Something I should have realized a long time ago

I’m going to make a bold statement that is going to anger a lot of people. If you are an artist, and you want to be a great one, you cannot do anything else. You can’t have another job. You can’t work Monday-Friday during the day and then expect to create something at night when you are exhausted and thinking about how early you have to get up for work the next day. You can’t focus your energies on something else for a significant chunk of your week and then still give everything that you have to give to a play or painting or song. You can’t do it. You can’t. Because human beings can’t function at 100% all of the time. So if you are devoting your time and brain function to a job that is just a job, it is taking away from your art. It is making it impossible for you to create because all you will be giving your art is what is left over.

The problem we create for ourselves is that we need money, and art does not always, does not usually, does not ever sustain us financially despite sustaining us emotionally and aesthetically and physically and spiritually and psychologically. So we are caught in this horrific pattern of needing to make money that does not sustain us in any way that matters but not having the time to balance the two. I can work a full-time job, and I can make enough money to live comfortably, but I can never be what I should be as I should be it if I do that. The other problem I encounter is that unless you are an artist or of a similar mindset, you don’t understand that. You don’t support it. You think I am lazy and a fool. How dare I spend my days laying on the balcony writing and my nights at rehearsal when neither pays me enough to make rent? How dare I not conform to the American dream of a husband and babies and a white picket fence working 40-50 hours a week to pay for it all and never feeling fulfilled and wasting my talent trapped in a cubicle? How can I not be satisfied to merely make a good wage and accrue vacation time with nice albeit slightly boring people and count the days and the hours until I can retire? Can’t I be an artist on the weekends?

It’s not that I don’t want to do any of those things (except the husband and babies part). It’s that I can’t. I cannot live any other way. I need to be in the theatre, and if that doesn’t pay me for the next 20 years or not at all, so be it. It is what I need to do and how I need to live. Because I need to live and not exist. I wasted 9 years of my life trying to conform to society’s expectations, and I can’t do it anymore. I was a miserable shell of the person I am and the person I should be. It’s time to jump. It’s time for life to begin. It’s time to be me.