agonyaunt | Dear Prudence: Artfully Employed

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Dear Prudence: Artfully Employed

I am a very talented artist. I am internationally known in my field. I work regularly. I am respected by people in my industry. I make very little money from it. I think the reason for this is I have debilitating social anxiety and ADHD, which means I completely fail at the business end of it. I recently broke down and got a part-time desk job to bring in some cash, until, hopefully, either or both of my businesses take off and I can quit. Even though, for the most part, everyone is nice to me at the desk job, I die a little inside every time I go. I am a thirtysomething woman with a master’s degree and an international portfolio, and I spend my days scanning and answering phones. How do I keep my self-esteem in this situation?

A: This is much easier said than done, but can you work on disconnecting your self-esteem from your desk job? Artists have been working day jobs to pay the bills practically since the beginning of time! Maybe connecting with others in similar situations, or checking out memoirs and biographies about creative people who lived similar lives would be helpful? And keep in mind, lots of people who aren’t internationally known artists work jobs about which they aren’t passionate and still manage to feel good about themselves—by focusing on their families or friendships or hobbies or just the kind of people they want to be. Try to tap into some of that kind of thinking. And in the meantime, can you take some time to start to get help with your social anxiety and ADHD? If those are the only things standing between you and making an income from your art, it seems worth trying to find ways to navigate living with them so you can have the life you really want.

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1) Fuck you, lady, you're not better than me.
2) Self, that reaction is about you, not her.[I went to an Ivy. I have a pink collar career. More than one coworker has told me, "you're bright, you should go to college," to give you an idea of the jobs I have had. I struggle with self-esteem because of this.]
3) This would need a cash infusion, but I think what LW could use is to hire someone to do the business side for her. Manage appointments, payments, bookkeeping, that kind of thing. Someone wrote in and suggested an agent or gallery representation for the LW.
4) Obvs she also needs treatment, but I think this is a place where the treatment and the business building could go hand in hand.

Fuck you, lady, you're not better than me.

I was going to stay start by examining why you think the work you're doing and the people who do it aren't deserving of esteem.

Edited (to close the italic tag) 2021-09-22 20:04 (UTC)

To her or to me?

ETA I had to think a lot about this one to make it short. Because of both personal and societal factors (I wanted to have a job that benefits society; I belong to several demographics that society generally disfavors and I wanted to help change that) I feel guilty about having "wasted" my education doing jobs that don't use it. (Entertainingly my current job does use my education, though it doesn't pay like it.) Both personally and towards society, since my pink collar career could be used to reinforce the very stereotypes I wanted to help demolish.

Which leads into the second half of it. I know how people view people with jobs like mine. I have been told by not a few women in professional careers that admins are stupid, unambitious, officious, and generally worthless -- that's annoying coming from men but it hurts coming from fellow women. And yet I understand why those women want to distance themselves from admins. "If you're going to be a lawyer/doctor/professor don't learn to type," they used to tell women getting professional degrees.

It's not that the jobs I've had during my career don't deserve consideration. It's just that I experienced time and again that they don't get consideration, that people think I'm stupid because I'm doing these jobs, and that I have failed to accrue the societal power to change this.

I wonder what the LW's answer would be.

Edited 2021-09-22 21:41 (UTC)

No, to her, definitely, I was agreeing with you. If you can't help feeling less worthy or valuable for the work you do on some level, or embarrassed about it or whatever, I wouldn't be surprised, but your first comment already demonstrated much greater self-awareness about it than LW's. I've been thinking about this lately because I dropped out of college and other attempts at professional certifications due to mental health/trauma and, I now think, some undiagnosed ADHD, and I've been doing what is called unskilled labor on and off for quite a while now. I've been enjoying myself more or less in a retail store of late and thinking about my peers from high school with doctorates and masters degrees and how much I'm not 'using my potential' (or my greatest strengths, skills, and talents) to best contribute to society, and I still can't help feeling a bit guilty about that even though I sort of tried to.

Oh hey. :)

More in a bit.

ETA Yeah, I'm not sure what's more annoying, the intense feeling of having wasted my personal potential or the knowledge that I have slotted myself into places in society that I didn't want to be.

I tried to deal with this by doing admin work in "meaningful" places (a school and a hospital) but all I learned was how many people would assume I'm mindless because of the job I do.

I want to convince people that pink collar work isn't stupid, but I don't know how.

