What about your multiple selves?
Multiple selves: that would be nice. If there were three of me, there’d be seventy-two hours in each day, probably. Eight hours of it would go on earning a living, twenty-four hours of it would go on sleep, and the rest would go on making things and reading.
The question was about earning a living. I think Kat’s point is spot on, so I quote it:
Regardless of whether we’re talking about an overtly “creative” pursuit, it seems to me that putting pressure on your dream life to earn you money can somehow rob it of all its joy. This can become crippling and get in the way of the actual doing i.e. the refining of your craft, the prioritising of your actual goal.
I am incredibly lucky to be in the job I’m in at the moment, working for a not-for-profit organisation whose aims and ideals are broadly in line with my own – and, moreover, comparatively well-paid when you look at the job description. (Which, we note, is not the norm in the not-for-profit sector.) I have a lot of freedom to direct my own work and I have a good sense of its being generally worthwhile.
And yet sometimes I find myself resenting my day job for the proportion of my mind it occupies, for the way it takes up the morning, when my brain is at its best. I miss being a mile away from my office, rather than fifty-five. And knowing I need it in order to be able to pay my half of the rent, the sense of dependency, is frustrating.
I remind myself that this would happen wherever I worked, whatever I did. Even if I worked for myself. Particularly if I worked for myself.
I don’t want to make my bead stuff into a job. The pressure of knowing I have to make so many by this particular time… No, thank you. I don’t really want to make it into a business. Too much hassle. I do want it to pay for itself. Annoyingly, this will mean going through the motions of some form of business, but I’m not quite at the stage of thinking this through yet.
I am getting used to the idea that people might pay me for writing. Art is worth paying for, mine included. Yes. But I really don’t want to become dependent on any money I might make from it. I don’t want to be forced into writing to order.
So. I like my job. And it brings in enough to live on, and it doesn’t drain my brain completely. What I would like to do, when the workload picks up again after the summer, is to look into working a compressed arrangement, where I do ten days’ worth of hours in nine, and have a day off every two weeks. And by ‘day off’ I mean ‘a day to do everything else’.
Does this give me time to be everyone I want to be? Probably not. But I don’t want to be all of them at once. The day’s too short, and life is long enough.
Kathleen Jowitt 