I have been stirring some uncrystallized thoughts over in my head for a few months. Today I saw a brief little thread on Twitter, almost unrelated, and it was like scratching the side of the flask: instant nucleation.
I can articulate some of what I'm thinking now. There's still a lot of it yet to solidify.
Here's what I saw:
I want to start off by saying that I don't like the term "don't have the balls/cojones for" and I won't apply it to anyone; it's totally inappropriate for the context that I wish to shift to in my analogy. That's not the part that struck me. Let's set it aside.
I want to call attention instead to phrases like:
- typically 'unstable' jobs
- do what they love instead of what they must
- do something with your life that will more often than not bring you
- jokes
- side-eyes
- late nights
- moments of self doubt
- financial instability
- pursue a passion that isn't normalized
- muster the courage
I feel... a certain affinity with this description as applied to my own life's work. Let me dig in to the analogy, quickly so I can get the post out, and see where it is useful and where it is not.
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I put my finger on what I've been trying to articulate lately: a new way of seeing my work. That I walked away from the career I trained for, not without missing many aspects of it, for a different one: unstable, but essentially a creative career.
By many measures, I have made poor choices. I got an advanced degree, which sounds good, but according to some conventions that was a misguided and limiting choice. I completely failed to build up a work history post-PhD. I have maintained practically no networking contacts, certainly none who can vouch for my employability. I haven't kept up with the literature. I've not cultivated an online persona.
Everyone, it seems, knows a woman who's had life's rug pulled out from under her. If only she'd kept up her skills/not stayed home with the kids so long, she'd be in a more stable position. One such woman raised me, and she never felt secure again for the rest of her life; and is that always in the back of my mind? Well, yes, how could it not be? So there's this certain self-doubt, that even though I do appear to be quite secure, this shame that I've gone about it all wrong, insufficiently protected myself, and if everything goes south through malice or through random chance it'll be my fault that I made the choices I made.
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I've had the good fortune to meet, in real life and virtually, a collection of really interesting, creative, brilliant, and educated-or-self-educated women who have spent years out of the paid economy or interacting in only a limited way with it, because all their time went to family-based work: for spouse, children, and sometimes siblings and parents. A few men, too. I don't meet very many who have not expressed, at one time or another, an internal-or-external attempt to cram the peg of how they spent that time into the square hole of economic/labor language.
A lot of people in this position go with the model that full-time childrearing, dependent care, bureaucracy-navigating, and/or homekeeping is itself a kind of profession. A "professional" profession, with all the word's associations of specialization, advanced training/recertification, and (let's face it) social class.
I tried to make this fit myself, for a long time. In retrospect, it was obvious that the "professional" model would tempt me, because I grew up and trained with every expectation that I would spend my working years in the professional class. I was loath to give up that view of myself. And I had a lifetime habit, if not a compulsion, of reading the literature, of self-teaching and constant improvement, of honing long-developed skills, learning new ones, and analyzing systems and procedures looking for ways to streamline them or to improve their outcomes. All those elements are there. It seemed to fit! And especially when I started homeschooling, it felt that it satisfied that compulsion-to-excellence. I don't think I vocalized it too much (I hope I didn't) but it was definitely part of my new mental model of myself.
But... as the years go by and I gain experience, the shine has worn off, and I find the "professional" model doesn't actually fit all that well.
First of all, it's just too obvious that I pasted it on hastily as a way to cover up the lingering embarrassment I felt (even though I knew I had good reasons!) about having dropped out of my original profession, one which I hold in considerably high regard.
Second (and this is the real killer, I think) a sine qua non of professional work is measurable-to-the-outside accountability: to the client, to the patient, sometimes to a certifying body or to the state. Whether for its goods or for its ills: Measurable accountability is not a feature of my life or my work. I don't wish to establish it: Life in the United States would be rather horrifying if it, generally, were! I only wish to point out that the nature of family life, when it is accorded its rightful sphere of independence, is such that the measurable accountability of professional work is entirely absent.
(And—I'm very sorry if this opinion bothers any of my readers—it looks ridiculous when this kind of labor is put forth as equivalent to labor that's accountable and measurable. It is real labor with real economic value, but it doesn't go on your resume. You are not employed by your spouse-with-a-paid-job, or your children, as a domestic engineer. Please stop this, and should you need to make a resume or a LinkedIn profile, embrace the convention that you have an employment gap of a very easily explained, no-red-flags type.)
