Thoughts on My Year and Encouraging Words for Creative People and Their Careers
When I lost my job in July of this year, many people urged me to fight back and sue. Although the cold hard facts screamed ‘œwrongful termination,’ deep down I didn’t have it in me to make a case out of it. I would be suing in retaliation, not for justice. I was in fact happy to be freed from an intolerable job and unbearable working conditions. I often had to repeat to the insistent and litigious, ‘œI’ll miss the money, but not the job, so let’s leave it at that.’ I truly didn’t see how milking more money out of the situation with a lawsuit could deliver me justice or satisfaction.
I thought long and hard about the possibility that maybe I’m missing something, or that I’m falling victim to my nice-guy sensibilities, but really it just boiled down to the facts that I’m not greedy, nor soft — I’m just determined to succeed in complicated and opaque ways — to the outside observer and myself at times.
As I sat reading my annual review that led to my termination, the office manager, who fought hard to have me stay but had no say in the matter, offered many words of support over her trembling voice. A few times, my jaw dropped at some preposterous and insulting claims in the review. There was even a blatant stab at the fact that I have an anxiety condition, which was a known fact, but for the most part wasn’t an issue with my job performance. As incendiary as the reading material was, nothing in the review affected me more, not even the word ‘œtermination,’ than the well-meaning but loaded words of my manager that followed.
When I finished reading, I looked up with this expectation that OK, here’s where the real talking happens — now I’m actually listening. Simultaneously I was thinking about the 80+ hour weeks I pulled; the sacrifices; strained friendships; sleepless nights; health problems; that very public panic attack on the day I had to file two very important motions on my own; thinking about how I’ve never truly enjoyed a job I’ve worked at and how blank I am about what to do next. My manager then hits me with the last words I wanted to hear at the moment. ‘œJohn,’ she said with an earnest and fragile gaze, ‘œno matter what it says in that review, I believe you are a wonderfully creative person.’
My former job, like all my former jobs, required zero creativity.
That damn word, ‘œcreative,’ cut me like a knife again. That word has followed me around like a negative qualifier since I was a kid, e.g. ‘œHe’s a good kid, but he’s creative, and we just don’t know how to handle him.’ ‘œHe’s smart, but too creative for this job.’ ‘œWorks hard, but his creativity trips him up the most.’
I flashed back to high school, feeling like a troubled kid again, thinking about how one of my English teachers thought it was funny to call me Hamlet because I lived in my head a lot and made life more complicated for myself than necessary. And yet at the same, he was calling me Hamlet out of concern because he really wanted me to get my s**t together and figure out how to engage with the world like a well-adjusted human being.
For all the years and experiences leading up to the moment of getting fired, I still had not learned to engage with the world realistically or honestly. I treated my creativity as a burden, as something I had to box up and contain and only bring out when it was time to be interesting, entertaining, charming, or in many cases, bored silly from unrewarding work. It’s no wonder employers would take a look at my resume and ask, ‘œWhere is this guy headed? His resume is all over the place.’
In the months after getting fired, I still wasn’t sure where I was headed either. I knew that I needed to find work, bring in income, and keep working on my financial stability — all the things creativity seemed to keep me from doing consistently. But for all my imagining and thinking outside the box, I wasn’t doing a good job of nabbing a secure line of income. It seemed that everywhere I went looking for work, I’d get questions fishing for some indication or prediction of how dedicated to the job I will be. Potential employers were almost always impressed by my transferable skills, qualifications, and attention to detail, but the one trait I could never quite sell or feign was sincere interest in making a career out of XYZ-job-of-no-interest-to-me.
All this honesty is probably making it impossible for me to ever get hired again–but that’s my hope–for all the jobs that are wrong for me, at least.
It has been an up and down year for me in 2007, but all the downs have not been that low. In fact, I can walk away from this year with an incredibly valuable lesson about how creativity fits into my career life.
