The Artist & the dreaded Day Job
The challenges and the blessings of having a Day Job in combination with creating
I was going to start writing a new Habitual Creator post and assignment, but I changed my mind. That post and assignment will come - this post just kind of shouted louder that it wanted to get out in the world first šā£
This post is going to be a reflection on something that many an artist that Iāve met and coached - myself included since I both self-coach myself and have coaches I work with myself too - are having a complicated relationship with.
Itās the dreaded Day Job.
Yes, Iām actually gonna spell Day Job with capital D and J, because so often itās such a hot topic and big dilemma for so many of us artists.
We despise the Day Job because it robs us of our time and energy, those precious resources weād like to allocate to creating.
We bless the Day Job because it provides us with a steady income and some peace of mind when it comes to finances, something thatās not always a given if we live the life of a freelance artist.
We feel shame over the Day Job, and our Inner Critic relentlessly uses it as proof of us ānot being real artistsā, of us having āfailedā as artists - since the Inner Critic resonates that āa real artist makes their money from their art and doesnāt need a day jobā. (Which is B.S, because there are plenty of real artists who make art and earn money from other income streams too besides their art - including Day Jobs of various sorts).
We talk bad about the Day Job. We call it a Survival Job. āNot the job I want to have, but the job I need in order to surviveā. (More about that later on, because this mindset is actually not necessarily that helpful..!)
ā¦and also:
We enjoy the Day Job, because it gives us routines and colleagues and community, something that might be lacking in our oftentimes self-managed freelance lives, and because it - depending on the type of Day Job - might give us the possibility to make use of our creative gifts, talents and interests. Not everything about the Day Job is necessarily bad!
I know plenty of artists who love their Day Jobs. And yet, the struggle with the time and energy aspects is real.
Our Day Jobs come in many different forms:
Working in an office
Working as a security officer at the airport
Working in a cafƩ
Working as a bus driver
Working in a store
Teaching in a school
Teaching in a community arts school
Teaching in a university
Teaching or coaching privately
ā¦these are just some of the types of Day Jobs artists I know or Iāve coached have had, or currently have.
One of my artist friends even refers to writing grant applications for her artistic projects as a Day Job. Yes, if you wanna be a full-time artist, that money for all those artistic projects & creative work has gotta come in from somewhere, and your grant applications are not magically going to write themselves! So perhaps writing grant applications could almost be seen like a Day Job in disguise š„ø
Last year, when I did my big life change and relocated to Finland after two decades away, I decided to do a temporary return back to my old job as a music teacher and took a Day Job. Temporary, because the job I took was a maternity leave replacement, and also because I really had no idea what it would be like to return to school after more than 2 decades away.
Itās not like I havenāt had Day Jobs before. Iāve had plenty of Day Jobs, in different shapes and forms! Iāve had teaching jobs at the University of the Arts, at theater schools, at music schools, and at an elementary school. Iāve also had a Day Job as an independent voice teacher and coach, and Iāve had more freelance Day Jobs than I can count with my 10 fingers. What was different this time was that this Day Job as a music teacher was full-time. It wasnāt a part-time Day Job in combination with freelance work, and it wasnāt multiple part-time freelance Day Jobs adding up to the equivalent of a full-time Day Job. It was one full-time Day Job. The most ordinary thing in the world! Yet it was the most unusual thing for me. Mentioning to anyone that I took on a full-time Day Job seemed almost like doing the unthinkable, because everyone who knows me well knows that my soul has Wanderlust etched on it, and freedom is one of my biggest personal values. So what happened? Had I abandoned myself completely? How could I be talking about alignment and say yes to a full-time Day Job if my biggest personal value was freedom?
