Last night I signed up for a 100 days of writing challenge with my writing group. However, the challenge began the night before a 6am work start at my day job. The irony was not lost on me. I finally committed to writing daily, something I had been telling myself I wanted to do for a long time, but the night I committed was the night I badly needed to sleep so I could be rested for work.
Part of the challenge worksheet allows for the fact that humans have stuff that will stop us writing or creating. To keep us on track there is an accountability section and also a possible obstacles page. Up there at no.1 for me as an obstacle was my new part time job.
Since I started working in retail after about eighteen months of solid working as a producer and outreach person for my film production company, I gave myself some grace and allowed a ‘settled in’ period.
During this time I promised not to be hard on myself until I developed a work/life routine. At my age I know myself well and how I operate as a forty-something woman and an easily distracted artist.
The 6am shift finished at 11am. After savoring my first meal of the day after work, I sat in my favorite inner city cafe watching people pass by, taking in the market activity, observing and letting ideas for this blog piece come to me.
Getting some writing done over a matcha latte.
In my exhaustion and starvation I noticed that when I did have all the time in the world to work on my creative tasks, I always found an excuse to put tasks off for the next day. Or that it would take weeks for me to even write a YouTube channel video script, which if I had just focused, I could have written a draft in half a day.
Despite all this up and down, working in an uncreative job is an interesting experience which I think every creative and artist should embrace, not just once, but a few times in their life. Not only does it mean you can pay your bills on time, but it also gives your brain a rest from thinking like an artist 24/7 and tricking yourself into believing that you have ‘all the time in the world’.
What I find now that I have lost thirty hours a week of my precious creative time is that I feel the urgency to create and do the tasks that need doing whenever I get a chance. I better value my time. It’s strange, as if I had forgotten the value because I got caught up in the full-time freelance lifestyle.
Don’t get it twisted, the freelance lifestyle is not everything that some people romanticize it to be. What it is not is sitting around at quaint cafes dreaming of ideas; like I did earlier today over coffee. You still need structure to your days, to-do lists and the most important of all – self discipline and direction, which helps with time management.
The positive of my retail job is that it’s not a straight nine-to-five. I would lose my mind completely if I only had a few hours a day to do the creative tasks I desire, envision, and need to undertake for Nexus to keep growing.
Now I just have a better appreciation of what is important to me, how to better use my time, how to prioritize my tasks and how to fit in what’s important, including self-care and rest.
Being an artist often means confronting the difficult reality of straying from your intended path, yet staying committed to what matters most — your creative output and storytelling. Like everything in life, this process takes time, but you learn to adapt and adjust along the way.
Written by Sarah Jayne