Vanishing acts

I recently joined the Creative Entrepreneur's Club. After some deliberation. So far it doesn’t disappoint. I went to my first online meeting of the club’s on Wednesday morning - two days ago. It was called something like “Purpose Driven Business” with Rachael Arnold. I would never have gone to something with a name like that, if it weren’t for the fact that I’d exchanged a few messages with Rachael, and thought this would be a good way for me to dip my toe in.

Rachael said that she hoped these sessions would be like a shot of adrenaline and she was on the mark there. Having started the day tired and unmotivated, her session left me buzzing and full of energy and productivity for the day ahead. Whilst I am turned off by words like business, trends, strategy when it comes to my creative career, it started to make sense to me why I might want to take notice of these things, and now I feel lucky that something CEC exists which not only makes these terms accessible but also relates them directly to creative careers, and how they might relate to you as a creative.

But really today I wanted to talk about hiding. Those days where you engineer a situation where you can hide and no one will look for you. Today is one of those days for me. In her session, Rachael mentioned exactly this. As an impressive and highly articulate and inspiring speaker, who seemed to really know herself, it was a comfort to hear her say she had days like that - those hiding days. What a relief! I haven’t previously been able to verbalise that sort of day, and felt guilty for them. But the way she presented it made me feel like it was ok to sometimes engineer a day like that. That in fact it could be necessary to taking care of ourselves. She spoke about how running a creative business and being an artist are both vulnerable to feelings of loneliness, isolation, or feeling like you exist in a bit of a void and questioning your purpose. All these things can lead to burn out and a need to recuperate.

I work full time alongside developing my creative career - indeed sometimes my creative work overlaps with my full time employment, thanks to the great management where I work, and their desire to a) nurture and make use of my skills and interests and b) recognise the healing and wellbeing properties that art brings to communities. (You can read more about my creative work with communities on my Projects page.) So perhaps I don’t experience the isolation of a creative career in the same way some others do, but I do experience overwhelm and a sense of being an outsider looking in and trying hard to fit in which is isolating in itself. I love the way that Maria Popova explores these feelings common to artists in her article A Lighthouse For Dark Times.

Maria Popova talks about times of transition and change in cultures and states, and how artists are equipped to envision solutions and building blocks towards a workable new system out of chaos caused by wars and upheavals. Not only did this help me reflect on my own role as an artist in our society, it also reflects on my own personal time of transition - where I intend to make a full time living from my creative work and can feel that pulling me whilst still committed to a full 9-5 working week at my current employment.

But going back to the need to hide now and again. Today is one of those days for me. And perhaps I can be a bit pleased with how I know myself and my needs because I could feel this coming. You see, a whole day work commitment that would have had me out of the office all day today was in fact rescheduled for next week and my first response was to, of course, remove today’s appointment from the calendar. But then I rethought. I was already tired this week, I hadn’t been sleeping particularly well, it’s January - dark, cold - and I have a strong desire to take things slow and avoid overstretching myself. I thought about the other commitments I have this week, the places I needed to be, and I felt tired just thinking about it. I left the appointment in the calendar blocked out so that anyone looking could see I was unavailable and had reason to be out of the office, and I laid my plans for a day in hiding.

The next day I said casually to my fiancée, Alex, “I’m home on Friday, working remotely”. No big deal. On the Thursday, I said to him, “I’m pretty much treating tomorrow as a day off”. He said “Nice.” “I’m not even going to set an alarm” I said. He didn’t blink an eye, he just said “I’ll be right there with you.” How good to be seen and accepted.

So here we are on Friday, and as promised we had a lie in. When we got up I sat on the sofa with a book and Alex made coffee and brought it through. I must have looked a bit tense. I was ready for my day in hiding - my day where no one would be looking for me or expect me to do anything - but I hadn’t switched off the part of my brain that was busy, problem solving, task focussed. I hadn’t articulated this to Alex, or explained what today was for me other than I was treating it as a day off, but somehow he got it. He saw me sitting there quiet but tense with my coffee, and he put his arm round me and said “everything is ok. No one is expecting anything from you.” I could have cried at that tender recognition. Then he hugged me and sung to me until my shoulders released some of that tension and my breathing slowed. And when I got up to start making breakfast, he told me “no, I’ve got this”, so I enjoyed sitting with a book and having breakfast brought to me.

I need to take a moment to express how good it is to have someone in your corner. I’ve become pretty equipped as ‘adulting’, but right when I needed it, Alex was there to look after me.

It’s serendipitous that several ways to understand and validate my need for rest and recuperation have presented themselves to me this week; Rachael’s session which showed me that a powerhouse of a woman also engineers days in hiding, and has words to express what that is and why it’s important; the article by Maria Popova that arrived in my inbox which increased my understanding of how the way I interact with the world may have similarities to the ways that artists have interacted with the world for centuries; and a fiancée who not only gets it but who actively enables my vanishing act by looking after me in tenderness on a day that I need it most.

Pausing from his own work today, Alex has just popped through to bring me a cup of herbal tea, and I fully intend to savour that over whiling away an hour or so reading and watching the the world go by out the window where I can currently see crows perched on the bare tree branches, piercing cold sunlight in a textured sky, and frost slowly receding on the rooftops.