The Things You Carry With You
On the difference between changing your circumstances and changing yourself, and why it is easier to see in other people's love lives than in your own career.
Towards the end of my last job in contemporary art, I was close to burnout, and I started making mistakes, mostly small, the ordinary kind. When I left and began something entirely new, with a different structure, and nothing in common with what I had come from, it happened that I made the same mistakes. Getting the day wrong on a Google Meet is a perfectly normal oversight (especially as the software changes the dates!), but I did not live it as one; to me it was evidence that I had not been good at the old job, and a forecast that I would not be good at this one either, and the tension that produced went on generating further mistakes, which confirmed the picture I was busy painting of myself.
I had changed the circumstances, but I had carried my insecurities across with me, and then I set about recreating the situation I had left. I was not starting "fresh"; some clutter from the past was trailing along. I was walking in a clean room with mud on my shoes...
What repeats is not just the events, which are quite random. It is the way you read them, the meaning you lay on top and the way you connect them into narratives that are not actually there. The new situation may not be the same at all, but you put yourself there, you see it like that, and then you do things in a way that almost makes it the same.
It is a bit like buying new clothes and styling them the old way.
We tend to recognise this more easily in other people's romantic lives. We all have a friend who seems to relive the same relationship over and over. And it is not only whom they choose, but how they behave once they are in the relationship, and as you share with them their excitement for the new romance over cocktails, as well as the sadness when things turn sour, usually over cake or savoury snacks, and wine, you see quite clearly the recurring elements and the structures that repeat themselves.
This is much harder to see at work, and I think that is because we are not fully aware of how personal and emotional our relationship with work actually is. A love affair is understood to be entirely subjective. Work feels more clean-cut and straightforward by comparison, and so we do not notice how much of our own baggage we take in with us.
If what you have read up to this point intrigued you and you are curious, you could look for your own patterns.
Can you sit down and spot the things you do repeatedly, the things you return to?
Some of them will be your peculiar traits, what sets you apart, your winning tools and superpowers, and those can stay exactly where they are. But others are ballast, and as I write mostly for contemporary art professionals who feel they are not where they would like to be, maybe there is something of value to find there.
It might feel hard at times, because we are the least reliable observers of our own repetitions, but if you go looking for them, the way people go looking for mushrooms, and it is the season after all, you might well find some.
And if you feel like discussing your findings, or knowing more about how to change your side of things, cutting yourself free of old ties along the way, book a free chat with me here.
