The Academy of Approachable Artists
Note: It’s hard for me to write about the group that claimed it could help me. Not because I am shy. The clue’s in the name: Underearners Anonymous (UA).
The UA 12th tradition states: “Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of all our traditions, ever reminding us to place principles before personalities.”
I’m not even meant to admit I am a member. It’s much like Fight Club, only with Jaffa Cakes.
I’ll have to do some serious smudging and blurring of people but I’ll make sure the important bits are as accurate as they can be. No James Frey, I.
I am familiar with the 12-Step model because I attended AA “meetings” — one is never short of jargon in the “fellowship” — back when I got sober. That was six years ago. After AA, founded 1935, a plethora of other fellowships sprung up to help all manner of compulsions and addictions, such as Narcotics Overeaters, Sex and Love Addicts, Debtors Anonymii. And this one, too.
AA was useful. It helped me cement what I had learned in rehab. Anyway, it was mandatory. But it was intense. Many people had a long road to mental health ahead of them. I didn’t feel at home, at least in the East End meetings. I was too lazy to travel. The “drunkalogues” were far more extreme than my blackouts, lying and argy-bargy: prison time, abuse, houses burnt to the ground.
I used to dread it when certain people were about to “share”.
I had an overdose on a drug-from-the-internet and my sponsor told me I needed to quit all drugs. I didn’t want to, I just wanted to not drink. She told me it would be the end of me, so we split after my “step 3”. I have gone of them now. *Childish raspberry*
Then, my fellow tea server had flown into a rage at the “poncy” coffee machine someone had donated — it was too much, he had decided. I later saw him on the street, high, dragging some steel to be recycled. He didn’t recognise me.
But when I walked into the UA meeting for people in creative endeavours housed in a large room under a church, I immediately felt I had found a home. They read out the “symptoms” of the condition “underearning.” Procrastination (check), compulsive need to prove (check), hoarding work (check), underpricing services, overwork followed by fuck all, isolation: check, check, check. It was uncanny.
(These “symptoms”. Does that mean I have a disease? It’s often asked and quibbled about with regard to booze because that is the argument AAers make for never being able to drink responsibly ever again. In fact, some people do go back to social drinking. At any rate, let us say that all the people here in the room share the same symptoms or struggles and are here because they think there is a “cure” to their woes.)
In the meeting that day, there was a “chair” — a short talk where a fellow offers their “experience, strength and hope”, or their store. A painter* around my age, shy, calm, soothing, talked about her early success, her failure to complete work. Her travels in any number of other professions, including law, her hiding herself away and nearly turning her back on art, her lack of belief in herself and her eventual discovery of UA and recovery through the steps under sponsorship, tools of the programme and recent success in showing work. It could have been my story — apart from the recovery. I wanted it.
People “shared back” or spoke for three minutes about their reactions and how they were getting on. They were musicians, writers, actors. (Lots of actors) singers, illustrators. My kind of people, but open and vulnerable. Not the successful type I was so scared of meeting to whom I would have to try and weave a success story out of my tawdry current situation. Interesting people, but approachable.
I suddenly realised that, having spent eight years writing the kind of stuff about buildings that no one else wanted to write, given I didn’t pitch for business, I had also nearly smothered my creative spark, my career enthusiasm, my nine-to-five life under a pillow. It was breathing its last gasp when I came into the “rooms” (collective term for “meetings”) once more.
A book went around with people’s names and numbers for calling each other up. A column said if a person was free to “sponsor” people, or take them through the 12 Steps. The calm painter was one of the people. I decided I would ask her to be my sponsor.
Next time: a discursive interlude on being fired.
*details obfuscated
