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Identity and Becoming an Artist (Whether You Make Art or Not)

Land of the Lost Artist

Hi, Polly,

I’m a very sensitive person. I have been for as long as I can remember. This sensitivity has brought many positive things into my life, including art. Art has been my #1 ever since some very tough years in high school, when I can remember telling my best friend, “If I only had a camera, that is all that I’ll ever need.”

I am now twenty-nine. I did everything in my power to release myself from the very average, very midsized, very midwestern city that offered little relief to my restless appetite for cultural activity. I packed all of my things and moved to the West Coast. I lived in five cities across the country and traveled abroad, had several semi-long-term relationships, and earned a master’s degree in art. But I still feel very much like the same little seven-year-old girl who asked her big sister to check her books out for her at the library so that she wouldn’t have to speak to the librarian. There were always people who would protect me from these fearful situations, but as I got older, I became capable of functioning very well within the social environment that once brought me so much stress.

I just got out of a relationship with a great guy who I thought was “the one,” despite the fact that I broke up with him several times, citing my own mental health as the factor when my “higher self” (as the self-help book says) must have known that love should not be so cruel. The truth is, I probably spent a year clinging on to him for safety. He was the one person in my life at that time who truly knew me, who held on to my love with such care. I was never afraid that he would hurt me. And yet I treated him so poorly. He won’t take me back now. It’s taken a while for me to drag myself out of my comfortable position in his arms.

I am now living with my parents in the midwestern city that I once loathed, trying to convince myself that “it’s not so bad” and “you could really DO some THINGS here! Why not?” But in the back of my mind, I am anxiously awaiting my future life as a failed artist in a boring city. The hard part is knowing that I could leave, go somewhere alone, and figure it out there. I’ve done it many times over. But am I just escaping? Is this what I have been doing all along? Am I going for someone else’s idea of success?

When does a personality trait become a corporate body with rights? Sometimes I feel as if I have to stick up for my art and my personality, because it has brought so much happiness and excitement and challenge into my life. At other times, I feel cursed by my own genetic disposition. Like an insect that circles the same lightbulb over and over again, always trying to satisfy its craving for brightness, when the brightest thing is always just outside of its reach, a place that is closer to where it originally came from.

I could say that I am trying hard to accept myself fully, to embrace the here and now in whatever shape that takes without relinquishing my decisions to the opinions of others, but I also just want to say that it is terribly lonely to feel like I am forever stuck in some kind of waiting room, the kind with interesting magazines and stylish furniture, while everyone else seems to move in and out with such dedication and consequence.

Where do I go from here?

Lost Artist

Dear Lost Artist,

Other people will always appear to move with dedication and consequence. How else does a person behave when people are watching? We all pretend that our decisions and accomplishments took us in a straight line forward, decisively moving from one success to the next. We gloss over that year wasted looking at old photos or washing our hardwood floors over and over, wishing that we’d create something of consequence instead. We don’t mention the year we started and stopped three different screenplays or furiously typed out bad poetry at our go-nowhere temp jobs.

I used to write bad poems from my lonely desk in a bank office at the top of a downtown San Francisco skyscraper. I was living with my boyfriend from college, but he was working nights as a bartender, partially to avoid the clingy psycho chick he had rather unwisely agreed to shack up with. I rarely saw him. I had no friends in town. My boyfriend’s friends were not really my friends, which somehow I didn’t figure out until we graduated and moved across the country together. But even they didn’t seem sure if they were friends with each other at the time. One of them would complain to me that another one was going to inherit his father’s business and effortlessly become rich, which made him very envious. When I tried to talk to another one about how bad my relationship was, she’d say, “Shut up, that’s silly. You’re thinking too much. You shouldn’t be so insecure.” So that was that.

Let the record show that I wasn’t exactly stellar friend material myself. I mean, I was a clingy psycho chick who wrote bad poetry at work all day. But somehow, those poems felt like thin threads connecting me to something real and true somewhere inside me that wasn’t easy to access. Somehow, even though I knew my poems weren’t very good, I felt reassured by them. My loneliness took some pretty clichéd shapes: A Halloween pumpkin I threw out the window of our second-story apartment. A sea of faceless workers, moving with dedication and consequence, while I floated along, forlorn and self-conscious, worried and scared and skinless. I was lost and I needed to admit it. I needed to record the fact that there was always lint on my tights. I needed to remember that my dumb suit shrank in the rain. I needed to remember that my skin was breaking out horribly, and when I went to a new dermatologist and he learned that I had a boyfriend, he told me, “We are going to make you kissable for the holidays.”

Today, this comment would make me laugh out loud. But back then, I felt like I was living on some strange planet inhabited by heartless, careless aliens who for some reason wanted to grab me by the back of the head and smash my face into the carpet until I cried uncle. My boyfriend, with whom I was supposed to live happily ever after, recoiled at the sight of me. He was working in a bar filled with hot girls, and I was an angry neurotic with bad skin. I was paralyzed. He didn’t want me to talk anymore. There had to be somewhere else to put everything inside me.

