just note my optimism and ambition and bottle it for later.
