A Story That Has Been Mine, But May Be Yours as Well
On how the joy and pride of working in contemporary art turn into dissatisfaction, and how we might end up planning our future when we are at our weakest. And a shift in perspective you can test this week, on the parts of your present that are already in your power.
I am writing here a short story that has been mine, but is also a lot of other people's.
Let me know if you recognise yourself in it and it is, or has been, yours too.
Almost nobody wakes up one morning and decides to change their (working) life.
What happens is a slow process, and it tends to unfold through these steps, both in professional and personal settings, but I'll focus on the first here.
You start feeling unsatisfied in your job, and it takes a while before you allow yourself to acknowledge it. Quick to dismiss it, too busy to notice it, keen on ascribing the uneasy feeling to a lot of other reasons and possible causes, quite some time lapses before you tell yourself: this is not working.
Then, once you have admitted it, it is just natural to hope it will revert on its own. “It is just a bad few months”. “It is just a very difficult artist, show, fair, artwork”.
And sometimes it does return to a previous better condition; the process surprises us with grandiose reversals, maybe just temporary, maybe, luckily, permanent; the dark clouds dissipate, and you were right to sit through the storm as you enjoy the nice weather again.
Other times there is no improvement, or the solace you thought you had wears off, and you find yourself exhausted and sad at the opening you worked so hard for, with none of the joy nor the pride you once felt. You drink and eat too much at the reception and resent everybody around you.
Even then you resist because you are doing something so aspirational. We like art, we love art. We simply want to be part of it all.
By the time you realise the situation isn't improving on its own and that some change might be needed to craft a solution, you are already tired and become scared, unsettled, and anxious when you try to envision what it might look like.
Two elements often define the first images of change we draft. The first is that we look at the past; we want what we had before it turned sour, or when we were younger, and our expectations seemed better fulfilled, or at least still had time to be met.
We want a future that inhabited the past, and it might be hard to replicate, but it is easy to wish for something you already know.
The other thing we look for is often just a way out. We are not looking for an interesting alternative, an expression of ourselves, an evolution of our desires, but a quick and effective fix for a painful situation.
At this point, just by reading it, you are probably already tired by how one thing rolled into another.
Living it takes considerably more from you, as you try to elaborate problems, remedies and outcomes alone, in the evenings and at weekends, on top of a workload that has not become any smaller in the meantime.
If I could offer you a shift at this point, an idea for a different perspective, it would be this.
You are tackling a demanding task, addressing your professional frustration and objective difficulties, and as our identity, our job, and our purpose are often all intertwined, this might easily touch even more delicate aspects of our being and become a larger “existential” problem.
And you are doing it from a state in which you are depleted and burdened.
So what would happen if you temporarily shifted your focus, bringing it closer to you, and, aware that such an important decision requires better conditions and a calmer state than you are in now, directed your efforts to making your present more comfortable?
I am almost sure you are annoyed at hearing this right now, because of course it is easier said than done.
But what if you tried? What can you change in your immediate present, in the next days, in the next weeks, that somewhat improves your being so that you craft your future from a less exhausted, less depleted position?
The present can be broken down and looked at in parts.
Some of those parts are in our power, maybe even more of them than we would think, and a life that has been made a little more bearable is a considerably better position to plan from than one that has not.
This could be a starting point, as we tend to perform better when we prepare an adequate setting for us to operate comfortably.
The reason I write this, besides having lived it, is that this is now my job: I help and support contemporary art professionals through their career development, realignment or transition, bringing with me the knowledge of the art world and its specific characteristics.
If you are curious about what working together would look like, or would simply like a quick conversation with someone who knows how it feels, there is a link below to a free chat with me.
