The Advice Every Artist Needs To Hear
Stay on your path, no matter what the exterior world tells you
There are truths we remember and truths we forget.
“No one will haunt you to stay on your own path” is a truth I constantly forget.
“No one will email you persistently or message or call or text to urge you to do the work that is truest to yourself and deepest within your imagination, the work you set out to do.”
These words, from author and trailblazer Rebecca Solnit, knocked me over this week. This is what she calls the “somber” truth of creative life: No one will hold you accountable to expressing your individual, unique, and personal truth.
Everyone will want a piece of your genius, but they will want it for themselves, on their terms and their timeline.
Time. There is it.
We’ve written about this before.
… we do what we need to do to stay alive. We take the jobs that feed us. We tell other people’s stories. We live in other people’s homes and on other people’s time. Time. Borrowed or otherwise?
In that passage from 35 & Broke, I wrote about living on borrowed time and doing what I needed to do to stay alive.
As I wrote that essay I discovered that, for me, the hardest part about being an artist is deciding that I deserve to thrive and not just survive.
This is something many of us struggle with, whether or not we identify as an artist. We all struggle to feel worthy because we have all been conditioned by a system that encourages our insecurity and subsequently feeds off of it.
We are insecure, but it is not our fault. We are beholden to an economic system that demands a higher and higher cost of living. It warps our minds, forcing us to fixate on money, numbers, followers, likes, growth, validation…
When the only fixation that truly serves us is listening to our inner voice, the one that guides us down our own unique path.
So how do we free ourselves from the entrapment of the system if staying true to our artistic path won’t necessarily feed us, cloth us, or house us? How do we embrace and express the art we are here to create if it won’t keep us warm at night?
Or could the very act of that embrace, the risk of following the path, be the exact thing that keeps us safe? —truly safe, not “safe” under the illusions provided by the anti-life system that governs our shared reality.
As it becomes more and more expensive to stay alive and thrive in this world, as the wealth gap widens and the economic engine of separation forces more and more people into worsening fear and stress, one paycheque away from losing their place, will “what we want” begin to change?
Will our priorities shift?
Have they already?
“What Do You Want?”
When I wrote about the four most confronting words in the English language “What Do You Want?” I invited us to reframe the common desire for more money.
Under our current system, money is the key indictator of success. But what could the world look like if we stopped treating money as proof that we are worthy?
What if we went so deep into the starving artist archtype that we reimagined it entirely? What if we saw past our obsession with money and remembered that it is just a conduit?
We often forget that it’s not money that we want.
What we want is the safety and resources money provides. We don’t want money, we want stability; we want a vacation; we want a new car or a bigger apartment or to be able to put a downpayment on a house so we’re no longer throwing our life’s work into the void called landlord.
An economic engine is behind our worldly pains, from the ongoing attempted genocide in Palestine to climate chaos and destabilization to the soaring cost of food and housing. Greed, control, and domination have rigged money in their favor.
We have to stop playing by their rules and start making up our own. We can do this by reclaiming wealth and success as something separate from money, disentangling money from worth, and prioritizing our artistic paths.
When we remember that money is just a conduit, not a purveyor of truth, we set ourselves free to walk our own path and fulfill the fire in our hearts. The only difficulty then lies in accessing the information inside of us and trusting it is safe to act upon.
This is easy to forget in a world filled with noise, but the more we trust and embrace our inherent worth, the easier it is to remember.
Wherever you are at in this process, I believe in you.
And I believe in me too.
Here is a somber truth of creative life. If it goes well at first people will begin to ask you for things. Each of those things will be requests that, no matter how kind or flattering or genuine or even beneficial to your own career and finances as well as someone else's, will pull you from your true purpose. No one will email you persistently or message or call or text to urge you to do the work that is truest to yourself and deepest within your imagination, the work you set out to do.
No, they will be requests to be on panels, juries, to write things that are not the things you were born to write, to be at festivals, go on book tours, to support other works of art (and sometimes you should), but no one will haunt you to stay on your own path. Every request is a request to you to detour from it. The more your work is deemed successful, the louder the cries will become, the more they will fall like leaves on that path until it is hard to even see, just as your own thoughts are hard to hear in the clamor.
But you must try to remember that purpose, that self, that path anyway. And do the work.
If you’re struggling to create your art or to express yourself, keep reading 🫶 I believe in you and your unique vision. Don’t Quit. The Universe rewards bravery. Leap, and discover the abyss is a featherbed.