Would you quit your day job if you could?
Thoughts on the daily push and pull between striving for more and settling for what you already have.
Earlier this month, I listened to Sarah Polley (one of my favorite writers/directors) in conversation with Debbie Millman on Design Matters. I tend to listen to podcasts in 15-20 minute chunks, and after I finally finished the episode, I went back to re-listen to the first half or so to jot down this quote, Polley discussing what led to writing her memoir Run Toward The Danger:
The takeaway, of course, is that you owe it to yourself to think about these questions and try, at least, to do the things you want to do, be the person you really are deep down inside. And I dig that. I think any artist who works at a day job to make ends meet ponders these questions regularly. But I also have this quote, from the the show Severance (season 1, episode 4) pinned to the bulletin board in my studio:
The relentless rejection or utter silence that goes hand in hand with the pursuit of a creative life can be downright crushing at times. Is this latest rejection email my Simon Cowell moment (you know, the moment during American Idol when Cowell is seemingly the first person to tell an overly confident contestant that maybe they aren’t as talented as they clearly thought they were)? The self-doubt that creeps in at moments like this can be crippling.
And then a week or so ago, I was contemplating the podcast and how much I’d like to find the time to interview working parent artists for a second season and in a random web search came across this 2010 Etsy post by Summer Pierre, author of the above book, the title of which, of course, is not far off from the title of the podcast (which, as I’ve written about before, is inspired by the Judith Adler book of the same name). How I didn’t know about Pierre’s work then is beyond me, especially considering 2010 was at the beginning of my peak full-time Etsy seller years, having not quit my day job so much as having stumbled onto the accidental entrepreneur path, selling handmade wedding invitations after two years of unsuccessfully applying to teaching gigs post-MFA, new baby in tow.
So file that under don’t necessarily quit your day job, right? Finally, this week I listened to the KQED Forum episode with Alisha Fernandez Miranda, author of the new memoir My What If Year, about jobs and dreams she never pursued. Over the course of a year Miranda paused her life—work, family, etc.—to intern in things like theater production and online fitness, chronicling her experiences in this new memoir. She even has a podcast called Quit Your Day Job. Miranda basically posed the kinds of questions Polley mentions in her Design Matters interview, and had the resources and time to actually act on them. At one point during the Forum episode, a listener calls in to address the privilege required to do so, and it’s a fair point that Miranda addresses well. But let’s cut to the chase: you’d be a fool to not take advantage of resources and connections if you got ‘em in order to explore an alternate existence.
Granted, I “worked” largely as a caregiver to my then 4- and 9-year old kids (the 4yo in preschool a maximum of 16 hours a week the first year), but that’s exactly what I did, with the financial support of my partner, in 2017-19 (it was during this time that I created the podcast from scratch). I asked every interviewee at the end of our conversation if they would quit their day jobs if they could. Some said yes without hesitation. Others danced around the question a bit, I think largely because it’s hard to imagine being able to do so for more than a brief period of time (to wit, Miranda mentions having free healthcare not tied to a job as one factor that allowed her to pursue unpaid internships for a year). After my two years of, as I called it then, employment-by-choice, I felt a nagging need to get a day job of some kind, not only to make money but because my creative efforts weren’t really providing me with the kind of feedback (financial or otherwise) that I wanted and needed. What started as a part-time job (truly the ideal scenario for an artist with a day job, or as Jerry Saltz argues in his book How To Be An Artist, “your work is a life-and-death matter, so sooner or later you’ll scam your way into a job that needs you only three days a week”) eventually transitioned to full-time and with two school-aged kids on top of that, it’s challenging most weeks to carve out much studio time, let alone time to record a second season of the podcast. I was described in an email introduction recently as a “lifelong artist” and I took this as a subtle vote in confidence that I am still an artist, even if I don’t have as much time as I’d like right now to practice in the studio. In other words, day jobs will come and go, but I’m an artist for life, whether others agree with and validate that identity or not. And hell yes I’d quit my day job if I could afford to (if my manager’s reading this, don’t worry, I can’t afford to…yet).