7th
“Whatever - I Do What I Want”
Realization: I am destined to be a roving entrepreneurial artist-type, with the eventual settling place being a self-sustained creative practice.
This is something I am thinking of right now because I realized I was sad - SAD! - that I would be in school and not ‘doing the books’ for my teaching artist career this fall. Do I like doing/paying taxes? Is it weird that the ‘self employment tax’ feels validating? Or that I’m proud that I included no W2’s on this years 1040?
All the money I made this year was doing something I had a great deal of creative control over, and that’s pretty sweet. But I’m not done.
Recently, another teaching artist whom I had previously assumed was non-stop creative all the time and must spend her evenings making exciting art, admitted to me that she was frustrated with her lack of time for herself. She felt like she had no creative practice outside of teaching. Can even the incessantly creative teaching artists use up all their resources on innovative youth arts programming?
Part of the trouble is money: you rationalize the time you spend being creative with the paycheck you will eventually get (or not get) - but part of the drain is your investment into other people’s creative practice at the expense of your own. I feel deeply invested in arts education here - I love teaching kids about art - but it’s true that my own practice has suffered. I’m valued less as an artist, and more as a pleaser - pleasing parents, board members, staff, program directors and other teachers. Just this week I was berated by a nanny when the three year old she brought to art class got paint on her new shirt (doesn’t anyone have ‘play’ clothes anymore!). As if my only worth to her in the art class was to provide and apply a smock and “washable” (read: totally crappy and ironically stain provoking) paint. Never mind the planning and prep work (which I don’t get paid for directly in this case), all the child development news articles and podcasts I eagerly follow on the subject, and my years of experience with children who still sometimes poop their pants. My philosophy as an arts educator, and my talent and vision as an artist are crapped on for lack of a smock. Do I deserve this?
I’m not done following this path, but there is an essential balance I have not struck. I’m closer than I was when I was shaking martini’s and being sexually harassed by my customers, but I’m not completely satisfied. I may never be satisfied until I’m in control of what I do, when I do it, and for how much. I don’t want to feel like I have to take every gig that’s offered to me out of financial desperation. And I don’t want to have to deal with parents who feel it is their job to undermine my efforts, experience, and knowledge. I shouldn’t have to recite my resume to teach a class about painting fairy tales to seven year-old girls. Or justify free play as it relates, and is imperative to, the emotional and creative development of young children. And, if I forgot, because I’m someone who has to think about a lot at one time, put on your own damn smock. I’m an artist, not a babysitter.
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There’s also another, parallel, side to this, and that is something on the radio a month or so ago, it was a story about entrepreneurial families, and how it’s more likely for children to work for themselves if members of their family did. Not only are members of my immediately family working for themselves, but aunts and uncles, friends, employers, former employers (even at some of my food service jobs I worked for start-ups and self-mades) and my boyfriend (who’s father and grandfather were entrepreneurs). I’ve got it coming from all sides; this push to create my own life and my own way to build a career. I’ve got it started, now I need to take it to the next level.
