Fuller Wiser

I should clarify.

My last post read like a last will and testament, and to an extent it was. But not for my life. As I’ve written here before, I’ve been learning to let go of my aspirations for a career in the creative arts. Despite my best efforts over the past 17 years, I have not been able to make that which I love pay a living wage. This is not opinion, it is reality.

I have in fact been turning my attention to a new aspiration, one that in many ways is every bit as challenging and potentially rewarding as my artistic ambitions: By 2019, I hope to be a community college history professor.

In the hand-wringing screeds I’ve previously published in this space, I have frequently fretted about growing old in the administrative assistant profession, barring any sort of monetary return on my creative pursuits (an unlikely boon). The only other thing I really give a damn enough about to spend leisure time on is the discussion and research of history. I enjoy educating people about aspects of the past they may not previously have been aware of, and always have.

As much as it’s desperately needed in our society, I have no interest in teaching junior high or high school. My memories of being an adolescent history student are charged with bitterness about fellow students not allowing me to focus my attention on the subject, one of the only classes whose content actually engaged me in school. Plus the K-12 payscale is garbage, as my sister the educator can attest. Community college isn’t a whole lot better, but as far as I can tell, it is slightly more livable. And my brief stint in a junior college history class was enough to show me that crowd control needn’t be an integral part of the teaching experience.

This will require hard work. It will require a return to college, acquisition of a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree, licensing, and plenty of student teaching hours. It will require my extra money, time, and brainpower for many years.

To be able to devote these resources to the task, it is imperative that I kill my earlier dream, and kill it dead. In the past, whenever a dayjob or other extracurricular activity has made demands on my spare time, and encroached on my creatively-focused work hours, it has been cut from the schedule. I have not given other projects priority because I retained the belief that they were always secondary to the work that I believed would shape my artistic career. It is time to turn the tables. It is time for art to take second place behind education.

It’s not that I won’t continue to create. But it will be sporadic, and only as time allows. It will not be My Life’s Work. It will be something I do because I enjoy it, and perhaps that will help me to enjoy it more. Because I have a creative project due for release this year, I’m holding off on my return to school until January 2009. This year will allow me to give my last hurrah a good push out the door and allow all who might enjoy it to know it exists. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hold a small measure of hope for it to be successful enough to make my coming sacrifice unnecessary. But it is a grain of sand on the increasingly large beachhead in front of me.

I hope this explains the previous post. The last thing I need now is for someone to believe in me as a potentially professional artist. If people enjoy what I create, that’s marvelous. But I’m done tensing for the leap into greatness. I’m going to do something useful for people’s minds, and hopefully for mine. Please let me be, I just might make myself proud.