Every Day is Saturday

I have never considered myself to be a creative person.  I have been a singer, but not a musician.  I have acted, but never ever thought of myself as an actor.  I inherited none of my father’s ability to draw and paint.  I’m a good cook, a competent (but not brilliant) photographer, and at a very young age I knew I could have been a decent dancer if I had kept at it, but I did not.  Even with all of these pursuits I never thought of myself as an artist of any stripe.  In my mind, artists were the ones whose gift was obvious, their talent undeniable.  When I compared myself to people I thought of as artists, I believed I was not one of them.

In college I discovered stage management as a discipline, and the first time I heard the term “theatrical technician” I knew I’d found myself.  What a perfect description of me – the practical one who kept the creative types’ feet on the ground.  I could stay connected to the world I loved, but I never had to reveal myself.  I could hide in plain sight, no one the wiser – except for one professor who saw right through me, and who I knew I’d disappointed.  I managed to push the shame of that aside and soldier on, convinced I had finally found my calling.

I was always a good writer, but not of stories or poems.  I strongly believed that I had no gift for creative writing; any attempts I made to write stories in high school were, in my opinion (and that of my English teacher) unsuccessful.  And being the person that I have always been, if I couldn’t be great at something I just wasn’t interested in doing it at all.  I was used to things I wanted coming easily to me.  If I perceived my goal to be too far away I would abandon it in favor of something more easily achieved.   Struggling for my art was not something I wanted to do, which is why I ultimately abandoned all creative pursuits one by one.  Eventually I even stopped stage managing, and for years and years I’ve done nothing creative at all outside of the kitchen.  Which explains a lot.

Writing became a tool that I used to become successful at my non-creative pursuits.  It wasn’t a friend helping me find my way, it was a slave I bent to my will.  It was this way until my cozy life fell apart and writing became my counselor, my support and my confessor.  I wrote the words of my heart in the ink of my grief.  I wrote to catch hold of the pain and put it someplace outside of myself.  But the time came that I didn’t have to do that anymore to survive, so I stopped.

Now I find myself writing again, and for the first time in a very long time it is for the primary purpose of creating.  But even as I’ve taken the first few steps into this new world I find myself up to my old tricks – trying to find the easy way, allowing myself to be content with the early attempts, not stopping to dig too deeply.  Fortunately I’ve recognized this tendency before I’ve sabotaged myself, but the realization has forced the question: do I move ahead, knowing the difficulties that I will encounter, the time it will take, and the statistical probability that I will never make a comfortable living as a writer, or do I do what I’ve done so many times and give up before I even really get started?

I have been at this decision point before, and I have always chosen the path of least resistance.  Sometimes I was aware of the choice I was making, other times the opportunity to choose differently came and went so fast I didn’t see it until it was gone.  Most of the time I convinced myself I was making the “right” choice, even as I ignored that soft, gentle voice that said I was making a mistake.  This time, though, there don’t seem to be as many alternatives available.  It’s as if I’ve used up all of my excuses, and a stronger will is pulling me in, like being caught in a whirlpool or a tractor beam.

And I can feel myself changing.  Thoughts I haven’t had in years about who I am are appearing in my mind.  A sudden thirst for poetry has taken hold of me out of nowhere.  Ideas for stories I could write, ways of making the new memoir meaningful (not just entertaining), and fragments of poems I want to attempt are all jumping around inside my head, dying to get out.  I haven’t felt this energized in decades.  Not since I became afraid of making myself vulnerable, of showing the world who I am and who I was meant to be.  I’m falling in love again, with words and their beauty and mystery and power.  I’m still afraid; I’m not sure if that will ever change.  I’m just tired of letting it stop me.

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photo credit: Writing via photopin (license)

Recently a few people have asked me how long I will pursue self-employment before I give up and get a real job.  Not that anyone put it quite like that, but that’s the gist; how much longer will I continue to struggle financially pursuing my desire to work for myself until I realize that the attempt has failed and I have no alternative but to re-join the ranks of the gainfully employed?

