Creative "Work"
When will I take the quotation marks off?
Last week I had a lovely few pints with friends (which, as we all know from X discourse this week, is the ultimate sign of addiction and dependency) and something came up, like it always does. I found it difficult—impossible even—to explain what I was up to at work.
It used to be that I could rhyme off marketing campaigns and talk about weird and hilarious things that had happened on a company social media account that week, or about how a middle manager had pissed me off, or how I was looking for a promotion elsewhere at a different company. But now… I’m too literal. I say I’ve been typing. I say I’ve been sat in the house most days, “doing my writing”. I talk about how many articles I’ve written, but I don’t often, or ever say what I was writing, or what I’ve been researching, or what I’ve planned for my upcoming months of “sitting at my desk.”
Tom prompts me to talk about who I’ve spoken to in interviews, and what exactly I’ve been writing about. He remembers what I’ve had published recently, and he encourages me to elaborate. “But it wasn’t just a few emails was it? You were sending out book proposals.” I appreciate it, but I find it excruciating. I don’t know why.
A friend asked me about creative work, and how it differs from “regular work” and it was a super interesting conversation to have. I often feel like my brain is on fire after a good afternoon of writing, and that’s just part of the deal—I get a few hours of inspiration and focus, and then I have to lie down on the sofa and play my stupid colour matching game on my phone and watch Bones until I come back to earth again. I never felt this level of mental exhaustion at a “regular” job. I asked my friend how he felt after a day at work, his job being strenuous and mentally taxing in its own way, and he just said he was tired but not overworked. He said he found working on creative things far more exhausting. I hadn’t ever thought of my job as tiring until then. It just comes as part of the gig—I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home every day, doing something I love, making enough money to get by and occasionally do other things I love.
Sorry. It’s not luck. I’m working on this, give me a sec.
I worked hard all my life to enable myself to do this job. As a kid I wrote stories on the back of pictures I drew, as a kitchen dosser I wrote essays and song lyrics on blue roll and order pads when I should have been cleaning the walls with D2 and filling in The Cleaning Folder. Writing has always been something I can’t stop doing, but as someone who compulsively describes and romanticises everything all the time, why can’t I adequately describe my working week?
I suppose it sounds like a joke compared to the standardised expectation of a week’s work. We grow up and agree to spend 40+ hours in a workspace, wherever that is—a school, a hospital, an office, a factory, a restaurant—and that’s work. I’ve somehow decided I can circumvent that, and I work, generally, from 10.30am-3pm every weekday, unless I have overcommitted myself. What gives me the right!
Yes, I think that’s it. I’m embarrassed by my perceived laziness. Years of overwork, or the common societal belief that we should work far more than we should live our lives, or both, have implanted a sense of guilt into my psyche. I work hard, enough to burn out regularly, actually, but why do I feel the need to qualify myself with this information? Why is how hard we work more validating than the quality of the work we actually produce?
I doubt I will ever be able to accurately and confidently talk about my job without audibly adding quotation marks, but in order to ask others to take my writing seriously, I must start with taking it seriously myself.
Other Stuff
A beautiful short poem by Marsad Aurangzeb
Tiktok is full of “tryhard slang” by Rebecca Jennings for Vox
A short essay on taking a young person to see Shakespeare (maybe I have had a short attention span this week) by Sarah Moss for Granta
I absolutely hate these photos of Barry Koghan by Emerald Fennell for W Magazine, but that hatred was a strong feeling, something a lot of portrait photography in magazines doesn’t stir in me often, so I thought maybe it was worth something?
My Stuff
If you subscribe to Beer52’s boxes, please check out my stories in the latest Northern Ireland issue of Ferment. I’m really proud of both of them.