I had just spent six months living out of a suitcase, trying out a semi-nomadic lifestyle and doing all my coaching & teaching work online. The Day Job that I was having at that time was working in my own business: teaching and coaching entirely online. I did love many aspects of the freedom that came with that lifestyle. I enjoyed seeing my students & clients, and I loved working in my own coaching practice / business. This was what I once thought I had wanted: a business that was operating entirely online. But at the same time, I started feeling that my life was narrowed into one room - the same room in which I also was supposed to eat and relax, which made the borders between what was work and what was life very blurry. My eyes and my back also didnāt enjoy the amount of screen time and sitting - yes, I had the freedom of taking long walks in the middle of the day if I wanted, but I still spent horrendous amounts of time at the computer or on screens. And being a single person, I started feeling quite isolated in my little āonline bubbleā, wondering if that really was the best and only option for me right now. I had enjoyed my online teaching & coaching work until then - but what I hadnāt considered was that my online work had come in combination with other work which included seeing people in real lifeā¦until I decided to become semi-nomadic and move countries. Suddenly my entire professional life was taking place online, and I began questioning how much I actually enjoyed it. I was finding out that being largely location-independent when it comes to work was something I did enjoy, but being entirely full-time online with my work was actually not what I enjoyed - which is why Iām glad I did try it out š
By the time I knew I wanted to end my suitcase life, move to Finland and settle in Helsinki (at least for the time being), I began pondering whether I wanted to combine my online coaching work with a part-time job, or whether I wanted to take a sabbatical from my coaching work to fully allow myself time to settle in my ānew lifeā. I was starting to get back parts of my creative energy that had been somehow snowed under by life in the aftermath of that historical year of 2020 when the world turned upside down. My creativity had started flowing again, and I could feel an urgency to somehow ācomplete the creative healing processā that I felt I was in. I needed to āwalk the talkā and I needed to support myself so that I could continue supporting others. I felt like I wanted to be focused completely on my new life in Helsinki, and allow myself the time to settle in, instead of rushing into starting a new business in my new place of residence. So the decision was made: I was taking a sabbatical from my coaching work, and took on a Day Job as a music teacher.
So, what has it been like, having a Day Job and attempting to create despite of it? Itās been many things.
Iāve loved the possibilities itās given me to be focused on myself and my own creativity (I know it sounds really selfish, but I think being āselfishā in a healthy way is needed when youāre going through big life changes, like moving countriesā¦and I also think an artist and creative needs to be āselfishā at times in order to create, especially if youāre planning on creating in the middle of life and not just āwhen the circumstances are rightā). Because I had only one job, a Day Job with a steady salary and steady weekly hours (as opposed to multiple freelance jobs), I was able to spend all my free time on my creativity, my well-being and my social life. Last winter, I found myself pursuing certain creative passions and interests of mine again since a very long time, I started playing instruments I havenāt played in a long time, I took painting classes and theater clownery courses and started playing in the Bateria (the percussion section) of a samba school. All sorts of things I told myself āI havenāt got the time forā when I was a freelancer (because the truth is: as a freelancer, I was more or less āalways workingā).
Iāve even enjoyed certain routines that comes with having a Day Job (although I never thought Iād say this! LOL). Itās not like I never had any routines - of course you have routines also as a freelancerā¦but still, itās different. Thereās something very different between freelance routines - or from living a professional life thatās a combination of independent teaching, part-time Day Job and performing for example - and a Day Job where youāre going to the same place and seeing the same people, every week at the exact same time. It can be strangelyā¦grounding, in some way. And Iām gonna be really honest: at times, Iāve hated those routines and felt like the oddball who canāt get used to ānormal lifeā. (Iām full of contradictions, I know š).
At times, it was tough like hell. Iāve also experienced what itās like to be so tired - on all levels: physically, mentally and emotionally - that all you want to do when you come home is crash down in your couch and turn on Netflix. That feeling when all your brain cells have been spent on the Day Job and thereās nothing left for creating. This is horrible for an artist, because not only do you feel drained, you also feel bad about not creating. And not creating can feel like youāre literally dying on the inside..!! This is what makes an artist whoās tired from a Day Job different from a non-artist whoās tired from a Day Job. The non-artist doesnāt feel theyāre dying on the inside because theyāre too tired to create and have spent too many brain cells on their Day Job to be able to produce any decent creative work.
But it was also through the tough times that I realised creating can have many functions. Your creative practice doesnāt always need to lead to an end goal, like a finished product or performance. Sometimes - especially if your brain cells have been spent on the Day Job - your creative practice can become like a mindfulness practice instead. (I talked more about this experience in this podcast episode). This still doesnāt take away the artistās need to also create deeply. Not all of your creative practice can be a mindfulness practice, at least not if youāre having some tangible creative goals. So when do you do this deep creating if your brain cells are spent on your Day Job?