This is a loaded question.

The people who have asked me have done so out of concern for my welfare; they see what the lack of a steady paycheck has done to my quality of life and my hope for a comfortable retirement, and they are worried about me.  I’m grateful for their concern, and my response (without thinking much about it) has been “another year”.  I tell them I want to give the new business venture time to work.  I think to myself that I want to finish the second book I’m working on and see if anything comes of that.  Another year seems like a good answer, and it has satisfied the questioners.

Even before I was asked about it point-blank I’ve wrestled with the question of how long I should keep trying.  Everything you hear from people who have made the rags-to-riches journey tell you to never give up, keep following your dreams, and one day it will all pay off.  Of course the romance of that appeals to me, and I can see myself on talk shows telling about how I refused to give up, even when it got really tough and everyone was telling me I should throw in the towel.  But I held on!  Doesn’t that make me a role model for all the starving dreamers out there?  It’s a great fantasy that I’m sure most people have at some point or another.  But it doesn’t pay the mortgage today, which is actually a huge problem.

If I was on my own, it would be much easier for me to just ride this out.  The irony is this:  the fact that I’m married both allows me to pursue self-employment and sets limits on it.  My husband has been so supportive and patient and has never pressured me to give up and get a real job.  When I see so clearly what he’s giving up in return for his support it makes walking this path that much harder for me.  No vacations.  No occasional extravagant dinners.  No golf at nice courses.  No “getting new” but lots of “making do”.  It tears my heart out to see him working so hard just to meet our minimum requirements.  Not that I’m not working hard – I am – and I do occasionally make money.  I’m doing everything I know how to do, hoping it will all pay off one day. But so far it hasn’t, and the path in front of me is as flat and unchanging as far as my eye can see.

So the question remains, hanging over me every day – how long is long enough?  How long is too long?  Has that time already come and gone?

And then I remember a big reason why I got into this in the first place; when I was laid off in June of 2010, there weren’t any jobs in Atlanta in my field.  The jobs that were available were mostly in Washington D.C. or Chicago, which means we would have to move, which really wasn’t an option at the time as we would have never been able to sell our house, and NO ONE was paying relocation expenses.  I do keep an eye on it, and the situation hasn’t changed much.  I would still have to move today.  Not that I wouldn’t consider it – of course I would.  But the process of finding a new job will take months – it isn’t like there’s all that many out there anyway.   It’s a niche job.

I do draw the line at taking a job I know I will hate.  I would rather be on the street than do that.  I’m just too old and life is too short.

The bottom line is that I have no idea how long I should keep going.  I don’t even know if finding a job in my field is actually an option – it is much easier said than done.  I do know this – my heart tells me that this isn’t over yet.  And I’ve decided to follow my heart.  My head just hasn’t figured that out yet.

Ask me again next year.

On and off for years now I’ve dreaded it when people ask me “So what do you do?”  When I first was laid off, I was embarrassed to tell people that I was unemployed.  When I started ATB Meeting Design I was able to tell people about that, which was OK except that it is very hard to explain.  When I founded the How We Work group with a partner, I had to decide which pursuit I would use to define myself, based on who I was speaking with.  In the last few months, I’ve added yet another company, Moventus, to the list of professional pursuits.  Sometimes I let people know that I write meetings industry-related articles for an online magazine.  If they haven’t changed the subject by that time, I might mention that I have a book for sale on Amazon.  I don’t talk much about the blog yet – it seems like overkill.  I feel schizophrenic when I run the list, and I can see people’s eyes glaze over as I’m talking to them.  I can’t help but imagine they think I’m a jack of all trades, master of none.  It’s entirely possible that I am.

I wonder if we as a society will ever stop defining ourselves by what we do.  A dear friend recently told me that she has a job she loves but that it carries no status – meaning, people don’t respect her as a professional in her chosen field.  I had a job I loved that carried a lot of status, but as soon as I didn’t have that job anymore the status went with it.  In the blink of an eye I went from holding the keys to the kingdom to trying to melt into my plastic chair at the unemployment office.