A creative person will acknowledge and abide by certain rules one day, then wake up living by another set of rules written on the fly the next day. The creative person loves to change and shape reality based on his or her whim (or discipline), but when changes in life happen to the creative person, adjustment to those changes feel impossible. When you have a freethinking, ‘œanything is possible’ mindset, the one thing you crave most is some stability in your life, or meeting your basic needs, as Maslow would say.
I’ve found that there is nothing in life that will kill my creativity. Not getting fired; not grueling job interviews; not awful, unhappy people; not writing contracts that fall through at the last minute — not even unemployment. I’m always going to write when I’m inspired; I will always experiment in doing things differently; I will always make people laugh with my odd take on life. I cannot change those things if I tried. Believe me, I’ve tried.
Somehow I keep finding myself in situations that allow me to eat, be sheltered and survive. I’m always surprised by how I manage to provide for myself, but it happens, and I’m quite thankful that over the past year and a half I became financially literate and responsible. About the only cost of being creative up to this point has been superficial: I cannot say that I have an impressive career. And so what?
I’ve gone through life with passionless pursuits in work because I cannot be unfaithful to my nature. I need to make things, stories, ideas, sketches — it’s automatic and involuntary for me. I have no choice but to keep going through life finding some way to make a living from being creative. It’s what I want most from life. It calms me down. It makes me’¦ me.
And so what I’ve learned from 2007 is that I must be unabashedly, unrelentingly, unapologetically creative in order to have a satisfying career. There are only so many times I can run from reality just to come back to the same conclusion that I will not be satisfied unless I’m using my imagination. I just won’t get far in life any other way.
There are only a few predictions I can make for the upcoming year that I know will be accurate. I know I’ll have my partner Zac by my side supporting and believing in me. I’ll have many close friends who will do the same. But most of all, I know that in 2008, I will continue talking to people for advice. I will keep making plans to find satisfying income, and should those plans fall through, I will keep making new plans until the day I can say, ‘œAt last, I’m doing what I want to do.’
Creativity will no longer be my curse in 2008. It will be what helps me adapt to change, to life’s curveballs, and to the ever-unpredictable dictates of my imagination. Truth be told, creativity was never my curse. I’ve always relied on it through good and rough times. And as long as I keep trying, I will use creativity to get me to retirement someday.
I look forward to sharing with you how it all goes in 2008. To readers new and old, I wish you a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year. See you in 2008!
What a wonderful post! I’ve also felt trapped by my creativity in the workplace. I feel like it gets zapped out of me by the often dull routines of working in the world of IT. I’m slowly coming to realize that I don’t really want to work in this field anymore, and that’s giving me energy to look at new possiblities. Thanks for the inspiration.
I just quash the creativity at work and find other outlets for it in my outside life. As much as workplaces like to think they innovate or want to “think outside the box”, once they have someone who truly does, its easy to know who the outsider will be.
John, you are brilliant! This post is very uplifting and exactly what I needed to hear. I also have an anxiety issue and have always thought the creativity-craziness link was a curse. Recently if people call me creative, I turn it into “smart” in my head because really it’s just a different kind of smart.
John: This is a wonderful and thoughtful post. Bravo!
Personally speaking, I do think it’s hard to have it all. I used to feel like a sell out because I chose money over creativity & autonomy. I tried being a small business owner in my twenties and I never could figure out how to strike a balance between creativity and making a decent living. By the way, it was hard for me to be creative when I was worrying about money all the time.
I’ve been a corporate grunt for over a decade but the money affords me the opportunity to pursue creative outlets outside of work (e.g. Queercents). Would I like to be creative full-time? You betcha, but it would be pretty difficult to make the same kind of money. And right now money is important to me.
So I’m in a career that rewards me for a certain skill set and at the end of the work day, I’m free to be creative. Not be creative to make money, but be creative for the sake of creativity.
Penelope Trunk had a great post the other day with this advice: Do not what you love; do what you are.
I’m sure you will figure out how you can be creative and earn a good living in 2008. After all, you’re creative… and you’ll come up with the perfect solution. I’m confident of that.
John, what a wonderful post, you are a brave soul. There are so many jobs that suck the creative life out of a person. Try working in a factory… I hope you find something that fits you. Hugs, D.