Edited 2021-09-24 15:58 (UTC)

I think it's a real problem, those assumptions, not just psychologically for people like us and the letter writer but even more for society at large and what the devaluation of all that work and all those people who do it shows! Reading things like the letter always make me angry, yet I struggle with those same assumptions too, that the work I do is worthless or shameful. Five or ten years ago my original intention was to work in childcare instead of retail, mostly because it seemed more "meaningful" to me at the time, but I found the weight of those assumptions a lot greater there, perhaps from all the more highly educated teachers around. Surprisingly, in the relatively relaxed retail environment in contrast, possibly because all the other jobs there are equally unskilled in the eyes of society, it seems the negative assumptions are mostly coming from inside my own head. I hardly ever run into it from other people now, but it's still everywhere in my head.

Nah, your #1 is definitely right. The LW is looking down on people who work the type of job she's currently working and thinks she's better than them. So, fuck her.

Okay, thanks. :)

A lot of people have had to take jobs they're overqualified for or not what they're experienced in. It only becomes a problem when your pride gets in the way. If you have to, think of the job as part of the experience of being an artist and something that will add to your art.

I also agree with

minoanmiss that if you're bad at business stuff, you should hire someone. Even if, at this point, it means funneling all or nearly all of your art income into paying them and you're living only off the dayjob, it will hopefully be worth it in the end. It's hard to say what exactly that person should look like without knowing what field you're in. (Honestly, even if you were handling the business stuff just fine on your own, I would recommend that the minute you can afford it, because every second you spend on admin is time you're not spending creating art. I have known too many people who burn themselves running the business and it fails because they didn't have time or energy leftover to make any art to sell.)

Unfortunately, hiring someone, unless you are very lucky, is also very hard if you have social anxiety, adhd, and no business experience. And even if you do hire someone, you should know enough about the job you're hiring them for to know if they're doing a competent job.

You say you have a master's degree, but did that include any significant amount of training on running your art as a business? If so, is there someone at your alma mater you can reach out to for mentorship or resources? A lot of art degrees don't include any business training, though, or not enough, which is a big failure of the system. You don't magically learn how to run a business just by being good at your art, and there's lots of neurotypical people who run aground on that too! (Ask me sometime for the story of the very talented artist friend who had been running a "business" for five years and not yet realized he needed to, a, figure out the base cost of a print run, and b, set his sales price higher than that.)

This sounds like a good time to step back from focusing on art for a bit and learn about business. You have options! Do you have any trusted friends or family who have experience with accounting, administrative work, or running a small business (any small business, of any size - even the person who sells knitting at craft fairs may have experience to share.) Would they be willing to look over your books and files and give you advice on what to change on the business end, as a favor or for a one-time mate's rate? Is there a community college or community center nearby that's offering low-priced classes on basic skills for running a business? A business incubator or community development corporation nearby? Are there relevant MOOCs, or video courses you can access via your local library? (Actually, going to your local library and asking for help finding learning resources for small business owners is a great place to start. Even just a "for dummies" book from the library is more than a lot of artists I've met are starting with.) Are there regular clients or other artists that you're friendly with who you could ask for advice, or at least war stories, about running a business in your field?

And finally - the majority of small businesses never take off, and the majority of small business owners have at least one failed business behind them. Be aware of the sunk costs fallacy, and be ready to admit it if something isn't working, and figure out how to change course.

Edited 2021-09-22 18:47 (UTC)

I should also add that after 10+ years of being one of the people who comes on to sort out the filing and show you what a spreadsheet is - afaik, once you reach a level of skill high enough that you can accuractely assess your skill, making a small art business succeed comes down to three things:

1. Connections - tough if you have social anxiety, but if you've got an international audience already, you're farther along than most people!
2. Consistency - tough if you have ADHD, but if you can deliver the product that clients are expecting, and meet a deadline, and produce art frequently enough that you stay on everyone's radar, you are far ahead of 99% of artists. And if you can't do these things, it doesn't really matter how much talent or formal education you have.
3. Accounting - a surprising number of artists are so bad at this that they end up selling their art at a loss. You don't have to have a degree, but you have to be capable of tracking income and expenses well enough to know if you're making or losing money on something. And nobody can give you a hard line of what is a good business risk and what isn't, but you should at least be aware of when something you're doing *is* a risk, and when it isn't.

