agonyaunt | 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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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.

Dear Prudence: Artfully Employed

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