This is how it begins. This is when a personality trait becomes a corporate body with rights. You simply resolve to believe in your experience, to make something out of those feelings. You simply decide that the world doesn’t fit you quite right, it’s not that comfortable, and it never will be. And yes, let’s admit that other people sometimes do move with more dedication and consequence, especially compared with those of us who are slowed down by this need to write it down, to turn it into something real. Other people can focus on the bottom line, which is uplifting and uncomplicated. Other people can simply trill, “Great, I’ll be kissable for the holidays!”

But because these people have it a little easier than us, because they’re not moving through molasses every few days, because they don’t overthink things or feel crazy emotions they never intended to feel, because they can keep the world at arm’s length and suspend their disbelief and run with the pack and be team players and all of the other stuff that our dim-witted, reductive culture demands, WE GET TO CALL OURSELVES ARTISTS.

I used to hate the word “artist” and hate anyone who had the supreme gall to call herself one. I also hated it when people called themselves writers. I didn’t care if they got paid or not. It was pretentious.

I like calling myself an artist now for the same reasons I hated it before. Being an artist means taking up a little extra space without apology. It means allowing yourself to annoy other people with your deluded views of yourself. It means rubbing people the wrong way by acting like your experiences add up to something more. No one is supposed to believe such a narcissistic thing, of course. If your experiences add up, it better be all about god or public service or making a bankroll. It better not be personal or messy or vague or emotional, with no fucking dollar signs attached. Don’t you know that people are starving and dying? Who the FUCK are you?

An artist’s answer to that question is, “Well, who the fuck are YOU, exactly?” Artists are not easy people to like. Their feelings often come before yours. That’s how they have to live sometimes, just to remember, just to locate the center of the thing. They rarely make themselves kissable for the holidays.

It sounds selfish, I know. Some of us have no choice but to give ourselves a lot of space. When things get blurry and people are unkind to us, we have to stop and dwell in that blurry space. We have to experience the full brunt of an insult—we have to swallow the bitterest pill, the sharpest words, ingest and metabolize these things until we’re weak and wan—in order to be strong. We have to welcome our clingiest, ugliest monster self into the room and love that sad, ugly monster dearly in order to one day be beautiful and generous and resilient. Yes, it sounds selfish, but it’s also a route to being less selfish. Trust that.

You might look back someday and draw a straight line from world travel to the West Coast back to the Midwest, selecting out the victories and skimming over the flailing and the second-guessing. But recognize, today, that this skidding, stuttering, stalling point is one of the victories, too. This is your time of reckoning. Of course you’ll need a practical route out of your parents’ house. The Midwest feels oppressive to you because of the way you’re living right now. Of course there are artists there! But you struggle with the sense that where you are is small and average and you will always be a misfit there. You should work hard to either deconstruct your ideas about the place or explore new places instead.

That doesn’t mean you won’t be a misfit everywhere. Artists are always misfits. Even when you plant them in artist colonies, they feel like the misfits among other misfits. That misfit energy is good. But if you throw in all of the signs and signifiers of powerlessness from your childhood—and that’s what’s in the mix when you live in your parents’ home, whether you have a good attitude about it or not—you’re really giving yourself too steep a hill to climb. You need to live on your own again. Decide where you want to live. Make it happen. You don’t have to believe in this decision every single day. You just have to earn a little money and save a little money and then pack your stuff and arbitrarily move somewhere.

There is the artist, and then there’s this pragmatic person within you who bails you out when you’re drowning. Don’t let the artist fuck with what the pragmatist is trying to do. But do let the artist take up a lot of space. Let the artist call herself an artist, even to her parents’ skeptical friends. Practice saying it out loud to exactly the people who are the most likely to think you’re a fucking joke.

You’re an artist if you create art, period. You’re a writer if you write. First, you have to claim the title. You can’t work hard until you claim the right. (For women, I think, that’s particularly true.)

Artists, pretentious or not, blustery and swaggery or self-abnegating, need to find their faith in their work all over again, every morning of their lives. You need to devote yourself to your religion, Lost Artist. You need to cling to it the way you once clung to your ex-boyfriend.

It makes sense that you’re not there yet, at age twenty-nine, in your parents’ house. You want other things besides your art. But don’t even think about throwing your art aside. Don’t think for a second that it’s a liability, a personality flaw, just an extra thing that you need, that slows you down, that regular people don’t need.

In fact, stop thinking about regular people. They will never matter as much as you think they do when you’re twenty-nine years old. You will move with dedication and consequence. Believe it. This is your era of reckoning. Write that on the wall of your childhood bedroom in big letters. Writing on the wall is precisely the sort of obnoxious shit that a real artist would do. This way station, this troubling pause, this return to nowhere land, is also a victory.

When I finally quit my temp job at the bank downtown, the new temp I’d trained, who hated me for some reason—maybe because the job sucked and I was much younger than him—called me and asked me, “What are all these documents you left on your laptop?”

“Those are poems,” I said. “You can throw them out.”

