A few weeks ago I attended an event, the sort of event where you meet strangers and get asked the question:
“What do you do?”
Now, if you’re a human being with any sort of non-juvenile lived experience, I know I don’t have to explain to you what this question means, because you’ve been asked this question yourself many times, and virtually every one of those times, you’ve responded by either:
- stating your job title – for instance, “I’m a bartender”,
- highlighting where you work – for instance, “I work in a bar”, or
- describing what your vocation entails – for instance, “I make and serve drinks to people who are out for a good time, or need to drown their sorrows”.
I'm a teacher, I work in a school, I help to shape the minds of the future.
I'm an accountant, I work at a consulting firm, I move numbers around a spreadsheet to make sure they line up.
I'm a farmer, I work in the fields, I help to feed the nation.
I could give many more examples, but you get the idea. I find this all quite interesting, because this is just one of the many, many ways the question could be interpreted, which means your job is one of an infinite number of things the inquirer is interested to know about. The question is as broad as questions get, and yet we default to the same responses everytime, because that’s the unspoken agreement we’ve upheld for generations. Why that’s the case, I’ll save for another essay, but today, I’d like to talk about how I responded to the question at the event I mentioned.
As you can imagine, I’ve been faced with this question many times before, and I’ve almost always answered it by stating what my title is in my day job (i.e. option 1), or occasionally given a one line overview of what the job is (i.e. option 3). But that evening, at the event, something came over me, and instead of defaulting to my usual answer, I heard myself say “I’m a writer.”
I’m a writer!
That’s right. I rooted myself in my art, but it didn’t even end there, because I followed that up by saying “...and a musician.”
A writer and a musician.
It felt good to say those words out loud, and it engendered a fascinating conversation with the folks I was speaking to. I suppose it’s impossible to know for sure that the reason the ensuing conversation was fascinating was because of my answer. Maybe the conversation would’ve been just as interesting if I’d told them about my day job. Maybe the conversation would’ve been interesting regardless of my answer because the people I was speaking to were interesting in their own right. Maybe the conversation wasn’t actually interesting but I just perceived it as so, because of the answer I gave, or because I can’t bear to entertain the idea that I’m not an interesting person to have a conversation with.
Regardless, it felt good to embody that creative identity. It felt nice to introduce myself as a writer and a musician. It felt oddly liberating to ground myself in my art. But these weren’t the only things I felt. These feelings were swiftly followed by something I didn’t recognise at first. It didn’t take long to realise that while I felt good, I also felt like an imposter, a liar, and a fraud. I heard a voice in my head ask:
“Who gave you permission to call yourself a writer? Or a musician? Or an artist?”
After all, like most creative people on the planet, being a writer or musician or artist of some sort isn’t how I earn a living at the moment, so I felt like I was being disingenuous by calling myself an artist because it just might give the inquirer the wrong impression. But then I heard another voice in my head saying, even louder than the first, questioning voice:
“So what?”
So what if I don’t currently earn a living from my books and music? So what if I never do? Does that make me any less of a writer, or musician, or artist? I think not. I’ve sat with these feelings and thoughts for a while now, wondering why I felt like an imposter in calling myself an artist, when as a matter of fact, I am.
Perhaps this goes back to the unspoken agreement I alluded to earlier, the unchanging script where a person asks a question as broad as life itself, and the respondent knows to answer in a very specific way. Perhaps it’s because we’re trained by society to engage in the delicate dance of sizing people up when we meet them for the first time. And in this hyper-capitalist world we inhabit, what better way to do so than to inquire about how they earn a living, and use that as a proxy for the measure of their financial worth, so we could place them on some invisible hierarchy?
It is not lost on me that the artist simultaneously inhabits both the highest and lowest positions of this hierarchy, which, in the context of work, can be spoken of as rungs of the vocational ladder. The artist is revered as the successful maverick who refuses to be confined to the box society defines for us all and has thus been rewarded with fame and fortune. But the artist is also derided as the struggling, destitute, tortured soul who toils and suffers for their art, only to be rewarded with no more than their blood, sweat and tears. And in between the successful and struggling artist on the vocational ladder, lies everyone else; all the jobs that are more acceptable and palatable than the struggling artist, but less attainable and achievable than the successful artist.
I don’t know which rung I fit in on the conceptual vocational ladder. Or maybe I do. Maybe I have an inkling where my day job places me on the ladder, and how that position differs from where I’d be situated if I were to fully embody my identity as an artist. Regardless, I’d dare to say that the rungs on the ladder, and the ladder itself are artificial constructs we’re all better off without.
As I write this I wonder whether the dissonance I felt – and I do believe it was some sort of dissonance – was as a result of the distance between the rung that would be inhabited by the day job version of me, and the rung that would be inhabited by the creative, artistic, musical version of me, you know, if these rungs existed in the first place. Perhaps my mind was struggling to reconcile the distance between these two imaginary rungs, hence the dissonance.
So what would happen if I just let go of the idea that I don’t need to tether myself to any rung on any ladder? What would happen if I actively step into and continue to embody my creative identity, in line with the life I want to lead? What would happen if, the next time someone asks me that loaded question – what do you do? – I’d answer without thinking twice or hesitating, or being racked with guilt, or feeling like a lying, fraudulent, imposter, that I’m an artist?
P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.