The artist life as a black sheep
reflections around identities artists adopt to protect their creative souls
“Why don’t I feel ok with what I’m expected to do?”
Somehow, to have a desire for something else, something more, something different than what the general narrative offers, can feel alienating and confusing. Because… why can’t I just be like everyone else? Work a regular job? Do normal things? Work on one project at the time? Stability over fulfillment?
Here’s why: Because it would be the same as an internal death to the creative soul.
The soul who sees beauty at every corner. That gets triggered by the light moving across the wall or the way the leaves sway in the wind. The smell just before the rain hits and gets filled with wonder as the clouds move across the sky like fluffy cotton candy.
The more I try to contain the muse, the more she’ll rage. She’ll throw a fit from within, making sure that the pursuit of “shoulds” leaves me miserable. Do I listen? I may. And if I don’t, I pay the price down the road.
Creatives and artists aren’t meant to live in confinement.
It’s like our very core is dependent on free movement. Expansion. Liberation. Deep inhales and exhales or else the nervous system stops functioning.
The loneliness of the artist life often starts already in the formative years.
With each new choice of how to live, it can feel as though we’re being separated either from ourselves or from others.
My friend asked me this weekend as she stayed at our house that maybe I just “want to be different”?
It got me thinking.
She’s right.
I want to be different because I feel different than the context in which I grew up and the context in which I’ve operated physically for my whole life (I exclude the digital world). In recognising that difference I adopted a “black sheep identity” that served as a survival mechanism when the external pressure to comply got too big.
To be the black sheep allowed me to forge ahead with my unconventional (relative to my context) dreams and goals.
“I can’t do it because I’m different”, felt like an internal excuse and explanation as to why I wasn’t able to “just get a normal job” or “be happy in the same place forever” or “why I’m not able to castrate my thoughts from day-dreaming when I’m with my children”.
Also… I can’t emphasize enough… Never ask me if we’ll stay in this house forever, that’s a big bloody question and it feels daunting because HOW DO I KNOW?! I don’t know. I don’t want to know. Actually, I don’t even want to think about it.
And the work situation…
Truly, I could have taken any job. But I really really don’t want to and I have felt great shame in that realization. It’s like I rather live in a tent than go to an office where someone else decides where I should be, when and what to do.
This can be problematic when you get children, because the pressure to build a safety net and stability shoots through the roof. There’s literally no end in sight.
But still we keep going. I keep going. Because to give up my soul and heart would be like death. I want my children to see me create art everyday. I want them to see me scribble in note books, draw and dream and see that this can be work too. More than anything I want them to see me feel alive.