The Terrible Secret About Life

The Terrible Secret About Life… you live in a system and there is no such thing as freedom.

Did you ever grow up wanting to be a firefighter? Or an astronaut? What about ever reaching the ‘American Dream’? Here is the awful truth, laid out straight up.

American Dream

We live in a system. We can’t escape from it to start our own country or become autonomous in any way. We are born into it. We live in it. We die in it. Everyone we know, our children we grow, our pets, our possessions, are all part of the system. We have to work. We have to always be working to pay our constant bills. We don’t have time or a safety net to try out to do what we really want in life. We can’t afford to let one month slip by without work to try for that dream.

My story

This all started because I had a child. I love my child with all my heart and wouldn’t trade him for the world. But now since he is here, my place in society has become cemented and I have come to understand that I must accept my fate.

All my life I have had artistic endeavors.  Acting in high school and college, art in graduate school, and then sewing while in the work force.

Acting

Acting was my passion. I loved to pretend that I was someone else. To shed the skin of everything I was and knew and just play pretend for some time. It was fun and it felt important.  I was able to act because I went to school part time and worked full time at the mall. My job had all sorts of hours (9:30-5:30, 2:00-10:00) and each week was different so I could request certain hours to allow me time to act. I did mostly independent films once I started working full time and that allowed me a lot more flexibility to work around my job than a play would.

I did get picked up by an acting agent while working on a play in New York City.  The terrible thing was that, as an assistant manager, I couldn’t commit to anything.  My schedule was flexible, but once it was written up, it was set in stone.  The only ones able to cover my shift were other managers of which there were only two, so they could never fill in for me on a moment’s notice.  I could have quit my job, I suppose, but I was finally making enough money where I didn’t have to work two jobs and just couldn’t afford to work where I was making anything less. So there went that dream.

Painting

Then I started graduate school. Even though I was going part-time and still working full time, my new job was the basic 9 to 5, but each class had a much larger workload.  Especially when writing up my master’s thesis, I found that I had barely any time to myself.  I could no longer fit acting into my schedule as not much was solely filmed after 10 pm. So I started painting. I had been making visual art since high school, but now I jumped into it head first.  It was a nice way to allow myself to unwind after working nonstop from 8 am to 10 pm.

I finished graduate school and started showing my art. I sold some pieces, did some commissions. Art started to get hard for me.  Especially when I started making more woodburnings than paintings.  These were extremely detailed and each piece would take between 40 and 60 hours from start to finish. I didn’t mind working on them in the odd hours I had scattered throughout my week, but where I lived, and for the time I put in, when my pieces were sold, it was equivalent to me making $3 an hour. Wasn’t my time worth more? I started to not want to sell them. I also stopped wanting to make commissions. It wasn’t what I had wanted to create. It was someone else’s vision, and it was more stressful than working on my own pieces.

Sewing

Finally, I started sewing.  It started as something I would work on in between art pieces.  Slowly, I started sewing more often than I worked on my art.  The sewing was nice because I was making clothes for myself alone. It was a completely selfish endeavor.  I loved art, but I felt that it had become usurped by commission work, and by what galleries were looking for rather than what I wanted to make.  I wanted to sell my work, but I was straying from what was true to me.  Sewing was something that I could keep for myself and all I did was make clothes for myself to wear.

I sewed more. I stopped buying clothes at the mall. I had visions of things that I could make and had sketches of my ideas laid out.  I worked on sewing in the odd hours that I could scrounge up during the day.  I would get home from work exhausted, but work up the will to go into my art room and start working on what was important to me.  This would charge me up and I would often stay up working late into the night and going into work exhausted the next day. By this time I was married, and though I would be torn between spending time with my husband and sewing, since the clothes had no deadline, I could take my time and still feel like I was getting somewhere.

Motherhood

Then I had a child. He is the most wonderful thing in the world. I love him more than I could ever have possibly thought imaginable. But now, I have no time.  I come home from work, exhausted.  My husband and I tag team back and forth between taking care of him and doing essential house chores (making dinner, cleaning the cat box, doing laundry, etc.).  When we finally get him to bed, we have an hour or so to work on everything else we need to do.  This usually consists of filing paperwork, cleaning up, getting lunch ready for the next day, doing dishes. Everything not fun, but necessary.  And there goes my sewing. No more time for anything that feels important and soul satisfying. And if there is time for sewing, I have to choose between that or spending time cuddling with my husband on the couch, unwinding after a long day that repeats itself every single day.

Throughout it all, work felt like something I had to do, but it never quenched the thirst that I had for feeling like I actually did something worthwhile with my time.  Only the arts did that. So my work I did, begrudgingly, and my art I did with an earnestness and intensity.  It felt important. More so, though, I felt important.

My job is not my life

My job doesn’t do it for me.  I’m underpaid, cynical, tired, and extremely busy.  I can’t stop working, not even for a month.  I have too many bills every month that require my money.  Not being able to get ahead is an endless cycle. It’s not life, or at least is not living. My arts, in whatever form, made me feel like I was alive, like I was a member of society contributing whatever small part I could into the great wide world.  But now, with my growing child who I want to spend my time with, and with my unsatisfying job that sucks the hours from my days like a vampire, I am no longer producing art. I just am. Life has squashed my ambitions. Now, if I vacuum the rugs in the house, I feel like I’ve gotten something productive done for the day. It’s the terrible truth.  Work doesn’t satisfy the soul, and I’m too entrenched in the system to break out and do what I really want to do. That’s the terrible secret.  There is no freedom.