Chewed Up and Spat Out: On Being a Creative
I recently read a piece written by a contemporary of mine, Alan Parkinson, another writer from Sunderland that echoed some thoughts I’d been having recently and inspired me to try and articulate them as best I can.
We’ve all seen memes that jokingly contrast what your friends and family think you do when you’re self-employed, with what you actually do. The real joke is that it’s not actually uncommon for most people, even the people who might be paying you, to have very little idea of what you do. It’s understandable, a lot of creative work is varied and often doesn’t fit into a particular box or category, but the question you’ve been asking lately, is why does it matter?
Every day we trust professionals to do a whole variety of jobs without questioning, or expecting to change outcomes in any great way. When you sign up for Sky, you might try and get money off your TV bill, but you don’t ask them if they can also deliver a pizza. If a bakery has made a cake, you understand that the price of it is different to the price of making it yourself: the ingredients, the time, the skill, the previous experience… You know too, that if you ask if you can have the cake on the proviso that you’ll tell everyone it’s amazing (they’re bound to get more customers, right?) that you’ll be laughed out of the bakery. Why is it easier to ask a writer for a free article than it is to ask a taxi driver for a free ride? You wring your hands, you sigh, you write the reply. And then rewrite it. To say no is to run the gauntlet of firm-but-polite-ness in the hope that your irritation is masked by good cheer, lest you burn bridges.
Magpies will collect you and place you in their nest for a short while, until your shine dulls to their eyes. At which point you’ll be dropped over the edge without ceremony, echoes of false promises still ringing in your ears before reality hits.
Holiday time is an abstract concept. Weeks off have to be planned long in advance and are worked up to, furiously and desperately, trying to get ahead and move things around so that you can relax. Despite best efforts to switch off, emails and missed-calls still scream for attention. After 5pm? Weekend? In another country? Doesn’t matter, the fear of losing the job means you are fair game.
And just before you descend fully into a miasma that will have you reaching for the job pages, there is a faint glimmer of hope. You find a person, a group, an organisation, that *gasp* shares your values. Who nurture creative individuals in their own ranks, who reach out to the community with honesty and care, rather than putting up barriers. Where there’s one, there are others, and a small network builds of people who lift each other up and understand the significance and worth in what you do. Conversations move from, ‘what can you do’ to ‘how can we help’. Through thought and action they say, here is some trust, take it and do the thing you’ve proven you can do. Impostor syndrome hits, what if you can’t do it well enough?
But you can. You have. You will.