Status is an illusion, but we all buy into it, pursue it, try to convince others we have it, and downplay it when we think we don’t.  I compensate for my lack of status by listing everything I’m involved in at the moment, because for some reason I still care what strangers think of me.  It’s hard wired into my brain to want to show to others that I meet the definition of “relevant”.  I would love to live in a society where I could say “I want to be a writer, but in the meantime, I’m doing all this other stuff to make some money” – and have that be not only acceptable, but what everyone aspires to do themselves.  There are people out there who want to pursue their dreams, but they’re afraid of losing the status they think they have.  They may admire someone else for taking the plunge, but there is a part of them that thinks that person is an idiot at the same time.

When I think about the people I admire, they are not the people with a lot of status according to society’s definition.  Most of them are artists who continue to pursue their calling in spite of the enormous struggles they face – no money, intermittent work, and sometimes, a lack of support from their family and friends.  I admire these people because they have the courage to keep going in spite of it all.  Sure, there are lots of heartwarming stories out there about artists that struggled and struggled and finally broke through – those people are easy to admire, because their struggle “paid off”.  Those are great stories, but I’m more impressed by people who struggle and struggle doing what they love who never “make it”.  Who do what they do because they can’t do anything else. They have never been “successful” in the eyes of most people, but they do it anyway, and they don’t care what anyone thinks.  The idea of that kind of life both attracts and frightens me.

It is possible that one day I will regain my status in the world.  For a long time I pursued avenues that I thought would result in me getting my status back, but it didn’t work out that way.  I’ve talked about that before, about how I’m now convinced that my motivation for doing something is probably more important that the thing I’m actually doing.  If that’s the case, then, here’s the paradox – I’ll only get my status back when I don’t care about it any more.  I can tell you for a fact that I’m not there yet.  I hope I will be one day; I just have to stop being afraid.

When you get laid off, if you’re lucky like me, the people in your life want to help you.  Many of my friends and most of my family tried to be helpful in lots of different ways.  Some provided emotional support.  Others helped me craft my resume.  I asked for, and received, lots of advice about different courses of action I was thinking of pursuing.  One friend gave me a refuge to fly to when I needed to get away.  Others continued to reach out to me for advice, helping me to cling to the belief that, in spite of everything, I was still relevant.  Friends called me up to talk, or took me out to lunch.  Some made me laugh.  Some let me cry.  I am grateful to them all, as each of them played a part in keeping me from complete despair.

Just recently I had an unsolicited offer of help from someone I’ve just begun to get to know.  They were suggesting I look into a profession that fits my skill set; they suggested it because they thought they could be of some help starting me on my way.  It was kindly meant, and I appreciated the gesture, but after giving it due consideration (and discussing it with my husband) I decided that it wasn’t what I wanted, regardless of the potential financial upside.  My husband agreed.

This episode made me realize that I’ve come a long way since the early days, when I would pursue any course of action that presented itself, regardless of how I felt about it.  At the time, I had decided that I didn’t have a choice, that I had to take whatever came my way if it paid money.  I spent a lot of time and energy following up on the slightest possibility of employment, even if I knew it would crush my soul to take a job like some of the ones I pursued.  My heart knew it was wrong, and thankfully, for one reason or another, none of those jobs ever panned out.

I think I’ve finally reached the place in my life where I don’t have a choice but to follow my heart.  I’ve been down a lot of blind alleys, pursuing different ways of getting what I thought I wanted, only to come up empty.  I’ve looked hard at those attempts to try to figure out what went wrong, and I think I know now that my motivation was faulty.  Instead of doing work that fed my soul, I was doing work as a means to an end.  The work itself wasn’t bad in any way; in fact, much of what I accomplished I’m very proud of.  My heart just wasn’t totally in it – and I knew it.  I knew I wasn’t being authentic, and I feel like the people I was working with could sense it.  Sure, I’ve done work before that I didn’t give my heart to, and I was successful at it.  I think the difference is that now I’m doing it for myself – and there is no room anymore for self-deception.