“They’re pretty disturbing. One starts out, ‘I threw out the pumpkin…’ ”

“Yes, that’s one of my poems. You can delete it.”

“Another one says, ‘Sad and small, hoping for something to save me…’ ”

“You can delete all of them,” I said. “Just delete them.”

What I should’ve said was, “Why the fuck do you care?” I can’t imagine someone talking to me that way these days. It makes me sad, the way some people talk to young people, knowing they’re embarrassed and vulnerable.

Maybe I’m less likable now than I was then. Maybe in the intervening years, I’ve willed my personality flaws into a corporate body with rights. I don’t have to mumble an apology and feel ashamed of myself. I know that I deserve to take up space. I still have copies of those poems somewhere. Even if I didn’t, I could still remember them. That was the year I realized I was a bright, burning light, and no fucking insect was going to persuade me to hate myself for it.

Let’s fly into your future and look back at this year in your history in our minds. This was the year that you really knew that you were an artist, first and foremost. This was the year you committed to what came next.

Remember this year? It was a good year, actually. This was the year you stopped waiting around for things to happen. And somehow, as soon as you stopped waiting, as soon as you started doing things, making things, claiming your own space, speaking up for yourself? That’s when your real life began.

Polly

Lame Job, Lame Life

Dear Polly,

I’m single for the first time in nearly ten years. Since being dumped last summer, I’ve spent a good amount of time looking at my life more closely, and I do not like what I see.

I work at a small company in Los Angeles. When I started there I was twenty-three, just graduating from college, and had decided that I was going to try my hand at becoming a freelance writer and comedian. This job was supposed to be one that helped pay the bills without draining me mentally and emotionally. I wanted to make my living by making people laugh and creating things with other people who loved to do that, too. I told myself that I’d take one year to hone my craft, save in the meantime, and then go out on my own to be the successful person I was destined to be.

Here I am four years later, still with the same company. I make myself the same promise every year, and every year I’ve let it fall to the wayside. I’ve somehow ended up in a leadership position, but it’s unfulfilling and I do absolutely nothing creative. I love my co-workers and the company, but I really couldn’t give a shit. I’m worried that this will eventually become obvious to people. The little fulfillment I get from my job comes from these amazing people I work with, who are all infinitely more capable and intelligent and creative than I could ever pretend to be.

I think I know how I got here, and the answer embarrasses me. Since I can remember, my life has been about boys. I started dating at fourteen and now recognize that my self-worth was (is?) deeply tied to how men feel about me. Everything else—my career, where I lived, the college I went to—was decided based on some combination of convenience and “the next logical step.” I’ve sort of floated through my life following these men down their paths, while every once in a while feeling worthless enough to make blind, halfhearted attempts at finding my own. Since realizing this, I’ve tirelessly analyzed how it has affected my life, and it bums me out more and more and more.

My most recent relationship was nearly six years in length. While we were together, I dabbled in comedy and a few people encouraged me, but I never seriously pursued it. I was more concerned with making this man—who I knew didn’t really love me—love me, and I regret it so, so much. If I had a chance to talk to myself back then, I’d warn her against relationships, period. I’d try to shake sense into her until her head came off.

What’s sad is that my relationship with my job is the same as my relationship was with my ex: I’m exhausted, I constantly feel undervalued, and if I’m being completely honest, I’m giving about 30 percent across the board. I am certain that something out there is a better fit and I have an idea of what it looks like, but I’m certain that I’m wholly undeserving and unprepared for it.

I never got in the habit of hard work or pouring my energy into my passions because I was too busy trying not to be alone. I’m trying now, but I’m twenty-seven, and at this point it just feels hopeless. Even if I thought I was good enough to pursue my dream, I’ve got no body of work. No experience. No training. Just a hunch that I might be funny and the idea that it’s what I’d rather be doing.

Maybe I’m not funny, maybe I’m not a creative person, and maybe I should just be grateful for this comfortable, “fun” job that someone else would love and that I’m hardly qualified for. How do I give myself the courage, or the motivation, to try and prove myself wrong?

Sincerely,

Stuck Phoning It In

Dear SPII,

The words “I’m twenty-seven, and at this point it just feels hopeless” just make me laugh and laugh, the deep, smug chuckle of a nasty old crone with a superior attitude. Listen up, dummy: You spent four years at a mediocre job. That is the best possible start for a creative career. It’s actually much more dangerous to never have done a single thing to support yourself and then discover that your giant creative ambitions are not going to usher you straight to the widely adored, shiny princess life of your dreams. I live in L.A. I know people who’ve been chasing their creative dreams with less and less vigor for TWENTY YEARS now. Having had a concrete professional existence is great and very typical of many (if not MOST) successful funny-person trajectories. You will look back at this job and say, “I’m glad I did that. It taught me all about the life I didn’t want. It helped me to never look back.”

