The Hard Road of the Creative

Creative people are inspiring to be around. I worked in corporate offices for 19 years as I dabbled in playing music and performing comedy in my free time.

The stark difference between the office cog and the creative entrepreneur never failed to surprise me, those two worlds, forever separate and foreign to each other. If it was a Venn diagram, it would look like the back end of a pair of binoculars.

Corporate workers can be driven, powerful, smart and efficient, but mostly - in my extensive experience at least - offices are nests of unambitious Steady Eddies and Unadventurous Ursulas. They are full of people hiding from themselves, squirrelling away money to one day pay off a mortgage on a 3 bedroom house in a suburb, their ultimate moonshot utopia, working into oblivion on someone else’s mouse-wheel, dreaming of being old enough to be deemed inefficient for work and set free in the secular afterlife of retirement.

Is that a dream?

Creative people are seemingly the opposite. They see life and decide to take the hard road, the road of rejection, vulnerability and financial slim pickings. They see the existential treadmill of working for other people's dreams and choose differently. They believe through creativity they can find meaning, relevance and answers.

Yet let’s not mince words, being a creative is hard.

A creative life is full of rejection, doubt, fear, rejection, effort and did I mention rejection?

I write, perform stand-up to half-empty back rooms of pubs (at least before the mutant virus came along and put an end to all that for the moment), and I performed in bands for years. I have made no inroads with any of them. None of them at all. All I faced is rejection.

Even in writing, I have the same struggles. Just today, as I write this, 3 online publications rejected an article I wrote. Three. This year I had a succession of gigs where I bombed (that's told jokes to an unamused audience, by the way). The numerous bands I was in are all consigned to the history bin, their Soundcloud and Bandcamp sites gathering digital dust.

Creativity means rejection, but still, the creative idiots and dreamers, continue. Why?

The Urge

I don’t consider myself talented, but I do consider myself creative. It’s a need, a strange drive inside that makes me do it, makes me come back for more.

Why I cannot say, but within that need, that "urge" is the hope of a better world, or at least a better way to live.

Creative people walk the road less travelled, the harder road, the road more barren, the road with no recognisable rewards, just wild dreams and aspirations, a road unmapped and without a destination.

The corporate road is straight and true, it’s linear, it’s easy, it’s full of pit stops that deliver, it’s safe, secure, it’s sensible.

It makes me wonder why anyone switches roads, but I did, I have. I left the corporate world for the creative journey a year ago. A creative needs to be in the rough, unmapped terrain and they can’t explain why, nor perhaps should they, after all, it's easy for the human brain to rationalise dreams into oblivion.

Still, along the creative road, that rough terrain, we are rejected, over and over and we endure it. It's a sort of self-flagellation that cannot be explained, but life cannot be explained, so why grasp for explanation here? Can we not just have faith in the process, be grateful for creativity, say thank you and simply get on with our day?

You'd think.

This is the hardest thing to do of all. It's difficult not to question your sanity or decisions when the money runs dry whilst your friends are raking in six-figures a year from their corporate desks.

Surely life isn't a binary choice between selling your soul for money or keeping it but living in poverty? How do we square this circle? Faith is the only answer I can give. Faith, not necessarily in divinity, but in creativity. It will show us the way, it will reveal us to ourselves. We just have to stick with it, right? Then the answer will come, right?

Seriously now, I'm asking. Do you have an answer?