So I’ve decided that whatever I do now, I must love it.   It must give me joy.  It must help others.  I can’t worry about how I’m going to make a living – that always seems to work itself out anyway.  I must have faith that being open and honest about who I am and what I want is the only path forward.  I have no idea where this path will take me, but I’m going to walk it anyway.  I might need help along the way, but my hope is that now I can be there for someone else who needs help.

When I was very much younger than I am now I used to think that at some point in your life you “mature”.  I understood “maturity” to mean that you had a pretty good grip on things, and that nothing short of a major catastrophe could impact the trajectory of your life.  When you became mature, I thought, you knew what you wanted, and even if you hadn’t achieved it, you knew how to go about it and that’s what you did.  A mature person didn’t question their life’s purpose.  A mature person knew who they were and proceeded confidently into the future.

I don’t know where I got that crazy idea.  I suppose it was from watching the adults in my life, who seemed to be so wise, and so stable.  I kept this notion of what maturity was until my parents split up during my senior year in college. For the first time in my life I began to see them not as my parents, but as individuals, with a whole life experience that had nothing to do with me.  For the first time I saw them as fallible, and vulnerable.  It freaked me out initially, but eventually it allowed my relationships with my parents to morph into the friendships I have with them now, which has been a great blessing.

I have started over many times already in my life.  I graduated college believing that I would make my career in the theatre, only to change my mind after one season of working professionally.  I thought I would go to law school, only to decide against it after a couple of years as a litigation paralegal.  I thought I would make my living in commercial real estate, only to walk away a year after finishing graduate school.  I thought I had finally found my life’s calling working for a membership association, only to have it snatched away in the blink of an eye.

So here I am, starting over again, and again, and again.  Until three years ago I was my own agent of change, and I’m still working to find the way forward.  I’ve tried a number of avenues; some I’ve abandoned, some I’m still traveling, wondering where they will take me.  I am not, according to my own definition, mature.  I am still beginning.  Every day I get up is a chance to be someone new, to get one day closer to finding my voice.  I keep catching glimpses of a bright, beautiful life that I know could be mine, but I’m not the person I thought I should be at this age.  I don’t see the way ahead clearly.  All I know is that I must keep trying.  And for now, that has to be enough.

Y’all know what cabin fever is?  I can’t confirm this, but I heard once that the term comes from what happens to people who live in the mountains and get snowed into their homes during the winter; the enforced confinement makes them start acting crazy.  It’s not claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces.  It’s what happens to a person who, for weeks and maybe months at a time, can’t get out and see people and do things.  It’s what I get from time to time working from home.

I get cabin fever if I’ve been in the house too long, even if I’ve been out to the store (buying groceries doesn’t count, as it is not an emotionally gratifying or intellectually stimulating activity).  If the bank account is particularly low I stay put; no lunches with friends, no browsing at the bookstore, no going to my sister’s house.  And after a while I start to show the symptoms of my self-enforced confinement.

Cabin fever for me means a total lack of interest in doing anything – almost a compulsion to avoid activity.  I start a slow, downward spiral of diminishing productivity, and as more time goes by, it gets harder and harder to force myself to do the tasks that need doing.  Convenient excuses present themselves as if by magic and before you know it, I’m settled in front of the TV watching M*A*S*H reruns, convinced that I can’t do what I need to do because I have to wait for something else to happen first.  Which is nonsense.

When it gets really bad I start actively talking myself out of doing things that could break the pattern.  I feel like a black hole, absorbing all of the light and matter around me, collapsing in on myself.  This is when my husband has to almost force me to get out and to see a movie, or go to dinner, or do anything outside (or inside) the house.  Of course, once I do, the negative momentum is broken.  But the pull of inertia is very strong, and I almost can’t overcome it on my own once I’ve let it go too long.

