It’s been a while now since I finished “that job”. Time and space have given me a little perspective on it. Despite all the stressful circumstances that led up to me resigning, I now believe that the time was not just right, but possibly overdue. Change was inevitable. Because I had changed. I now have a different set of priorities and needs and tastes and wants. When I started it I had no way of foreseeing what changes were going to happen to me, so thought that would be the job I would do forever.
Now, I think I’m no longer employable. Oh, I can do workshops on a freelance basis, I can teach a day or so at a time. Commit in the short term, be extremely professional, then go home. Go back to the studio, and think my own thoughts. Politically and philosophically I am no longer able to buy into the way our schools work. I need freedom, and I need to work where, if I am with children, I can provide freedom for them too.
I am unemployable because I am unable to sustain someone else’s thoughts and ideas. I am getting on a bit, and I no longer want to waste my thinking time. (Just like I send back food in restaurants that doesn’t live up to expectations. Waste of calories. I eat too many anyway, so I don’t want to eat rubbish ones!)
To the outsider, to the non-artist, and I think to my husband too… THIS is what looks like time-wasting. But it doesn’t work like that. THIS is the real stuff. Some days I can feel my brain fizzing. I can feel the blood rushing round in my veins. I’m not marking time until some randomly applied birthday hits and I can do what I want. I do it now. This artist won’t retire. Because it isn’t a job, it is my life, religion, philosophy. I can no longer conceive of putting myself through the “proper job” grindstone. Economic circumstances might alter so that I need to I suppose… but it would certainly be the last straw. But I hope to be thinking and making till my brain and/or my body gives up on me. I hope to go to bed one night, at 3am possibly, at the age of 93, having had a particularly brain-fizzy day, and not wake up in the morning.
Some ambition huh?
