How to Survive being an Artist in Your 20s. No really I’m asking.

Twenty-Something Doing Oh My God For Sure So Okay!

I would like to preface and acknowledge that this is all going to sound quite akin to Kim Kardashian sobbing when she realizes she lost her diamond earring in the ocean and Khloe saying “Kim, there’s people that are dying.” I am not making excuses or justifying what is to come, I just think you should know that I also know. There’s people that are dying.

I have this subconscious ritual I conduct once a month or so when I my brain conducts an all inclusive progress report. “Age?” 23. “Place of Residency?” My childhood bedroom in my parents house. The faceless entity conducting said interview always takes a long pause here. I hate when it does that. Finally it speaks again, “Employment status?” It’s complicated. The entity knows what this means. I hate it for knowing. It proceeds to inquire about my financial status (not good), my highest level of education (still a college drop out, same as last time, so also not good), my mental health? (I kindly abstain from this one but I’m sure your pattern recognition skills can piece together my response). I know how it looks on paper. How I look on paper. Not good.

I try to explain that I am on a really good path and have really good prospects to do something amazing and unique and that I will be successful before we all know it, but the entity is wholly disinterested. I’m met with yet another hatefully long pause.

Every 6 weeks or so I find myself in the beginning stages of reapplying to college. I left for good reason, I haven’t forgotten that I am simply not built for college life, nor do I have any idea what major that would bring me closer to my final destination, being that my previous three years in political science sure aren’t worth much to me to now. I spend an afternoon doing the math of how many of my credits are transferable, it’s never nearly as many as I hoped. I go so far as to type the phone number for the office of admissions into my phone because I know I have to speak with someone who knows just about anything at all to parse out the unique nature of my situation in order to proceed. I don’t press call. I stare at my phone for a moment before turning off the screen and setting it face down. I feel my skin grow warm with discomfort. I pick up the phone again. Dial the number again. Stare. Set it down. I don’t want to go back to college, I have no idea how it would help me other than to give me a year of knowing what comes next. It’s an escape. A very expensive escape. Before you say it, I will finish my degree, I know the value it holds both in the “real world” and developmentally, but trust me, this is not the time. I left school 10 months ago now to take care of my health. I moved back home with my parents to recover and explore some creative avenues I always dreamt my future would hold, but it’s been 10 months, and I am not sure if anything has changed. I’ve written previously about the importance this last year has held for my health, it took me months to recover from the effects of my college lifestyle. Don’t get too excited, I wasn’t so much the party animal as a perfectionist with an apt for sleeplessness. I don’t discount the necessity of this last year, but I felt like all that slow moving restful gentle recovery work was truly done three months ago. I did it. I rested and recovered. I gave it the time it needed, and I don’t regret that, but now I feel petrified that I haven’t moved mountains since. I know everyone says your twenties are this nightmarish time of trying to figure everything out. It’s a deeply selfish time, a deeply anxious time. I also know that I have time, that’s the other thing everyone says. “Slow down, you have so much more time than you realize.” I hear both of these things, and I can accept them as they are, but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I know probably everyone of every age feels to some extent like they just aren’t quite there yet, wherever there is, and this anxiety of trying to keep up with time while staying present is assuredly universal, but that doesn’t make me feel better either. I take stock of myself in my monthly progress report performed at the mercy of my subconscious. I am 23. I live in my parents house. I don’t have a real job, not that social media isn’t a real job, but if we’re looking at a job from an income perspective, I am a very part time hire at best. I don’t have a degree. I have less money in my bank account than I did as a full time student. It’s pretty impossible to look in the mirror and be proud of where I am.

I guess it’s hard to see progress when I don’t quite know at all really where I am going. It’s not that I am aimless, by any means, but it’s all so fuzzy. I want to create, to tell stories, to cultivate the nonsense in my head until it’s fully realized for an audience, but how do I even begin? I want to be a writer, I think first and foremost, but I want to be an artist, sculpt and paint and build and play, and I want to do stand up, but maybe I want to be a photographer, or a film director, or an audiobook narrator, or an actor, or a choreographer. I want to do it all, and I know what you’re thinking because it’s yet another thing everyone says, “life is long, you can do it all. You have time. Don’t feel like you need to put yourself in a box etc etc etc.” I’m not saying I need to pick one, that kind of forethought is far beyond my means. I’m sure life is long and I can do it all and I won’t put myself in a box, but it sure is difficult to carve twenty paths at once. If my career is like a big board game and I move a piece forward for every cool thing I do in my field of interest, instead of having one piece that moves 20 spaces forward a month, I have 20 pieces moving forward one space. I know it’s not a race. I know I have time. I just want to feel like I am actually doing something, like I am actually going anywhere. I went to one of those colleges that sucks everybody in and shoots out engineers or computer scientists or chemists. You come in knowing where you’ll end up, and in 4 years, boom, you’re there, working your way up your field, just like you knew you would. I have been so engulfed by people with laser focused direction, their course perfectly plotted so long ago, it has made me feel twice as aimless.