I myself began my writing career as a highly celebrated assistant executive secretary at a bank. Then I moved into desktop publishing (see also typing). All the while I wondered if maybe my creativity and my writing talent were both just self-protective ego illusions. Thanks to the dot-com boom, I got to start my real writing career at the tender age of twenty-five, which then seemed to me a little late in the game but now looks absurdly lucky. But then the tech bubble burst, and I had to start over. Writers have to start over every few years, honestly. And let’s not mince words, that aspect of the creative/writerly path is an UNMITIGATED FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

And there are many low points in the trajectory to (limited) fame and (limited) fortune. Many, many low points. The great irony of being a creative, sensitive, talented love seeker is that you’re not always that well suited for such low points. Your brain likes to eat itself alive in a vacuum. You feel needy and unworthy. Having an office job of some sort is not the worst-case scenario for such a person. Even as you half-ass your way through day after day, at least you’re not facedown on the carpet at home, feeling lonely and worthless and delusional.

That said, you’ve reached a point where you cannot sally forth with your current career. The work means nothing to you. You like the place and the people, but you don’t like your actual job. You really don’t have a choice now. You know you have to pursue your dream at this point. It’s not remotely too late! It could take you four more years to whip your creative act into shape, and it still wouldn’t be too late! If you were forty-eight and had kids and were broke, I might tell you to keep your job until you find a new one. But you aren’t. In fact, this could be the ideal time to move forward. A second earlier would’ve been too soon (you would’ve dropped every project to make your boyfriend love you more, anyway); a second later might be too late (you might’ve moved into an expensive place or had a kid or had other responsibilities that precluded taking this kind of risk).

This is your moment. Seize your moment, goddamn it! Do not ask about where the courage and motivation will come from. This crisis will give you the courage and the motivation you need. It’s already there. You’re unhappy and you feel like a failure. PERFECT! Use that sad/angry/disappointed energy. Channel it into what you know, deep down in your heart, you love.

Spend the next six months in a state of total obsession. Get up two hours earlier than usual and write before you go to work. Come home and exercise (not optional, sorry), then write for another hour. Read or watch the kind of comedy you love before bed. Don’t waste all your time socializing. Do a little socializing on weekends, but focus. Focus! Save your money. Research part-time work you could do for your company; use your slackness as a way to sell a new position where your boss would get your best from you every hour that you’re there. Pitch it as win-win. Or pitch working from home half the time to cure your blahs and jack up your productivity. Then overproduce at work, but fit all of your work into a part-time schedule, and fill your prime working hours with writing/comedy. Almost any capable human with a not-that-taxing job can pull this off if they put their mind to it. If you’re a manager, investigate other roles or sell your boss on the fact that you’re managing via e-mail most of the time anyway.

Of course you will still question what you’re doing every stupid day, maybe for the next two decades. Even after you write a hundred funny things, you’ll believe that you’re all tapped out. I’m always convinced that every essay I write will be my last. I’m always wrong. And I can tell you from experience that if you get up early, drink your caffeine, and fill yourself with the sense that you are going to TURN THIS MOTHER OUT SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY, you will find the inspiration and the tenacity you’re looking for. You have to put all the pieces into place, and then you have to let it come to you. It will. Trust!

You will still feel like a self-deluded loser most of the time. That’s okay. That’s the writer’s life for you. Take some classes at one of those improv factories, meet some other writers and comedians, discuss your ideas with the creative people at work who probably have side projects of their own. Start owning this goal and living it.

And stop saying shit like “I’m not as creative or as talented as these other people. I don’t deserve this, I’m lame compared to them.” Stop it. With writing, with comedy, with everything, you’re about as talented as you think you are most of the time. People are so delusional about talent, as if you’re either pure magic or made of nothing. You know which people think that way? Talentless people. Those who strive, who create, who try, who work hard? They know that about 50 percent of talent comes from working your ass off and the other 50 percent comes from cultivating an extreme arrogance around your particular flavors of genius.

As long as you’re walking around saying you don’t have it, then you don’t. And having it is sometimes as easy as saying, “DAMN I’M GOOD,” over and over again. You say it before you start writing. You say it the second you write something decent. You say it when you’re done. Can you do that or can’t you?

Because I don’t think you were made to follow men around, to wait for their cues, and to cower in the presence of creative people. I think you’re doing these things out of habit. You think it’s audacious to stand up for your talents, to boldly proclaim yourself a writer and take the life that you want and tell the life you don’t want to fuck off. Listen, it doesn’t matter if every human on the planet would kill for your job. If you don’t want it, then to hell with it.

Stop being grateful for scraps. Everything good in my life has surged forth from one crucial moment or another when I said, “I am not settling for these scraps anymore. I want more than this for myself.”

In my seventh year as a staff TV critic, I kept saying to my husband, “So many people would kill for this job.” I felt spoiled. But I didn’t want to write about TV anymore. I was done. I knew that freelance writing was going to be a total crapshoot, and I had two small kids and a big mortgage to worry about. But it was time to move on. I needed to try something new.

I tried and I failed a lot, and this was after fifteen years of professional writing. I went through a long stage where I couldn’t get my editor to reply to a pitch anymore, so I just sat around freaking out all day long. You will have times like that, too. But don’t torment yourself by lamenting over the big picture of your career every goddamn day. Make concrete goals and meet them and power forward. When you can’t move forward with your work, go on a run or read a book, then try again afterward.