Why do I let this happen, you ask?  Good question.  I could get out more than I do – I could go to the library, or my local coffee shop, for little to no expenditure.  I could take a walk down to the nearby lake.  I could (gasp!) do more housework.  I know these things.  But knowing what to do isn’t enough sometimes.

This challenge is particularly difficult for a person like me, because I get energy and inspiration from exposure to new experiences and face-to-face interaction with people.  Sometimes I get so busy with work that the spiral never starts.  Sometimes I am successful at fending off the spiral with activity.  But sometimes, the fear of not being able to pay the bills (which has never happened, by the way) keeps me confined in a prison of my own making.  My hope is that one day soon I’ll have so much work that these periods of cabin fever will disappear forever.  In the meantime, I keep moving ahead, trying to stay busy and keeping my fever down.

Yesterday I had one of those great days where I felt like I got a lot done.  In the morning I worked on a new project for a few hours, then took a break at lunch.   While I was working I got an email from a returning client with a signed proposal, so that really brightened up the day.

I spent the afternoon doing preliminary work for this client, which consisted of some email communication.  While that was going on I started working on part 2 of a project I have for another client.

In and around all of that I followed up on some outstanding business to do with the wind-down of an unsuccessful business venture.  That was a drag, but it had to be done.

So yesterday I would characterize as a productive day, and those make me feel really good.  They justify my continued pursuit of self-employment.  I enjoy those days because there are all too many where I don’t feel “productive” at all.

Which got me thinking about productivity.  When I was working in corporate real estate, the holy grail for people in the workplace design field was the accurate measurement of the productivity of “knowledge workers” (as opposed to workers whose output is easily measured, like in a factory).  Everyone wanted to know if their wicked cool new workplace was actually improving people’s ability to get their work done, and there was a constant stream of angles people were taking to determine how productive people were in their new environments.  Some people claimed that they could measure productivity, but I never saw it.

My own feelings about productivity are not clear-cut.  I generally feel productive only when I’m doing work for which I will get paid.  There are days I spend almost exclusively doing “house-work” – going to the grocery store, balancing the checkbook, doing laundry, running the dishwasher, etc., – that I feel I haven’t done anything.  Which, of course, is not true – but since in my mind I should be doing “work-work” instead (even if I don’t have any “work-work” to do), I’m not being productive.

I recognize that these attitudes are a holdover from the 9 – 5 days, where one is made to feel like every moment of the time for which one is getting paid must be filled with work.  There is a powerful collective guilty unconscious associated with anything that looks like goofing off when you work in an office.  People keep score.  You keep score.  It helps you justify your own lapses if you can say, “Well, yes, I took an hour and fifteen minutes for lunch today, but So-and-So spends all afternoon on Facebook!”.

I find that somewhere in my psyche, this sort of score-keeping is still going on, only I do it to myself now.  One part of my self is keeping track of what I get up to during the day and meting out either approval or guilt, depending on the perceived productivity of my actions.  As time has gone on it’s gotten better, but I still – even now, three years on – I STILL find myself saying things like “It’s OK to go to a matinee movie on Tuesday – I’ll work late tonight”.

I have yet to master the art of joyously blending all of the things I do in my days into a beautiful whole, free from judgement and guilt.  I can see in my mind’s eye what that kind of life that could be, but I haven’t figured out how to release my fear about not being “productive”.  I can’t seem to allow myself to just take it as it comes.  But I’m working on it.

I’ve been on vacation for the last two weeks.  I didn’t go anywhere, I just stopped doing anything that looked like work.  I didn’t intend to not work, it just sort of happened.  The 4th of July was on a Thursday, so really, that whole week was shot.  Then my birthday was the following Monday, and my mother came to visit.  We planned our family celebration for Thursday night, so I spent that week hanging out with my mother and sister.  I did have a project to do and a meeting with a client, so it wasn’t like I didn’t do anything at all for two weeks – but it was damn close.