You can get up earlier. This has worked for so many creatives: the busy mom who wants to get her novel written, the full-time college professor who wants to start his own business, the independent music teacher who wants to release an album with their own songs. I too, joined the 5-5:30 am club and went to my creative practice right after I had my first cup of coffee. Itās been working well for me, but Iām not entirely sure I can keep up with it for the entire winter, because Finnish winter is dark and I learned last winter that I need more sleep during Finnish winter than I need during the summer. Some form of hibernation, if you may šā£
You can do some restorative thing after your Day Job, and then create for a couple of hours (or whatever time you can block off for that) in the evening with a fresher mind. Things that help me restore from the Day Job are a decent meal, or a walk in the forest or by the sea, for example. Certain types of restorative activities arenāt the best for me in combination with creating afterwards, though! On days when I do Yin Yoga with a sound bath or go to the swimming pool and relax in the sauna after work, I usually donāt get any creating done afterwards (I get too relaxed). But hey, you might be different! So yes, it is possible to create in the evening after your Day Jobā¦but it comes with a downside though: I sometimes get so much in flow that I find it hard to stop. And thatās a problem if you do have to get up to teach the next morningā¦because nobody can get away with too little sleep for very long.
You can also learn to create a little bit everywhere. I wrote some about it here. And after one of my fellow Creativity Coach training participants told us about a certain Japanese female writer, I decided I can never ever again say āI donāt have time to createā..! Yosano Akiko (7 December 1878 ā 29 May 1942) was previously unknown to me, sheās thought to have written between about 50,000 so-called tanka poems, about 500 poems in modern style, published some 75 books - including poetry but also more essays and literary critics - and translations of Japanese classical literature into modern Japanese. She also fought for womenās rights and established the Bunka Gakuin School for Girls. And this all while being a mother to 11 children (and having given birth to 13)ā¦! I canāt imagine she was only creating āwhen the circumstances were perfectā.
These are just some ideas, based on my own trial and error experiences. Iād love to hear what works especially well for you too.
Iāve also been thinking a lot about how we artists tend to talk about āSurvival Jobsā, and how using that term is actually some really negative energy around the word āJobā...! The word āsurviveā comes with so much heaviness - itās so far from āthrivingā and not even close to āenjoyingāā¦can you be enjoying what you do if (in your mind) youāre busy surviving? The more we consider the Day Job a Survival Job, the more negative the energy gets and the more we start feeling like weāre living in an unfair world where weāre forced to do something we donāt wanna do, in order to pay our bills...when all we actually would like to do is create. But if we look into the energetics of things, we can learn that this negative energy actually creates even more resistance around our situation as it is, and it actually even blocks the inflow of abundance into your life - because your entire focus is on how much you dislike the Day Job you call your āSurvival Jobā and how much youād rather be somewhere else. Calling a job a āSurvival Jobā also puts you in the role of a victim, mentally. You can change a whole lot in your current situation if you change your mindset from victim to conscious creator of your life. How about thanking your Day Job for the possibilities it brings you, instead of being focused on complaining about all the things you donāt like about it? Thatās empowering. And transformational. I know Iāve used the term āSurvival Jobā myself too in the past, but the more Iāve been contemplating the effect that term has on your energy and mindset, Iāve decided Iāll never use that term again when talking about a Day Job - any job, really!
Iām grateful for the Day Job I had for many reasons, including the many insights Iāve gotten through the good and the challenging things related to combining a Day Job with creating. They teach me very much about myself, my creativity, my energy, my vision, and so much more. As much as I value freedom, I also valued the insights and possibilities this Day Job gave me in this new start here in Finland.
Iād love to hear your thoughts on being an artist, creating, and having a Day Job! You can share your Day Job thoughts and experiences with me here in the comments or in the Subscriber Chat - or if that feels like to much work (pun intended šā£), Iām sure weāll connect in one way or the other when the time is right. ā¤ļø
Much love,
Katja