Red Shoe Artist

A friend came over for a catch up last week and we were having our usual chat about life and its complexities. I was reading him parts of my journal and I mentioned the phrase “multi-potentialite” and how someone called me that once but I couldn’t remember who… so he picks up his phone and is tapping away while I’m talking and at first I’m thinking “RUDE!’, but he was in fact looking for a TED Talk that he said he has played to me 3 times now. I honestly do not remember it being played to me 3 times and he said it was because I wasn’t ready to hear it. So this phrase… It was coined by Emilie Wapnick (actually, I am assuming it was coined by her), and she has this remarkable TED Talk here that resonated with my journal entry almost identically as well as the journey I currently find myself on… So I must have retained some of the info when I heard it for the third time because even though I don’t recall watching or listening to the video, there it was, in my mind, making itself comfortable and living in its way until I was ready to use the information. I was blown away.

So my education through osmosis was reflected in my journal entry. It was on a day where I was feeling a little overwhelmed from starting my own business and I had this fleeting thought of chucking it all in, I had bitten off more than I can chew and maybe I should get a part-time job and go back to the life of boredom but regular pay checks. I thought, I’d like a job as a copy writer. Am I a qualified copy writer? No! Can I do the job of a copy writer? Hell Yeah!

Then this thought popped into my head about my work history. My myriad of jobs that I have had throughout my ‘career’ has actually prepared me to be able to do so many things. I am multi-faceted through my experience in so many ways. From my ‘qualified’ jobs to my unskilled jobs, they all taught me something. In fact, some of my menial jobs that required no qualifications taught me so much more than my skilled jobs – I had so much to learn from scratch. Ask me how to use one of those huge copy machines that look like a Dalek from Doctor Who… cause I got skills from just walking up to that f**ker and saying “I own you!”.

I don’t think having so many jobs over the years means I’m lazy or distracted… it just means I am interested in so many different things. I am adaptable, open and great at learning quickly because I am always learning quickly at these new jobs. This sort of information may look like the opposite of what we were taught in school by career counsellors. Back in the day when our hair was still greasy and we had pimples on our skin, we were told we had to ‘pick a lane’ for the rest of our lives. We couldn’t wash our hair or faces properly to keep up with our raging hormones, but we had to make a life choice after being penned up like cattle until we were old enough for the world. Hmm, for those that were specialists, this was the correct advice. You want to be a doctor, architect, teacher, nurse, juggler, cupcake sprinkler, YOU. WERE. SET!

BUT…. what about us “mult-potentialites”? Oh, what is a multi-potentialite you ask? It’s someone who displays aptitudes across multiple disciplines, or as I like to put it, ‘someone who can’t make up their mind, or make up their mind but want to do 37 different things, or is easily bored/terrified by the idea of one single path’. Because in the past I have started and stopped so many new things I always felt undisciplined with no skills. I didn’t pick a lane. But when I think about it, picking a lane doesn’t make sense to someone like me that doesn’t need to be somewhere by a certain time. One of the most annoying questions I got asked by my peers when I was in my early 20’s was “where do you see yourself in 5 years?”… in my brain, I hear “tonight, I’m having Pizza from Dominic’s” (OMG, I miss Dominic’s pizza!!!).

The idea of one true calling is a highly romanticised notion in our culture, so someone like me feels stressed as I tried to figure out what this great thing I was meant to be doing with my time here on earth. I was meant to make sense of my own existence. I used to search for mine until I went crazy. I need to be an academic. I need to be an author. I need to be a sandwich artist. I need to be a podcaster. I need to be a poet, painter, candle stick maker… (all true examples btw). I’d lose the spark., or something else would take it’s place. I’d look around at people who had been on a fast-track since they began working toward one job and their linearity was so foreign to me. Like, “are we even the same species?”. At a young age, I chose hairdressing. I thought it was a calling, but now as I look back, it was the most creative job I could pick from that was from my father’s approved list of jobs I was allowed to pursue. Stay tuned for the next blog post about that and how much it gave me in life. It was fun… but I was sooooo done in that career.

I went to Uni as a mature-age in my mid-late 40s and got myself an English degree. I kept getting asked “what are you going to do with that?”, and I’d reply “not have a mid-life crisis or “live my best life”. Meanwhile, I’ve worked! I’ve worked in shit jobs, good jobs and great jobs and my interest in reading classical literature became a sacred study only for my own afternoons and daydreams. I am technically a much happier person for it and I am certainly happier in my life choices than a lot of people I know – embrace your complexities and stay true to yourself, you’ll never regret being true to yourself.

Be blunt! And do it with enthusiasm. When someone asks “what do you do?” say – I work at a store, and I want to be a writer, and I want to bake cookies, and I cook myself an amazing dinner every night. I promise you, it all belongs in your answer. Read stories about how others had mundane jobs before landing their true calling, or actors doing menial jobs before making it to the big screen. As some people followed their dreams around the world, I encourage you to do the same. I never expected to have a series of oddball jobs that didn’t make much sense in succession, but it did allow me to spend my free time as I pleased, with fun creative pursuits. Now, I make cookies and I’m thinking “So, this is what I do now”. I don’t want to neglect my other dreams in this process, so it is important that I become a person who can remain true because what about my dream of writing a book of poems to be published? What about my dreams of opening a small sandwich shop? This is the real reason it’s so hard to choose a path. Picking a lane means abandoning all others.

Sometimes, grief intertwines itself in our most successful moments and it can be a little sad to be giving up my identity as a person with a lot of potential. At times, I would catch myself being stuck in someone else’s version of a dream – I want to keep experimenting with my own unfinished-always-zig-zagging life. I don’t want to ignore the what I’ve called in the past, meaningless jobs I’ve had. By erasing them, I’ll forget how exactly I got here. It would be easier from a self-promotion perspective to say “I am a cookie maker”, but that isn’t true at all. It is simply something that I am trying now. I can’t pick a lane!

I still have trouble articulating what exactly I do, especially as my job changes and I’ve changed and my situation changes – I call myself a writer but I get tripped up when I get asked what I write about. I cringe the same way I used to cringe when I would list all the different jobs on my resume thinking it was a negative instead of showing my incredible knowledge in its incredible order. Sometimes I stop my mind and catch it thinking how great it would be to find my one true passion and run down that lane. It makes me sad that, that decision would mean abandoning everything else.