Question: How does one successfully change their life's path?
FROM : Anonymous (via Ask TCI on our homepage)
Q: I’m 24 and I just quit my first ever job (as a web developer) that I’ve had for two years. How do I best use my new found time to avoid regret and depression over quitting and make the most of my time? I want to switch fields and get involved in the arts, whether it be music or publishing related… How does one successfully change their life’s path?
A: Stay positive. My experience with depression, especially after quitting my job without a plan and very little confidence in my art practice, put me in a longer-than-I’d-like-to-admit spiral of negative doubt. Hours to years can be spent on constant idles of similar questions, while waiting for nudges in any direction. A trick to keep your time productive—put a positive spin on everything, including your situation. For example, you didn’t just quit your first ever job, you opened a door for yourself. You took a risk not many are willing to do. You’re exploring possibilities. You are braving the unknown.
The more you focus on how scary this moment is—and I know it is—the less the mind can filter what needs to be done about it. It’s easy to stay in the negative, so I challenge you and your mind to see the positive. When feelings of regret and depression are too strong to see the good in them, I strongly suggest paying attention to what type of thoughts are coming in. Write them down. These are potential clues of what’s really going on, what’s keeping you stuck, and possibly how you want to be spending time—whether it be in the arts or otherwise. Utilize this moment to get to know yourself so you can start telling people what you want to be doing or making. The more specific you can be, the more likely you’ll start seeing the way towards this path you seek.
I got used to bailing out on one life and trying something else. Not bailing, but pivoting. I was comfortable with doing a significant pivot from high school, to pre-med, to sculpture, to graphic design, and then to New York. For whatever reason, I was never nervous about jumping into the unknown. I was lucky that way.
It’s not like my parents had wanderlust, but they were very encouraging. They wanted me to be happy—that’s what success meant to them. When I told them I was switching from pre-med to sculpture, I had this sense they were going to think it was great. Most parents would probably say, “What?” But my parents were like, “If that’s what’s going to make you happy, that’s awesome.”
In graduate school [at Columbia University], I had a full-time job. The morning was the only time that I could work, so I protected that time. I remember kicking some boyfriend out of bed at like five in the morning because I was like, “These are the only hours I have to work.” He was like, “You are a maniac.” I was like, “Well, I’ll be worse if I don’t work,” so I had to do it. If I don’t do it, I’m depressed. If I do do it, sometimes I’m depressed, too, but it’s much worse if I’m not diligent. It’s really installing the correct mechanism to keep me from, like, killing myself.
I created this very quiet and creative space for myself to work. I had quit my last restaurant job and was focusing on the book and was somehow able to get away with just disappearing.
When I was fired from my band, and that was my whole life, I thought that’s all there was to me. Then discovering after so many attempts at getting clean and sober—and then eventually getting clean and sober—that it wasn’t true. I had the feeling, “It’s okay to put that away for now.” I had to stop for a while because my ego was wrapped up in it. I had to put it all away and then to start to experience other things. This is going to sound so corny, but I really like knitting and things like that. You start to figure out that there’s so much more to you than you ever thought and you just have to allow it to happen, you know? After doing that, music could come back into my life in a healthy way.
Putting your whole life into something and making that the way that you make a living—as well as the way that you express yourself—can be a disaster. For a long time, I thought that was the dream. I don’t believe that anymore. I love that people support my work, but I would rather find other ways of making money.
Nic Annette Miller is a multidisciplinary artist living in Brooklyn. Her personal and commercial work, which makes use of both analog and digital production, features woodblock printmaking, installation, and art direction of photography and video. Her recent personal project, All I Can Do is What I Did, evolved into a stop-motion video, an essay and has been installed in Salt Lake City, where she studied printmaking at graphic design at Utah State University. She’s art directed for Tattly and Etsy. Here, she talks about taking stock of what you need to create, how to make use of the ideas you don’t have time to fully realize, not getting stuck on schedules, and why art is a conversation.