Above all, believe. Cultivate your swagger. Make this your new religion: You are funny and talented, and you’re going to try something new. This is the exact right time for that. This is the most important year of your life, and for once you are NOT going to let yourself down. If you fall down and feel depressed, you will get back up. If you feel lethargic and scared, you will try something else: a new routine, a new roommate situation, a healthier diet. You will read books about comedy. You will work tirelessly and take pride in your tireless work. And you will take time every few hours to stop and say to yourself, “Look at me. I’m doing it. I’m chasing my dream. I am following my calling.” It doesn’t matter if your dreams come true, if agents swoon and audiences cheer. Trust me on that: It truly doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling that you’re doing it, every day. What matters is the work—diving in, feeling your way in the dark, finding the words, trusting yourself, embracing your weird voice, celebrating your quirks on the page, believing in all of it. What matters is the feeling that you’re not following someone else around, that you’re not half-assing this, that you’re not waiting for something to happen, that you’re not waiting for your whole life to start.

What matters is you, all alone at your desk at five in the morning. I write this from my own desk at five in the morning, my favorite place, a place where I know who I am and what I’m meant to accomplish in this life. Savor that precious space. That space will feel like purgatory at first, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you. That space will feel like salvation eventually, because you’ll realize that it all depends on you.

Polly

P.S. DAMN I’M GOOD.

Do I Make Music or Have a Family?

Dear Polly,

I’m a highly accomplished jazz pianist, but I also write pop and techno and musical theater. I have a lot of facets to my art, so it takes a lot of time, and it also makes it harder to earn a living, since I’m competing with people who are more specialized. But I have so much to express I feel like I have to do it all. On top of that, I’m interested in music and the brain and would like to go to graduate school.

I’ve been living in New York for seven years, writing music and performing and also making ends meet as a private piano teacher, church pianist, etc. I don’t have many friends here, and I have been feeling increasingly isolated.

Five years ago, I met a girl, we clicked, and pretty soon we were living together. We had a loving, supportive relationship, but there were also some boundaries. I needed a lot of space to do my music, and I also had a lot of trepidation about the future, which got in the way of my work.

I knew that she wanted to eventually get married and have kids, so I tried as hard as I could to succeed before then. I also knew she wanted to move back to San Francisco (where we’re both from) so she could raise kids near her parents. I gave up most of my twenties trying to get some kind of success, and now I’m thirty-two and haven’t succeeded.

Last year, somewhat unexpectedly, she got a job in San Francisco. I didn’t want to stand in the way of her career, and we’re both pretty easygoing, so we figured that we’d figure it out. About six months ago, she told me that she needed a firm commitment to our relationship and raising a family, or else she needed to leave the relationship. I couldn’t give her one. I love San Francisco, but the music scene, and the possibility of making a worldwide splash, is pretty small. Part of me wants to move back there and start a family, but I also feel like it might be the end of my dreams. Maybe I’m deluded, but doing my art, and the possibility that maybe one day it will connect with a lot of people, makes me happy and gives me a sense of purpose and identity.

I’ve talked with a lot of people with children, and I can’t see how I could make it work. The older musicians I’ve met who’ve started families seem pretty disappointed in general, and I can’t say that their families seem to be a very effective consolation prize. I’m sure that I love her, but I don’t know if I can attain my potential and live my destiny with her.

I feel like I am choosing between a life of crushing, monastic loneliness in New York or a life of frustrated compromise in San Francisco. I have a genuine gift, and I simply must put it to good use. I can’t give up on my dreams, but I don’t think I’ll ever find another girl like her. It’s not too late to get her back, but soon it will be. I think the essential question is whether I would be happier as an unattached, free artist or as a married dad who is also an artist. I think my girlfriend (should we get back together) would be okay with it if I pursued my art, but I wonder also if that isn’t entering into a compromise where nobody is really happy. I wonder if I’m too black-and-white in my thinking or if the strength to resist temptation and compromise is what makes a truly great artist or person.

I guess it comes down to this: What’s it all about? Is it about happiness? What is greater, the happiness of hearing your orchestral work performed by the London Phil or playing with your kid on a rainy day? The happiness that some strangers get from hearing your song when it’s exactly what they needed, or the happiness that your family gets from having you around? Is it knowing you had the courage to go your own way and live an extraordinary life or being enmeshed in a group of people whose happiness is tied in with your own? Is it about giving happiness or getting happiness?

Yours humbly,

Burdened

Dear Burdened,

First of all, I find it troubling that you claim that you haven’t succeeded. You’re highly accomplished, you work hard, and you pour yourself into your compositions and collaborations every single day. Working on your music gives you a sense of purpose and identity and makes you happy. That is the very definition of success. There is nothing else. I’ve been paid and I’ve been popular and I’ve connected with people, but every single day I wake up and what I need, more than anything else, is a sense of purpose and identity. I need to write things that make me happy, that make me feel like I’m bringing something worthwhile into the world that wasn’t there before. Ego rewards and praise are nice, but you can’t carry them with you or ingest them and that positive glow you get from them fades no matter what. You are still just you, a talented artist who wants to create, every day. An artist who wants to work very hard, who wants to exceed yesterday’s high-water mark and create something even more entrancing and seductive and glorious.

