Tag: writing life

A letter to all my creative friends

What is your art worth, my dear friend? I write this as someone who has been writing for 25 years, whose writing is infused with the type of experience I would not wish on anyone. I write this as someone who wakes at 4am to write with a broken French Press and discount Lebanese coffee, as someone who spends her evenings creating digital art with pharmacy glasses as I cannot afford prescription lenses.

So, you tell me that your jewellery is not worth the price tag, though I know you have spent years training and hours making the piece which you undersell. I have seen the callouses on your fingers and the chisel slices taken from your hands.

You tell me your art is not worth the price, and I tell you the problem is not your jewellery, nor the price-tag.

The problem is that you do not yet know your worth.

Because there must be something beyond the daily labour that reduces us to automatons. A rationale for placing one foot beyond the other. There are those who say they are not creative, but even they enjoy a unique bangle bought, a song on the car radio played in peak hour traffic, a series on Netflix, a spring garden that they tend.

Art makes life bearable, my dear friend. It gives us a reason to keep going, and you might say well that this the role of children, or a partner, or a pet. But love itself is an artform, a creative practice infused with intuition and hard work.

Art gives us a reason to breathe, dear friend.

Please know your worth.

Steal time. A letter to my fellow creatives

To my fellow artists, writers, and creatives, I implore you:

that this is what we must do, so as not to die while our hearts are still pulsing and our breath still escapes our mouths in laboured gasps disguised as whispers,

this is what we must do:

steal time.

Yes, this is a particular type of thievery, but in this world, what other choice do we have?

Steal time from whomever demands your lifeforce at minimum wage, from whomever leaves you feeling more machine than organism, from whomever leaves you trudging rather than dancing.

Steal time because the moment we are born into adulthood, time is stolen from us,

and you can always earn money, shag someone on Tinder, binge-watch that Netflix series. There will always be more groceries to bag, or data to input or reports to write.

Time is the most precious natural commodity there is and if they could, they’d float in on the stock exchange like water, or power or other things that should never be

monetised.

I implore you, this is not merely a moral imperative, it is an act of resistance, to…

steal time from your employer, who won’t give you sick pay, won’t give you time off with a dying loved one, who won’t pay you what you’re worth

because it offends their sensibilities, their new religion, their worship of the bottom line.

And this is how you steal time, call it what you like, quiet quitting or just retrieving your humanity from a machine that assigns you a number that’s not a unique datapoint:

write stories in your lunchbreak, compose symphonies in endless meetings, imagine landscapes during the back-to-back shifts you’ve been asked to work,

write on the backs of report templates, on the backs of invoices, on the front of student exam papers, reclaim what it is that makes you human,

resist because the world needs your light,

 more than it needs company men and women, marketing gurus and hedge-fund managers, more than it needs people who only see living beings

as resources to exploit.