The heart wants what it wants
Sometimes turning your passion into a career can lead to resentment. If you want to follow your creative ambitions without ruining your relationship with your craft, you've got to make room for play.
I’m going to preface this entire post by making one thing very clear: I am very fortunate, and I know it.
I’m fortunate to have a good job and a supportive spouse, a combo that gives me the means and freedom to chase all of my artsy fartsy ambitions.
I’m fortunate that my web novels have been successful enough to earn me a place in the Wattpad Creators program, through which I’m literally being paid to write fiction.
And, I’m fortunate that an editor believes in my work enough to offer me an opportunity to revise and resubmit my manuscript to her publishing house.
Even though my creative career looks a bit different than I thought it would, I’m still grateful and excited about all the cool stuff I get to work on and be a part of. Heck, the very fact that I have a creative career at all is something else that makes me fortunate.
But — and here’s where I’m going to start sounding ungrateful — there’s a downside to creative careers that those who have them don’t like talking about (no one wants to be perceived as biting the hand that feeds them), and it’s something I’ve been grappling with a lot in the last month and a half since I last posted.
Here’s the dirty little secret: sometimes turning your passion into a career can make you feel resentful.
The phrase “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” drives me up the goddamn wall. While the sentiment may be true for some people, it’s far from a universal fact. It’s also kind of insidious. When we perpetuate the idea that feeling burdened by your work means you’re not truly passionate about it, we minimize the very valid experiences of people who are going through periods of feeling tired, frustrated, or dissatisfied with their craft. We fall into the trap of vilifying creative people for having anything less than a euphoric experience while chasing their dreams — of perceiving them as someone who must not truly love what they do. A real author wouldn’t turn down an excuse to write. A real artist wouldn’t dread picking up their pencil. And how dare they if they did!
That’s bullshit.
All careers, be they full-time commitments or humble side-hustles, come with responsibilities. In creative careers, that usually means having to prioritize the work that’s going to pay the bills or advance your goals over the work that makes your heart sing. You know the sacrifice is temporary, but that doesn’t make it go down any easier.
But as anyone who knows what it means to be summoned by the muse will tell you, ignoring that which inspires you most is hard. Hell, sometimes it’s literally painful. And being in a position that forces you to put your passion projects on the back burner, even if only for a little while, is what wears you down.
That, my friends, is where the resentment comes from.
There’s an important caveat to this conversation, a sort of metaphorical asterisk: resenting something isn’t the same as hating it. You can resent the umpteenth round of revisions that you’re currently slogging through or the list of overdue client commissions lurking in your inbox without hating them. Wanting to work on something else — or even nothing at all! — doesn’t mean you’ve fallen out of love with your craft.
It still feels like shit though.
From a career perspective, I have two priority responsibilities right now: the 1,500+ new words I’m committed to writing for Wattpad every week, and the revisions I’ve been asked to make on my manuscript. And this is on top of my full-time job (in which I’m just wrapping up one of my busiest times of year) and my personal life (which recently included the unexpected death of a friend and the overwhelming grief that came with it).
Don’t get me wrong: I love and am grateful for both projects. But neither of the are what I want to work on at the moment. Starborn Legacy (the book I’ve been working on for Wattpad) is a story I’ve always looked forward to telling — just not right now. And I adore my manuscript, The Many Ghosts of Magni Lamont, and I’m so excited that it might make it to bookshelves eventually. But it’s been out on submission for a year and a half, and in that time I’ve mentally and emotionally moved on.
What I really want to work on right now is The Wistfeld Project. That’s the story that inspires me most — the one that makes me want to create. It’s on my mind all of the time. It’s the one that makes my heart sing. And not having enough time to work on it has stirred up a lot of resentment.
I hate feeling like this. I hate the fact that I have to force myself to sit down and do the work that needs to be done. I hate that just thinking about the time I need to spend on my priority projects instead of my passion project irritates me.
But it’s more than just feeling bad about feeling bad, which leads me to the second, sneaky, double-asterisk of this conversation: resentment may not be the same as hatred, but it can definitely ruin a good thing if left unchecked.
I really, really, really don’t want that to happen, which is why I gave myself permission to make space for what I wanted amid what I needed. I may not have enough time to really sink into Wistfeld the way I want to, but I made enough time to be a little self-indulgent.
Creativity is kind of like a big dog: sure, it can make do with a few walks a day, but it’s much happier when it has enough room to run and play.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but this is me reminding you to leave room for play. You and your beautiful creative brain deserve it. Good luck out there!