So stop waiting for the future to arrive. You are here. You are a success. As someone who also writes songs and loves it, I have to say, I picture you collaborating and performing and composing and I think, “My god, that must be so great.” What you do is the most enviable thing on the planet, as far as I’m concerned. And you’re really doing it! You’re committed to it and you believe in it and it brings you joy. Just because the crass world outside tells you what you do is insignificant until you’re raking in adoration and cold hard cash doesn’t mean it’s right. Your existence might feel monastic and money might be tight, but you’re just working on your art.

So stop it with the self-defeating talk. Start making victorious sounds, and the world will rush in to greet you with more enthusiasm.

Likewise, it’s extremely self-defeating to believe that you have to choose between art and love. I hate it when I hear young people saying they don’t want to have kids because they’d have to give up their art or their careers, since we all know now that you can never have it all. Fuck that! Yes, it’s hard to balance a career and a family and love. In my experience, though, it’s far more difficult to live a solitary artist’s existence and come home to an empty apartment every night than it is to juggle the elements that make up a full life.

I understand the romantic notion that saying no to a compromised existence as a husband and father and breadwinner is the only way to be a real artist. I grasp that plenty of world-famous artists, particularly touring musicians, have lived that way. But I firmly believe that you have to go for ALL of the things you want, at once. I don’t think you should have to sacrifice love for art, or art for love. It sounds to me like your ex understands perfectly well that the man she wants to spend her life with is someone with huge passions and ambitions and, if she wants you, she’ll need to accept that your music career is fundamental to your happiness.

That said, I think marriages work best when both partners, as much as possible, contribute equally. You have to stay committed to supporting yourself, both financially and emotionally. You have to earn money and maintain friendships and keep yourself healthy. When relationships get lopsided—one person works to support the other person’s art—things can go south.

But don’t tell yourself that true artists always forge ahead alone. Like many other young men who are passionate about their creative pursuits, I think you’re unduly fixated on the idea that love will block you from your true desires. A good partner is not like some Teri Garr character, constantly whining, “Come back to bed, baby, and stop thinking about aliens/saving the world/syncopated melody lines!” I think girlfriends who want a firm commitment sometimes end up sounding like scary menaces who will force you to give up on your dreams just to juggle dirty diapers all day long. But trust me, what they really want more than anything else is to have a practical conversation about what a life together, long-term, might look like, and they want to know whether or not you’re mature enough and hardworking enough to handle all of it. I’m telling you right now I believe that you are.

I also think it’s deceptive to ask older, married musicians with kids about this issue. People who never got enough ego rewards from their art will make the same noises, whether they have kids or not. Kids are largely beside the point. Look closely at the people you’re talking to. Are they extremely happy and daring? Are they the sorts of people who composed music at a very young age, like you did, or are they the sorts of people who tended to sell themselves short, toured with this or that show, and then settled down and felt envious of other, more successful musicians? Did they work hard around the clock, like you do, or did they drink and play gigs and hang out around the clock? Were they idealists who believed in love (I think you might be one of these), or did they always have trouble showing their full selves to their partners and eventually came to see their partners as Teri Garr–style enemies?

You can mold a beautiful future for yourself. You need to stop intellectualizing and turning love into a puzzle. You need to stop accepting less than you deserve, artistically and emotionally. You can’t settle for the monastic loneliness you describe. You need to open your heart not just to your art but to the world and the people around you. Even if you decide you can’t move to San Francisco and you need to leave your ex behind, you have to start connecting to the world around you in a more open way. You’re surrounded by some of the most interesting, thoughtful people in the world right now, Burdened! You need more joy in your life RIGHT NOW, no matter where you end up with your ex.

You also need to ask yourself if you love your ex enough to want to be with her no matter what. I can imagine that San Francisco might be a challenge musicwise. I guess I’d ask for some compromise on her part in the short term there, in exchange for a long-term vision of a life together—if that’s what you both truly want. If you’re sure that you want her in your life, you have to call her and have a big conversation about the future. Would she consider living in New York for five years in the name of your work? What are each of your worries about a life together? What do you each really want? You were easygoing and a little indecisive before. Now you’re adults. It’s time to revisit this question. If you love this woman and you very much want her back, you’re going to need to make that clear. If that sounds extremely difficult, and not just for internal reasons, then maybe you don’t love her enough to go down this path with her.

And maybe, Burdened, you don’t really want a family. I can’t tell you if you do or you don’t. All I can tell you is that the great artists I’ve read about have something in common: balance. They know what combinations of work and play feed them and make them better at what they do. Sure, some are solitary. But all of them give themselves what they need to succeed. They don’t work themselves into the ground every day and feel punished and isolated and alone, not usually. Usually, they get up early, go on a walk, do some important thinking, work on their art for four hours straight, eat a nice lunch, work two more hours, read for an hour, go out with friends, and so on. They’ve refined their routines and have it all down to a science.

