I am an Artist

I am an artist, a writer, a poet, sometimes a performer when the world condones it.

I write, because poetry is the only healthy way emotions seem to process for me.

I write, because there's a voice inside, that takes several days to come out.

I’m the person who walks away from an argument and three weeks later thinks of all the things she should have said.

Not this time,

You see Rishi I will not step away from the writers table,

I will write until my fingers bleed and when my fingers are no longer able,

I will speak.

I will not retrain; I refrain from allowing myself to succumb to a society that doesn’t view my ambition as a valid one.

I agree art can be fun, even glamourous, however I object to the use of the later one describing art as a whole. Glamourous can hardly describe all of us.

For me art has been something to fight for, explaining to a tutor why I wouldn’t quit acting over any of my other subjects when I was too ill to attend all my classes. Explaining that acting was the only class that got me on the bus each morning.

Art was taking an extra two years of college before I even interviewed for university. Because even at 18 I understood how competitive the industry would be.

Art was working, waiting tables, serving drinks even working security to have the money to support my studies through uni. Art is not easy.

It’s a sector our government claims to want to protect, and yes some financial help has been appreciated. Although a tad belated.

It’s your rhetoric that’s debated your premeditated, weighted, orchestrated, manipulated, calculated, unsubstantiated bull shit.

That you speak so smoothly, as if to you Rishi condemning an entire industry comes easily.

I don’t know what you expected when you called for us to rethink, reskill and reboot. Is it the public perception of our industry that you aim to pollute?

But this is an argument we are tired of fighting, are whole lives battling to be recognised that are dreams, visions are reality’s fall under the definition of “a real job.”

If our jobs aren’t real please feel free to stop taxing us. If I need to retrain please feel free to wipe away my uni debt for me. And if the arts aren’t real jobs, you wont miss £10.8 billion to the economy, that’s annually.

We bring in more than agriculture. Although that probably doesn’t matter as post Brexit trade deals will likely also screw them over.

So Rishi, like I said we are tired of this argument, but that doesn't mean we are ready to stop having it.

We’ve argued our value, our whole lives to a point its rehearsed and the arts flourish with a rehearsal.

We are refusing to step away from this table. We refuse to allow our industry to crumble.

We are writers, musicians, dancers, actors, entertainers, engineers, sculptors, painters, designers, animators, presenters, managers. We are creators.

We are artists.

We are the arts.

We are essential.