I’ve found that the whole vacation thing is one of the most difficult concepts to get my head around in this new way of working.  It used to be very clear-cut; vacation was a proscribed number of days that had to be carefully planned and approved by others.  I never had the ability to just not work if I didn’t feel like it.  I can do that now – at least until my work picks up.

I’ve also found that I have a hard time allowing myself to enjoy my self-created “vacations”.  There’s always this vague sense of guilt associated with them, a feeling that I really should be figuring out how to find more clients, or networking, or writing industry articles.  I felt pulled in two the entire two weeks.  I enjoyed the time, sure, but not as much as I remember enjoying my time off when I had a regular 9 to 5.  There’s a sense of virtue in taking your allotted vacation time when you work a normal job.  There’s a sense that you’ve earned it, you deserve it.  I struggle with feeling like I “deserve” the time off, since I haven’t worked steadily since I finished my part-time gig a year ago.  It’s one of those things that is so different about my life now.  It seems strange to me (although I don’t know why it should) that I’m still re-programming how I think about work and vacation and life three years after getting laid off.  I wonder if I will ever stop feeling guilty about not working like I used to.

I’m one of those people who works well under pressure.  If I’ve got a huge task in front of me and a very short amount of time in which to complete it, I really shine.  I’m very good at prioritizing steps, delegating work (when I can), and making decisions.  I relentlessly move forward until the goal is achieved.  Whether it was opening a play, closing on a shopping center purchase, or putting on a conference, if I had a strict deadline, I always met it.  Always.

I’m finding that working the way I work now is in some ways harder than anything I’ve done before.  I do have deadlines – for articles I’m writing, for projects I’m involved in – but it feels very different.  Because my workload is lighter, I have more time to accomplish things.  You’d think I’d be happy about that.  What actually happens is I allow myself to get distracted and I put things off.  I may have two weeks to write a promised article, but you can be sure I won’t start it until the day before it’s due.  I may have a meeting scheduled in a week with a client to show him the progress I’ve made on his project, but I won’t start working on it until the last possible moment.

I’ve also found that my attention span seems to have shrunk.  If I’ve got multiple projects going on (which I do most of the time), I often jump from one to the other randomly.  I have a much harder time keeping focused on any one thing.  Some of that is due to the distractions of working at home – the cats demanding my attention, the dishes that need to be put away, the husband who needs my help with his computer – but not all of it.

I think the challenges I have are because I don’t feel the pressure to get things done the way I used to.  I experienced such clarity about my work when I was racing for a deadline.  I knew what needed to be done, and by whom, and in what order.  As the unexpected cropped up I would adjust course and keep moving.   It was a challenge, it was exhilarating.  I loved it.  I miss it.

I think the greatest thing about being underemployed and working from home is that you can go off and do things that you never would be able to do if you worked for someone who made you go into an office every day.  For example, last week I went to visit my mother in another state.  My sister and I drove over to help her move about three miles from one house to another. It was great fun, great time together, and it would have never happened if I still had a regular job – at least not during the week.  While I was there I participated in a conference call with some colleagues and reviewed a project we’re finalizing, so I did continue to work.

Since my layoff three years ago I’ve taken advantage of the freedom I have to visit friends and family.  It has been such a gift.  I can’t do it all the time of course, but I love to get out of town when I get the chance.  I tend to stay in the house a lot, which starts to be soul-crushing for an extrovert like me.  These periodic trips keep me clear-headed and energized, as well as remind of how much I’m loved.

So even though the trade-off is being poor, I still wouldn’t give up the freedom I have to spend time with the people I love.  I think my priorities have changed.  I used to be incredibly career-driven, to define myself by the relative coolness of my job, but that need to be “successful” has lessened.  Yes, I want to work, to do good work, to work at something I enjoy and find fulfilling, but not at the expense of my relationships.  And this time in my life has given me more opportunity to be the kind of wife, friend, daughter and sister than I’ve ever had as an adult.  It really is pretty great.