What I’m saying is that being an artist takes constant recalibration. As an artist and as an adult, you have to solve new puzzles every day. Successful artists have to keep rebalancing everything in their lives in order to stay inspired and energetic and fully alive. That’s true no matter what their circumstances are. And in my experience, being LESS busy doesn’t lead to making more/better art. Sometimes it can cause your gears to grind to a halt completely.

Productive artists don’t settle for “Oh, I’m in a slump now. I just have to sit here and mope and feel terrible.” They look closely at what works at this moment and what doesn’t, and they reinvent their schedules every single day.

Above all, you have to dare to reach for everything you want, even when other people say discouraging things. You should dare to reach for ALL OF IT. Going after everything you want makes you a better artist. There is no scarcity of time and money and love in the world.

Your life is happening now. You have to reach for what you love. You’re already doing that with your music. Keep doing it, on all fronts. Reach for what you love with abandon, with hope in your heart, with fragility, without knowing exactly what comes next. Reach and never, ever stop reaching.

Polly

This Job Is Killing Me

Dear Polly,

I am a thirty-one-year-old male, and I have a lot of insanely positive things going on in my life. For starters, I am in a wonderful relationship, I have a family that loves me, and I feel healthy and creative.

I have found a small amount of success within an artistic community in Los Angeles. I was always hoping to have a seat at a creative table, and now, I feel, people are really starting to notice my work.

What bothers me is my job. My current job, a temp job that has gone on for too long, is ending, and I am starting to interview for other positions. But I cringe when I go in for interviews because I truly don’t want any of the jobs I am applying for. I am not particularly good at working desk jobs. For example, I am sitting here right now, at work, writing this.

I find it difficult to give up so much of my time and hours to a company that doesn’t care for me, for a product that has no meaning to me. I come in late, I have difficulty remembering names of businesses and associates we work with, and I feel very lackadaisical about the job. It is difficult for me to get motivated for work I find no value in. But I know that I need a job to afford my life in Los Angeles.

And, as I apply for other jobs, I feel that I cannot even hide my lack of motivation anymore. At thirty-one, I’m feeling a bit too old to be an assistant, but I have no desire to climb any sort of corporate ladder. Truthfully, I keep myself at lower-level positions on purpose, always telling myself, “One day, I’ll leave this job. This way I can pursue my art.”

So I’m afraid I may have doomed myself to a lifetime of jobs where I will always have one foot out the door. Jobs I cannot commit to, but that I need in order to pay my rent.

I guess my worry is that I am not living up to my potential. I remember a letter you wrote to a lawyer who was having difficulty with her job. You suggested she get in touch with herself to figure out what it was she truly wanted with her life. I read your reply over and over again, and while I’d like to think I have found my artistic calling, as both a performer and a writer, to get to the point where I can be paid for either of those skills feels daunting and near impossible.

And so I go to job interviews and talk about how dedicated and serious I am about administrative work, all while my soul screams at me to drop everything and pursue acting and writing full-time. To give it a shot.

How do I possibly give it a shot when I have bills to pay?

How do I balance what I want with what I need?

Professionally Frustrated, Creatively Fulfilled

Dear PFCF,

Boy, have I been there! Way back in the olden times, when very few people had computers at home and no one had cell phones and, like that line from the Arcade Fire song, we used to wait around for letters to arrive, I had a job as a desktop publisher; that was the glorified term for a typist, in the olden days. And many days, instead of doing my job word processing (another fancy word for typing out the messages that everyone alive does now while they’re walking down the street), I’d sit around feeling sorry for myself. Then I would go home to my apartment in San Francisco, and I’d play guitar and sing for five hours at a time.

My roommate at the time was working for a software start-up that she was pretty sure would turn her into a multimillionaire eventually, so she’d come home and I’d be singing in my room and she’d go out for drinks with friends and she’d come home and I’d still be singing and she’d peek into my room and say, “SERIOUSLY, ARE YOU EVER GOING TO LEAVE THIS ROOM?”

She was my friend, but she also thought I was a serious loser. I had no community, no success to speak of. But I loved writing songs. It was my dream.

And like you, I was worried that if I committed to anything more strenuous than a shitty administrative job, I would lose my dream. First some executives at the bank I worked for discovered that I’d gone to what’s considered a good school, and they wanted me to join the sales force, coaxing rich people into various investments. No way. I quit. Then the technical writer I worked for wanted to promote me. No way. But I did spontaneously start drawing cartoons to illustrate concepts in her training books, and she ended up using them and asking for more.

It was a step in the right direction maybe, but it was only a day job to me. Like you, I figured no day job would ever make me happy. I didn’t want to put in the effort to climb the corporate ladder. I didn’t want to dress nicely and ride the bus to the financial district. I didn’t want to be taken seriously at something I hated.