I admit, the first thing I flashed on was all the shitty summer jobs I took while in grad school. I had a Master's when I worked at an Osco doing one hour photo. For all that, I lasted a year at a Big Boy my first year of grad school, when the betting pool had me leaving at three weeks. It's really amazing what you can put up with when you know it's temporary. I built my sense of self on the education I was getting and my future plans. Later, I built it on things like fandom and gaming. Along with all the practical advice, I would tell LW to adopt a utilitarian view of her non-art-related work as much as possible.

I am not sure that 'internationally known' in one's art field is necessarily the same as 'making money from it'. But anyway.

I feel like LW has absorbed the 'do what you love and you'll never work a day of your life' mentality so prevalent in our hustle-your-heart society. Most people work 'mundane' jobs to fill the pantry and pay the bills; there's no shame in it.

Yes! Yes! That!

I mean, I love my job, and it's still work.

Ok, so I feel this one a bit. I a) have a day job (heck, it's been my effing career for 25+ years) that doesn't spark lots of joy but certainly brings in enough to live on, and b) am selling my art and getting better at it, and that does spark joy. I don't get quite the same sense of superiority off the LW that others do - more a sense of the frustration at the necessity of taking time to do something you don't love in order to support the thing you do love. LW does get a little extra by linking it to self esteem, but I can see where they're coming from in that.

Also, I feel like Prudie's answer ... what. It's ok, but basic. Prudie clearly has no connection to the struggling-artist-sole-proprietor world, and it shows. There are lots of resources out there - groups of artists that support and promote each other, run Facebook private groups to gripe about things and give advice, resources for learning how to run the business side of things, people you can hire to run the business side of things, places you can turn to that specifically help with social anxiety, ADHD and running an art business while dealing with them. I mean, the thing that does make me cock my head at LW is the fact that they're an internationally known artist and haven't run into these support mechanisms themselves - they're not hard to find, and some will come looking for you (especially the ones that promise to make the business side of things better for a mere $XX - they may not be worth it, but they do contain info that point the way towards the things that will help). I feel like Prudie is basically saying, "you're not alone (but I don't know where your people actually are)."

"I feel like Prudie is basically saying, "you're not
alone (but I don't know where your people actually are).""

Prudie basically admits as much in reply to someone suggesting the LW get an agent or join a gallery.

Well, ok. But Prudie, part of being good at your job is knowing what you don't know and not being afraid to admit you don't know it, up front.

Without knowing anything about the kind of art this person does, it's hard to say - the resources available for a commercial illustrator and for someone who does monumental sculpture and for someone who does chiptunes are going to be very different, so I'm not really sure what else you could say. (Except "try furry porn on commission".)

And based on my experience on the fringes of the struggling-artist world: there are a lot of people out there who think they just need to put good art onto the internet and voila they will have a viable business, it would never even occur to them to look for industry resources or informal support groups, especially if they are socially anxious and have let that isolate them generally. Also, most of the people I know were mostly self-taught - I think some people who go to prestige art schools *without* being in communities first get debouched directly into commercial contracts without being in "struggling artist" mode first, and then when the art school connections aren't enough they don't know where else to go.

I have ADHD, various physical things going on, and artistic ambitions. When I'm in a physical state where I can work, what I look for in a day job is something that I'm a little (or a lot) overqualified for, and one where I don't have anything I have to take home with me mentally. Maybe even one where I have tasks that I don't have to think about so I can devote my brain to time with the characters and situations I want to write about. I want something easy, somewhere that the people around me are congenial or neutral, somewhere that the industry isn't doing something that makes the world worse.

Unless the co-workers for this LW are worse than her letter lets on, it sounds like the only thing preventing this job from being a solid day job is LW's feelings about it.

Several people have suggested this person hire someone to handle the business side of her art. However, if she's working a front-desk job, it's unlikely she has enough money to do that, even assuming she can find someone who understands the art market well enough to act as a business manager.

I agree, LW comes across as an elitist snob, and she needs to re-calibrate her attitude of "I'm too GOOD for this, I'm INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED!" Because she can be internationally recognized all she likes, but if people aren't willing to pay for her work, it doesn't mean a damn thing. She needs to look at her priorities. If she wants to make enough money so she can walk away and do her art, she needs to figure out what steps she needs to take to get to that point. If she wants to do her art and have people give her money, she needs to figure out those steps too. But she needs to stop this "I'm too good for this shit" attitude.

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Dear Prudence: Artfully Employed

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