Rediscovery
Being unemployed isn’t easy.
When I was let go from my previous job, I had a dream of what would happen when I was finally free of daily restraints. My productivity would soar, my apartment would be immaculate, I would cook every day and my creativity would be unmatched. That dream is absolute crap.
Granted, I’m not fully out of work. I’m freelancing, as a photographer and retoucher, as best I can, but I spend most of my days puttering around. Waiting to see if I’ll get any potential client emails in, watching my resumés get tossed aside from lack of experience and mindlessly processing images. That productivity I had high hopes for dissipated within the first week as jobs slipped between my fingers due mainly to clients unwillingness to pay for quality work.
The creative flow of ideas I wished for feels as though it’s nearing an expiration date. I lost my strong attraction to photography as an art form when I took on a mostly-full-time job at a software company. My imagery went from personal and project-based to cookie cutter and company-compliant. Not everything I experienced was negative, it did open a lot of doors for me. I was able to experience a world behind the scenes and meet amazing contributors to the photography world. But it also created a large separation between who I wanted to be and who I was becoming. Art sunk from a top priority to an item lingering on the edge of recognition.
The fantasy I felt would come true, the resurgence of my photographic innovation, is more of a fairy tale than a reality these days. What we never learn, through the years of schooling they promise is worth the $150,000 price tag, is how to survive. How to keep breathing under all the pressure. How to ward off the looming hopelessness that sets in. How to rediscover the fervor we once possessed before life clamped its unavoidable jaws.
During my unemployment I’m realizing, above all else, that the process of reawakening is slow. Wouldn’t it be marvelous to wake up one morning, feeling refreshed, and kick off that last project you swore you’d finish?
Life doesn’t work that way. The movies we all watch, where the protagonist falls, rises from the ashes of her defeat and dusts herself off, are riddled with lies. Theme music and smart cuts fill the moments that truly matter, the moments we never get to witness on screen; the struggle in-between the decline and resurrection.
As I fight through that struggle, desperately trying to find a passion that’s sunk to the bottom of the wastebasket, I’m beginning to witness small victories that will eventually lead to a larger picture. One I don’t get to see yet, but one I have to trust will eventually reveal itself. Maybe I won’t wake up in ten years with a successful photography studio, like my 18-year-old self dreamed about. I’m reminded of everyday, however, that I have potential. Not in one thing, in one practice or in one niche. I have a meandering list of prospective lives I could live, filled with the new and the old. My job is to keep trying.
Rediscovery is a process, not a single moment in time. If it were, we would all lose the experience that makes us valuable artists. And I refuse to lose that.
-liz