The final reason, perhaps the most important, for ridding myself of the mental model of my work at home as a "profession:" my children and my close relationships are not projects, or patients, or clients, or processes, or products.
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If one must project this life onto the work-for-hire economy—and no one said we have to, it's just that sometimes we need the analogy in order to explain our choices to people for whom it's senseless, people who cannot conceive of any other kind of economy—"creative, yet unstable career" strikes me as an improvement over the other. It is, after all, as @whoyoufinna put it, a kind of choice to do something one loves (as far as one can) instead of what one must. It is an imperfect model, as all models are; the only thing that fits this life perfectly is itself, and that is not really something that can be called a career at all.
"Creative" is, obviously to anyone who has lived it out of choice, a very appropriate descriptor.
"Unstable" is also appropriate. None of us will do this permanently, except the ones who will have to until they can't physically keep up, and that is a kind of unstable. And the choice entails taking on considerable personal financial risks: you have tied your financial stability, often, to other people's fortunes and behavior, and whatever individual capital you have built up in a previous life begins immediately to decay. These risks are perhaps viewed by polite society as greater the higher your economic stratum in the first place, although the absolute risk is probably not so in reality—interesting, that question, and a subject for people more versed in sociology than I am.
And then there are the attitudes that @whoyoufinna describes. They are not, of course, universal: creative careers are thought worthless, unrespectable, ridiculous by one group; they are thought unreservedly admirable by another; and a large group in the middle considers such pursuits as okay as long as you demonstrate sufficiently that you can afford your hobby, whether by being supported by someone or by scraping together enough income to justify your existence, and that you don't generate a burden on other people and/or the state.
Check.
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There's also the fact that many folks have to give a great deal of time to some kind of day-job for hire, and the rest of their time to their creative pursuit; and they live with the code-switching that comes with answering the question "what do you do?" one way to one group, and another way to another. Their identity, what they would like to make their life's work and the word for what pays the necessary bills, are not the same, and it's deeply felt.
(Here's where I reject the don't-have-the-balls formulation. For quite a lot of people, it's don't-have-the-privilege.)
There's a similarity there, too, for a lot of us. Some creative people put the main focus of their work onto their passion and their craft, maybe partly supporting themselves with it, and do other jobs part-time or sporadically, perhaps along with support from others, to cobble together a living. Other creative people have a "real" day job and have turned their leisure time into their creative outlet, perhaps hoping they can make a go of it with more of their time someday, perhaps accepting this is likely the most they can do. And there's a whole spectrum of people in between. A few *cough*, supported by someone else who earns a wage, have the freedom to give all their labor to their craft, whether they help to increase the wealth or only to spend it.
Again: an imperfect model. But better than the professional model.
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Maybe the biggest point of similarity that I feel, personally, is that all the very real constraints that come from taking on such a life are also accompanied by a sense of, at least intellectual, freedom. I mean, these are the constraints that I chose to live under: and I continue to choose them every day, implicitly sometimes, and even better when I do so explicitly.
I have no boss.
I can direct my time as I see fit. I am relatively free to make choices and engage in behaviors that I think are the best choices in my circumstance. I am relatively free to make creative choices; I am relatively free to make choices that turn the world to the good. I am relatively disentangled from and protected from many broken and corrupt systems that coerce people to cooperate with the banality of evil. I am not producing a product. I am not outcome-based. I do not have to keep the clients happy, perhaps at the cost of justice; I am freed (and thereby have complete responsibility) to treat people with kindness and respect.
I am free to make something good in the world. That is one of the best kinds of freedoms, even if it's sometimes frightening in the responsibility it implies.
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This comes with many of the kinds of troubles that other creative careers do. Instability is a good word for it; risk, and loss of status among one sort of people (maybe you gain it in another), and often but not always net financial loss. A few of us have the weird luck or maybe talent and work ethic to be able to confidently say that our choices increased our family's economic security, but lots don't and...
...is it worth it? The thing is, I think only the individual can really say whether it is worth it. Ultimately, the sneers or condescending adulation of the outside world don't matter. Not even enough to make it worth throwing the shade back, by retorting the sneers come from a place of jealousy or cowardice. They definitely don't matter that much.
Hopefully your work is appreciated and honored by at least a few people whose opinions you really care about. That can matter.
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But: yes. "Creative work." That is what it feels like to me now, 14 years after making my side hustle (at the time, just two little boys) into my full-time gig.
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