At the end of last year, my husband and I decided it was now or never. It was time to rethink and retool our lives to support both of our creative dreams and re-investing in ourselves.
Because I love a good slogan, I decided to create one for us to serve as a “true north” to guide us forward. I wanted this to serve as a central theme to summarize all our efforts ranging from financial, personal work, day-job work, creative side hustle work and perhaps most importantly, our attitudes around it all.
I’m calling this year our “Journey to Creative Freedom”.
I’ve mulled over sharing this publicly because… I’m scared. I’m scared of the uncertainty of 2021. I’m scared that I won’t be able to execute the vision I have to rebuild a creative life on my own terms. I’m scared I’ll look like a failure. But, here I stand. Planting a flag in the ground that says “I’m going to do life a little differently, let’s see what happens.”
This isn’t a gimmick or a 4-hour work week endeavor. We aren’t moving to Thailand and becoming network marketers or Instagram influencers. We are just two people – two artists – that are committed to building a financially sustainable, healthy, creative life on our own terms. We simply want more financial and creative freedom and this year is about us figuring that out, one step at a time. No fancy “hacks”, it’s just going to be us trying to make choices that will hopefully get us closer to our own personal freedom.
So how did we get to this “now or never” place?
2020 was a hard year for everyone, to varying degrees and for different reasons. But for me and my husband it was a rollercoaster ride in all the strangest ways. We had spent all of our early and mid-20s in the “creative gig economy” in Los Angeles – I had been a gigging professional harpist, actor and had other part-time work as a steady, stable supplement. My husband, a triple hyphenated actor-writer-comedian, is also highly skilled in sales and has worked in various sales positions for nearly all of his adult life. In 2018, we moved to NYC and both began to shift to earn more in our regular 9-6 work and stopped relying on “gigging” to supplement our income. This decision had both positive and negative side effects. I was finally able to stop doing classical music gigs and taking work only for financial reasons. I began to perform my own music more and did my first few hybrid speaking/performing events around the topic of mental health. My husband was able to invest in his own continuing education as a writer and continue doing stand-up without the financial constraints we had before.
At the start of 2020, I had a promotion at my own 9-6 sales job, a fair idea of what I wanted to do with my next album and I was starting to go to Toastmasters regularly to practice my speaking skills. My husband had been selected as a finalist for a huge comedy showcase, constantly was out doing stand-up, even while he also held his day-job as a sales manager.
Well… then we all know what happened next.
I had taken off a day of work to go to my husband’s show in Philadelphia. Things were already shutting down and the fear was spreading, but like most people, we didn’t fully understand what was happening. Bryan held the last show allowed in the venue on a Thursday night.
By the time we got back to NYC, both of our offices had called it and announced a temporary work-from-home situation. Then, the gyms closed. I announced to Bryan that for the sake of my anxiety and our own safety, we needed to leave the city like, yesterday. We packed up most of our things and drove straight to my family in Florida for what we thought would be 2-3 weeks… we stayed there for 4 months.
During those four months:
I watched my friends get laid off… and wondered when it would be me.
I stayed employed but got a pay cut.
My husband got a pay cut.
We realized this was more going to be more than a temporary situation.
We had more than one conversation about why we had chased “security” those few years, sometimes at the expense of our own dreams.
By the Fall of 2020, my husband and I were able to profoundly turn the year around. His day job slowly rebounded. Instead of waiting for the inevitable layoffs from the plummeting industry I had worked in, I went out and found a job more suited to my skill set and interests.
We surveyed the landscape and had some long discussions about how to make the best of a terrible situation. My husband recommitted and rediscovered his love for screenwriting, became a finalist in a prestigious competition and wrote a new pilot. While the music performance industry tanked around me, I briefly reconsidered if I even wanted to perform again. I was depressed. To this date, this is the longest I’ve ever gone without performing in my life. Despite my own depression, I wrote the bulk of my next album. I kept going to Toastmasters, albeit virtually. I soldiered on.
While I recognize these are all tremendous blessings after many ups and downs – and it may look like we left the year relatively unscathed – we left 2020 changed forever.
Didn’t we all?
Regardless of how much I like or enjoy my 9-6 job, I’m no longer comfortable just “clocking in” and grinding it out. I’m not comfortable quietly putting creative dreams to bed before they’ve had a chance to breathe in the world. I know that I owe it to myself to pursue my musical passions and other artistic goals with the resources I have now.
While this type of pandemic might be a once-a-100-year thing, uncertainty, financial crisis and civil unrest are all regular, steady parts of being human. We all just like to pretend they are few and far between. It’s just not reality.
The only normal is uncertainty. So, if everything is a mess anyway, why are we so ready to give up and choose this faux certainty of security and safety?
While the “Journey to Creative Freedom” may be our new personal beacon of hope, it has practical implications for us moving forward.
This new philosophy is the way my husband and I are finding a middle ground between being completely at the mercy of the artistic gig economy – like we were in our 20s – and now, being completed swamped with 9-6 work. This journey is about us finding a sustainable way to live, work and create on our own terms.
The type of creative lifestyle freedom we are seeking to build requires the following supporting principles:
1. Financial freedom and sustainability
2. The ability to make art out of choice rather than obligation
3. Cultivating a healthy mind & body
4. A schedule conducive to creative work
5. Creating and investing in our own projects.
6. Earning a set amount of sustainable income through creative work.
Before I go over each of these pillars in the coming weeks and share how we are personally working on this, I need to make the following disclaimer: We are making this up as we go along. I have no idea what will happen with this year. I can’t promise we are going to do this perfectly. I might add or delete a principle. I don’t know what the results will be. We may succeed. We may not. We reserve the right to change our minds and/or our goals. Only time will tell what happens.
The only promise I can make for certain is that I’m committed to the long game of a creative life. I’m committed to the overall vision of a thriving, healthy, creative, joyful life – if it takes a year, five years or ten years.
Will you join us for the ride?
-Katherine & Bryan