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Your Passion Is Not Meant To Fund Your Life
At least not right away, at least for some people, and other caveats
Last year, I fully embraced several truths that caused me to grind my teeth, question God, and drive me insane initially. One thing I’ve always believed was that our hobbies, if worked on diligently as a side hustle, would be able to pay us right now, or in the near future. I would grow cranky if I stayed back at work, because I needed to be with my yarn or my laptop to work on my novel.
It stressed me out.
After reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic, I finally realize that the arts are like little entities — they get hurt when we try to place them into “boxes” they were not meant to fit in. They are not designed to become a 9–5 or make us into billionaires or save people from house fires.
I kind of was thinking this anyway years prior, but Gilbert put it into a language I understood, and it freed me up.
Art doesn’t even save anyone. At least, not in the way we think. In the book, Elizabeth Gilbert says that our arts are “intracranial jewelry making” Decoration for the mind. That is perfectly fine and it’s a beautiful thing. Painting, creating poetry, screenwriting — is all decoration for our minds. It may not save the world or is something that feeds…
