little A artist

I’m jealous of those people who know what they want to be when they grow up. Even more so if they’ve always known. At age 6, when asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “a horse.” By the time I finished high school, I wasn’t much better prepared for the world.

I took the scenic route through college, so it took me a bit longer than most to graduate. I was 25 when I graduated with a BS in Physics, and still I had zero idea what I wanted to do with my life. I sort of fell into a job as a network administrator for a small security company. I stayed there for a couple of years and then started working for local government. Over the years, my responsibilities here have changed.

During my tenure here, I’ve had some times when I detested my job so much that it made me depressed. As part of our employee assistance program, I was able to see a career counselor. She gave me a litany of tests in order to determine what field might be proper for me.

After several weeks of tests and exercises, the results came back. According to my personality and temperament, I should be an artist. I do like to make things. I’ve always considered myself more of a “crafter” than an “artist”. I didn’t make anything that I considered “art”. I knitted a bit, sewed, and did other general “crafty” things. I believed that there was no way that I could support myself as an artist. I declared that I was entirely too addicted to eating and having a roof over my head to consider a career as an artist.

My counselor told me something that has come to be my motto. If I couldn’t be an artist as my career, I needed to create things in my spare time to feed that need or else I would forever be unhappy. It’s absolutely true. When I get super depressed, I can look back at the last few weeks and will realize that I’ve not made anything. All I have to do is pick up a project and make a little progress on it and my happiness returns. Or I can take an art class. I just have to give my brain something creative to work on.

These days, I call myself “craftmaster” of my own tiny label. I still dabble with many different mediums, expert at none, but I am beginning to see myself as an artist. I am not an “Artist”, but definitely an “artist”.

I still don’t know what I want to be “when I grow up”. But I know more about myself and what it takes to make me happy. That matters more than what I do to pay the bills.

Leave a Reply


Warning: Undefined variable $user_ID in /home/demen56/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/demented-ramblings/comments.php on line 74