Being creative and objective when you’re dealing with stress.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my work processes recently, taking stock of what I’m doing and who I think I am after a very tumultuous and stressful 2015. I don’t often do this but it’s way overdue.
I am a sole trader and working mostly on my own can be a free-form, organic experience to say the least, without anyone to help me develop past my current skill sets nor tell me what I’m doing. Working in any creative field these days requires a dedicated amount of research and a never-ending enthusiasm to keep current and up to date. The explosion of stack development, new libraries, methods and languages to learn can be overwhelming when you’re not sitting beside people doing the same thing. Keen UX and design graduates with beautiful portfolios and new energy are everywhere. How do I know if I’m any good anymore or if I’m out of date? How do I measure my worth if I’m now competing with people 20 years younger than me who‘ve never had that mindset that had to write javascript by hand and from scratch nor had to deal with Netscape Navigator? (the horror..! the horror..!) Should I actually care about this? I’m beginning to think not, now I’ve had time for a bit of middle-aged reflection. Experience and repetitive failure are very good things.
I’m nearly 48, most of my career I’ve coloured things in for a living whether as an art studio junior, a paste-up artist for Deadline comic, as a freelance make-up artist, a long-time web designer/developer or as an illustrator. I’ve managed teams of clever BBC people, built high-profile work for big corporations, waxed, plucked and covered the spots of the rich and famous, shaved my hair of with a Bic razor as a Tank Girl lookalike and seen and heard a lot of things I maybe shouldn’t have. Buy me a coffee and I may tell you more, especially if you throw in a bun. The sum of these experiences has not made for an obvious career trajectory but I do know one thing. Personally I’m better at whatever I do when I’m surrounded by people and I am the sum of all those experiences. I need to be inspired, angered, amazed, jealous and motivated by people and things. All I need is tangential, mind-stretching conversations, a sense of humour and an inquiring mind. That doesn’t really cost anything more than relentless effort and an acceptance of my own fallibility.
Last year was saturated with bountiful sorrow, worry, dismay and concern for my friends and family as well as my partner and I dealing with new insecurities about our living situation. I didn’t draw or paint a single thing, I rarely went to any exhibitions and performances nor socialised. All these things are the basic creative building blocks of my life and my raison d’être. Couple this with a job that requires that I spend a lot of time on my own reasoning with semi-colons and SASS design patterns and before I knew it I hadn’t left the house for weeks, unless you count Tesco Metro or my daily weight-training regime as a day out. I did spend quite a lot of energy answering the ‘where have you been?!!’ enquiry when I did venture out. That is a very good question.
Some of the work I did last year was awesome (www.dream2016.org.uk for the RSC for instance) and this really saved my bacon. Nonetheless, how easy it is to turn your head for 5 minutes and before you know it, you’ve missed a vital trigger in your own development and I can tell you from experience that Judge Judy is not going to help my career nor my sanity in the long run; even if the people are real, the cases are real and the rulings are final. Spending too much time on your own if you’re job is about creating things for people is just not going to cut it, especially if you’re a nosey extravert like me.
At the end of last year I had a couple of social meetings with some amazing women whom I admire and respect very much. It was when I was listening to their conversations and experiences, who they’d been working with and what they were trying to achieve, that I realised how much I wasn’t doing and that stress and tragedy had taken up so much time and energy. And you know what? That’s OK because that’s what needed to happen and I’m old enough to know that beating myself up is not productive. It’s when it carries on and you’ve dropped into a deep bucket that you’re probably in trouble.
The turn of this year and the passing of a significant, emotional anniversary early this month has lead to some constructive objectivity. I also asked a few clients and work colleagues to fill out a short survey to tell me what they thought I was good and bad at with a weak promise of a curly wurly as a reward.
From this I now have an evolving manifesto to work with:
- Invest in my friends — I chose them for heaven’s sake!
- Laugh more for better reasons
- Meditate regularly — yeah yeah but it really does work.
- Do a bit of shameless publicity — cough…
- Go to see and experience as many things as I can afford.
- Don’t be shy to voice my opinions in public.
- Speak at public events.
- Put together an exhibition of new artwork later this year.
- Stop watching Judge Judy!