Despite The Rain, We Are Happy (Creativity Series: Guest blog)

Facebook is an interesting animal. For a long time I only used to play games and to connect with people from my past. Then some  Facebook groups opened up to me. Some positive experiences: some less so.

One pleasurable experience came from being asked to be part of a group called Personal Bloggers Are Us (#Pbau). In this  I have come across a truly nice mixture of people. Muriel Demarcus is one of those. She has been a big fan of my work on Tale Spinning, and  it is my pleasure to introduce her, here, on Bornstoryteller’s Creativity Series.

#four in  The Creativity Series

Despite The Rain, We Are Happy: Muriel Demarcus

Creative, Me? You Must Be Joking

It’s fair to say that I am not a creative person.

By background, I am an Engineer. I used to be able drive trains and my specialty was Signalling (you know, the stuff that always fails on the railways). I have walked down the tracks while new trains were being tested (scary) and opened new metro lines in Paris . I have investigated train accidents and try to re-calculate speed profiles using complicated modeling tools to try to understand what had happened.

My family has always looked down on any creative activity. Maths and science were real subjects. Art? Creativity? Come on, be serious. I don’t know what happened to me. Maybe it is some early mid-life crisis (Let me clarify something: I am not THAT old. In my head I am still fifteen). Maybe it is because I went out of my comfort zone and moved to London (I am French born) to follow my husband. I had to drop my much loved-job and find something else (less interesting, somehow I felt that I couldn’t be too picky).

But it is obvious that I have changed. For starters, I am much happier.

To be fair, I started small. From time to time, during a rainy day in London (which, believe me, happens a lot), I started making some collages. It was fun.

This was my first one. It says “In London, despite the rain, we are happy”.

Initially, my excuse was that I needed to help my daughters for their school’s artwork.

But then, I realized that doing collages was simply making me happier. It felt weird. I just carried on…

                                                                                     And on…

And on…

I eventually understood that my boring but comfortable job was holding me back. I didn’t like it any more.

Still, I couldn’t find the strength to resign. As a new year’s resolution, I started a blog (www.mumuGB.blogspot.com). It became addictive. After a few weeks I had more than 3,000 hits a month. I couldn’t believe that my thoughts and worries could be of any interest. I was clearly wrong.

It felt good.

Putting my thoughts out in the open eventually gave me the strength to resign.  I am now living from my own business, and it is going from strength to strength. I am also writing as much as I can, with a view -who knows- to publish a book one day. But more importantly, I feel more like myself. I am finally designing my life around what matters to me. I know it is better late than never. But, after years of always doing what was expected from me, I am slowly starting to become what I want to be.

Who would have thought that this could happen? 

Why Do You Do What You Hate? (Creativity Series)

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it. ~Henry David Thoreau

A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus

I can’t imagine anything more worthwhile than doing what I most love. And they pay me for it. ~Edgar Winter

I met a woman on Halloween dressed in a witches’ costume. I complimented her outfit (no one else at the train station was wearing one) and we began to talk.

We were taking a train back to New York and she told me, in the course of our discussion, that she was very unhappy with her work and she wished that she could live a creative professional life. I had been telling her of all the things that I do to live a creative lifestyle. Yet, as much as she was agreeing that she should follow her muse, there was reluctance and, yes, fear, in all of her agreeing.

My father did a job for 26 years that he hated. It wore him down,  but…he had a family to take care of, and that was that.  This woman also was in a position that she did not like, that she said was soul killing, for well over 10 years. Even though I swore I would not do what my dad did, I got stuck in the money trap for 15 years;  due to being married and having  children  I needed to help support. But… I was unhappy every single day. That only changed when, in my mid-30′s, I quit my job and followed a burning desire.

A lot of people seem to think that the only time that they can do what they really love is when they retire. Why does that sound wrong to me? Why do we have to wait until we are older to enjoy what we do professionally? Who says we can’t enjoy what we do on a day-to-day basis right now, right here, in our own terms?

In this horrible economic time, people are more afraid than ever to leave the position that they already have. Yet, the security that many used to feel that they had in their pockets is slowly fading away. I feel that the structure of the secure position… The future of the workforce is changing, and we are not changing fast enough to meet the new demands. There are other alternatives out there: we just have to MAKE them work for us and change the paradigm of work.

I can speak about what it’s like to be a teaching artist today. If we do not alter the way that we approach our jobs, if we do not  take it to a new professional level, and if we are not treated as professionals, then we will get left behind. I love being a teaching artist. I also see that I have to change the way that I do things or have done things to survive.

Change is good, as long as we see it that way. As long as we are not afraid of it. As long as we accept the challenge of it and don’t let it overcome us. How we going to do this?

It takes a creative leap of faith.

What creative leap are you willing to take?