ask a therapist

02 Mar ask a therapist

Question–How should artists not freak out when they are barely getting by with money issues and then they get huge bills for unforeseen medical or auto issues? This is very stressful to me.

Dear Fellow Traveler,

My elementary school art teacher was named Fred Bremmer.  I don’t know how he felt about teaching art to kids, or if in his non-teaching time he sculpted, wrote screen plays, painted with watercolors, or was an actor with supreme range.

I don’t know if he worried about paying bills, felt good about his art, or felt lost without creating. What I do know is that he had a big fluffy mustache, a gentle voice, and the enthusiasm to inspire my confidence as a young artist.  

Confidence that cultivated these values:

• Freedom – The joy of feverishly dipping my brushes into an array of colors and flinging it across my canvas with abandon, a splattered messy masterpiece! No worries about staying inside the lines, fulfilling some agenda, doing it “right,” by the rules. The art was mine, the product of my freedom to do as I pleased.

• Pride – That one oil pastel: trios of dog silhouettes facing different directions, nose to nose, nose to tail, tail to tail, all submerged in a rainbow of colors I titled “Whispering Dog Winds.”  My father who had left home when I was four hung that picture in his house; it was the one tiny memory I have of him appreciating something I had created.

• Presence – When I was creating, nothing else mattered. Not my absent father, not my all too busy and stressed-out mother working multiple jobs and going to school at night, not the pain from my grandmother’s death, or the concern about having enough resources for clothes and food. I was lost in splattering and sketching, drawing dogs, working my hands, making a mess, and filling up my heart.

Creating art became only a backdrop in my adult years—a little community theater, Thursday night karaoke, coffee house poetry slams, learning a few chords on the guitar in college, dabbling with the art supplies next to my students.  (I, too, was once a teacher like Mr. Bremmer.)

While I hope I inspired students to build their creative confidence, I myself became a teacher for the security of it.  I taught school for fifteen years, which paid my bills and provided me with health insurance and gave my life a predictable routine.

What I wanted was a job that lit me up—that allowed me to feel free, to take pride in my work, and most importantly, to be present, submerged in the moment, full in the heart.  Enter three years of grad school, six-figure loans, thousands of unpaid practice hours, exams, tears, and ultimately, a whole new career in the middle of my life.

Being a therapist keeps me in the present, right there alongside my clients, meeting them wherever they are.  It reinspires me to create, so art is not a backdrop, but a nightly symphony of charcoal sketches and watercolor painting while The Grateful Dead jams through my speakers.

Why create? Why be in a “risky” position to paint, act, write, make music, have your own business?  Why put yourself out there in a way that’s so vulnerable to critique and with such uncertain financial rewards? Especially when there are careers out there with promotions, 401ks, big salaries, and promises of safety and security.

But what if the idea of safety or security in any field is an illusion?  People lose jobs, money, resources, and support in ways they never saw coming.

What if you are the safety and security you count on?  Does your skill, determination, and resourcefulness come alive when you need to figure out “how to get by”?

How do you remember what you are fighting for? What is it about your creativity, your artistry that makes you stand up in the face of stress and uncertainty to say, “I see you financial responsibility, and I raise you this current solution—so long as I get to continue as an artist?”

Will I have enough to pay my taxes this year? I hope so, but that question is not there when I’m walking with my client through grief, and it is not there when I am sketching farm animals. There is no place for those questions in the science or the art. Will that question be waiting for me when I lock up my office at night or I put my blending stick down? I’m sure it will, and I will meet it the same way you will meet the questions that cause you stress—with skill, determination and resourcefulness.

As long as you still get to do what you love, as long as you get to create…

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”- Pablo Picasso

Humbly yours,

Kind Therapist