“If it’s what you want, you find a way to make it happen. Do what it takes.” That’s another one of those things people say. People say a lot of stuff. Rarely does it make me feel all that much better. It’s easy to say “do what it takes,” or to perhaps actually do what it takes when you in fact actually know what “it” might be and subsequently what said “it” also happens to take. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing even a little bit, I am just desperately hoping I am at the very least not moving backwards as I continue to do things in hopes they might be what whatever “it” takes. People say a lot of stuff, certainly. It doesn’t make me feel better, but I appreciate their words nonetheless. Maybe it makes me feel less worse. Less worse seems like a good direction.

I made this commitment to myself to follow my gut when I moved home to focus on simply doing creative things for a year. Prioritizing creation and passion over money, over a furthered formal education, over my anxiety about said prioritizes. I’ve read all these memoirs and stories about how every creative pays their dues, they do their time, but it’s hard to see what they did in any comparison to myself. I feel like there’s a right way to be a starving artist, well, maybe not a right way, but my way feels wrong. I have this internal argument that I need to get a job, at least for now, build up some funds so I can have a space to work in, but it feels impossible to do anything different than what I am passionate about now, it feels like a betrayal to this commitment, to my blind trust in myself, to that which makes me happiest. At least for a year. I feel so certain I am supposed to be doing what I am doing, but in the way where you wake up from a really vivid dream and you feel like you could make an Oscar winning movie from it, but as you try to recall it, things go blurry. Right behind your eyes everything slips a little more out of focus. All that you’re left with are those unbelievably strong emotions a story you no longer remember has managed to imprinted on you. I know how I feel about where I am going, but the “where” I know much less about.

Sometimes I feel like a mama bird mistook me for her own little tiny birdbaby, which is weird because I don’t have a beak or feathers and I am 6 feet tall and not a bird, but mama birds are likely very tired and perhaps find themselves flying with one eye open after sleepless nights tending to the newborns and thusly end up with some not quite birds in their bird nest. Either way, I ended up in this nest at the top of a very large tree, and one moment I am being fed chewed up worms, and the next I am convinced I too can fly the coop like my little tiny birdy siblings, so when the time comes to jump, I jump. Unfortunately, no matter the amount of worms I am beak fed, I am, after all a person, not a birdbaby. I do not fly, and never can or will on the foundation of my own anatomical downfalls, but nonetheless I realize this notion of flightlessness one second too late as I am jumping into the air. As I fall, I reach out for a branch to save me. Any branch, as I am not in a position to be too picky with my branch preferences as I fall to my demise. I grab on to one and it holds, thank God. Close call. I begin to climb my way up again. Or down. Actually, I’m climbing in a,, the ? direction of progress, but this metaphor really only holds up so well. On second thought, I think the uncertainty adds to it. I am such a good writer and this was all intentional and on purpose. As I’m, let’s say climbing back up, because my career is in that nest or something, (okay now I admit that’s a reach.) as I am climbing, I grab hold of branch after branch, but they keep breaking. I find one that feels sturdy, slowly shifting my weight onto it and snap. I’m falling once more. I flail my unfortunately human arms out to grasp another branch and begin climbing again, but of course, as soon as I find a solid branch I am certain will hold my not so tiny not so birdy body it snaps again. It feels like I am going a direction and constantly moving and falling and climbing and trying a new branch then moving and falling and climbing and trying a new branch and I have no idea if I have even moved up the tree at all, maybe I am in a really dense forest so it’s especially hard to tell what’s going on so there’s a chance I actually climbed quite far up in between my tumbles and I am almost to the nest but just don’t know it yet, and this metaphor ran its course so long ago. I’ll let it be. Point is: I am certain I am not a bird but that is quite possibly the absolute only thing I am so confidently certain about.

I know all the things people say. You have time. You’re young, this is what being young feels like. It’s all part of the journey. You. Have. Time. I say them to myself every day. Perhaps they’re all true. Even then the clarity that brings me will only allow for new uncertainty to take its place. I worry that everyone is absolving my choices far too easily. Why are we all so supportive of me doing seemingly nothing? I receive so much positive feedback and encouragement from friends, family, the internet, etc. and it’s lovely, don’t get me wrong, I know that is very much not the case for everyone, but I am just not certain I deserve this pass I’ve been given to just skip all the stuff everyone else must do so that I may instead try to do… something. Being a creative in your twenties is terrible. It is an outrageous privilege to complain about, which is kind of nice because it does give me more ammunition to wallow about, and the writer in me really appreciates that. There’s people that are dying. Why do I get to play arts and crafts and story time and have everyone be so on board with that while there’s people that are dying? This is by far the most egregiously self involved pitiful thing one could really experience, but I feel a little okay with that, because that’s what your twenties are for. Or so I’ve been told. We are all so consumed in our own aimless wandering we excuse the aimlessness of those around us, perhaps. I don’t know. I really don’t know anything at all. I just hope I am moving in the right direction. That being said, I have faith there is still time yet, if I come to discover I’ve been running the wrong way. There is time. There has to be. Everyone before me must have had it, had time. There has to be time for me, as well. You have it, too. You have time.

*If I am being fully transparent I have no idea how to spell the plural of twenty. I want there to be a “y” and also a hyphen but there may be neither and I am mostly sure it’s an “ies” but spell check often fails me where hyphens are involved. If I have made the wrong choices in this regard throughout my writing that is between me and my demons that keep me up at night. *