Eventually, I started saying I wanted to work in graphic design. This was an arbitrary goal, really. I knew how to use all of the page layout software, I could draw reasonably well, so I figured, why not earn more per hour? Thankfully, my roommate caught wind of this and stopped me in my tracks. “Do you even like that stuff? Are you even good at it? Is that really what you want to do all day, lay out pages? You’re a good writer. Why don’t you try to get a job at a magazine instead?”

“Writing—whatever,” I thought. But I could see her point. Writing was something I didn’t hate. I’d taken an extension course in essay writing, and the teacher had told me to quit my job and become a writer. I knew I was good at it, but it always came easily to me, so I discounted its importance.

Eventually, though, in my usual half-assed way, I decided I’d pursue a writing career. I would make writing my day job. How impractical and insane is that? But I happened to know a few magazine editors. I got an internship out of the blue. Then I discovered Suck.com, loved it, and applied for a job there. They hired me, miraculously enough, and I started collaborating with their illustrator on cartoons. Suddenly, just by doing the stuff I’d always been good at, I had an actual career. Not a day job. A career.

To be clear, I’m the kind of person who could’ve easily stayed in those earlier administrative jobs indefinitely. I was comfortable with underperforming if it meant not having to shower regularly or look people in the eye. But now I have a career where that’s possible. I’ve been working from home since 1998. Eighteen years of skulking around at home smelling bad. I’m living the dream!

The most important thing for me was to avoid a life of punching the clock. The whole idea of being paid to warm a chair and show your face in meetings and add your “yeah, yeah” at the right times—it always chilled me to the bone. And I was terrible at it! It felt oppressive and stupid. I just wanted to be judged for my work, not for my demeanor or my ability to act like a team player. I didn’t ever want to be a team player.

I’m not bragging about that. It’s not the easiest set of preferences to have, and it made me feel like a loser and a misfit throughout my twenties. But it’s hard to pursue success in a world you secretly want to escape.

You’re good at collaborating with people, but you’re afraid of having your dream overturned by some crappy day job that morphs into a career, with real responsibilities and oppressive time commitments. You’re not wrong to fear those things.

That said, don’t project “the corporate ladder” onto every job out there. No one is going to make you become a middle manager out of the blue. If you’re working for an interesting place, you’ll be collaborating with smart, creative people, and that will be engaging and fulfilling in its own way.

When you’re doing administrative work, you rarely get looped into the interesting conversations or projects, at least not in any satisfying way. That makes it easy to take a dim view of everything around you. Your salary is low, and it seems like the only way to make more money is to say yes to something you don’t want.

If you are going to stay in admin jobs, choose your environment carefully. Make sure you’re working at a place that’s interesting, or at least honorable, run by smart people who have big ideas and energy and care about their work. You need to be around inspired, smart people.

But your letter suggests that it’s time for you to move on from your current job. Don’t give up on your dream of acting and writing. Find a job that springs from your real skill set. You need to take things you already love doing (whether it’s writing or interacting or creating) and then try to think about which jobs and work environments might encourage those things.

You don’t have to adore the entry-level version of a potential career any more than you like admin work. Nobody likes admin work. You don’t even have to be in love with the idea of reaching the top of that field. You just have to be able to look at careers in the field and say to yourself, “Yeah, I could do that without wanting to kill myself every day.” It doesn’t have to feel like a dream. Magazine writing never seemed like some source of endless glory and inspiration to me; it just seemed like a tolerable, occasionally satisfying way to pay the rent. The good thing about landing in the right career ballpark, though, is that, over the years, you can cut out the less inspiring assignments and focus on the stuff that really excites you.

You will definitely want to speak with people who do the job you’re considering. When I was working those admin jobs, I thought about going to law school because being a lawyer seemed respectable and it paid well. Then my dad told me that every lawyer he knew hated his job. So ask around. People will tell you what they love and hate and how satisfied they are. You just have to ask.

I think your day job really needs to be more than a paycheck. You can still pursue your creative dreams, PFCF! You can chase them even as you find other work. It sounds like you’re already doing that. Find a job that’s related to your dreams, if you can, or that’s related to another of your half dreams, and do that.

But don’t keep underselling yourself and doing work that makes you miserable. It’s not healthy to live that way. You have to aim higher and find something that brings you genuine satisfaction. You can’t feel like you waste forty hours a week on something arbitrary. You need to make a living, but you don’t have to do it by torturing yourself. Taking on more responsibility at something you enjoy will be much easier than engaging in tedious drudgery in the wrong field.

You have to make a commitment to your dreams. Don’t let yourself put your dreams second. Don’t let the attitudes of the people you work with, now or later, inform you on how “foolish” or “impractical” your dreams are. You have to keep your dreams safe from skeptics. You have to feed them until they grow into something that can’t be doubted anymore.

You’re already on your way. Take all of your energy and passion and put them into your dream AND your career. You have enough energy and passion for both. And someday, your dream and your career might be one and the same. But even if that never happens? Find a way to enjoy how you spend your waking hours. When you feed your soul and truly savor what you do with your time, that makes it much more likely that your big dreams will come true.

Polly