Change is happening within me. During the past two months, I have had many experiences that I can only refer to as divine timing: many more than I have had for the entire calendar year. I have met new friends, had timely conversations, and received pushes from others to live into my passions in the ways I needed to hear. These conversations have been affirming, but another feeling haunts me.
When I go out into the world and talk to my community, it is apparent how much I am valued and respected in music, the arts, community issues, and other things. I am applauded for being open, for being raw with my emotions- to speak plainly instead of making my speech overcomplicated and muddled with bullshit. My openness is not a performance- it is a means to simplify the chaos of my life into a dissolvable, consumable package- mainly for myself. I can't freeze up or overthink if I speak and act from a place of honesty. I can live on: I can live without wondering if my social performance matches up from interaction to interaction.
I'm not quite sure how to form this in an essay, a form of lines that make sense, but I have been working my absolute ass off to get the opportunity to be able to be a full-time cultural worker. I've been pouring a shit-ton of time into writing project narratives- on top of actually stewarding the projects with integrity. There's also my individual art practice, my friends and family and their needs, the needs of my home, the needs of my community, the dreams I have for my future, my debt, my income, the looming weight of working a conventional job and not being a burden, making music, helping other people make music, social events, taking care of my bodily needs (these suffer the most and the most often) all while continuing to find a path back to my spirit and what it's supposed to be doing here. Let alone the tending to my needs- a complex set of conditions constantly shifting and scrambling themselves.
I can best describe my landscape as a cultural worker as something mirroring the expansiveness of the universe. There are planets, stars, microbes, comets, and molecules, some very close together and some are very far apart. But everything is connected through a large enough perspective. Being open as a cultural worker is as expansive the universe: The number of possibilities of how one chooses to care for themselves and their communities is as unfathomable as the very being of what exists.
To be open and a practitioner of any truth- whether that be the arts or justice work, or something else- is to be a wedge. A wedge that narrowly forces open the door to truth and possibility while being squeezed by the realities of attempting to be a decent person in a culture of fear and violence. To wrestle with fate and take the dangerous chance to be a cultural worker of any kind- let alone a freedom worker- is to be absolutely insane and damn near delusional. To do it and live by following integrity and reality will forever be a both/and situation.
While being open means being a wedge between dimensions known, it also means being worn and broken, to be rawly, visibly dilapidated.
Several full-time cultural workers and practitioners, I look up to have fallen on horrible times, seemingly all at once. Workshop numbers are low, people aren't buying books, not coming to music shows and paying cover, or aren't getting knowledge about how to support in time of the thing due to shifting and anti-alternative algorithms. People are moving homes unexpectedly or suffer in the cloud of financial guilt in silence for a long time. It's terrifying to think about how I might be supported in a full-time occupation when the people I know who make six-figure incomes have had their strategies debunked and online communities disintegrated by time, economics, and capitalism. I am becoming more accepting of the idea of art being intrinsically marketing, making the artist a marketer on the side of truth (in the right hands.) Yet, I’m always protective of my core values. How do you pay bills as an anti-capitalist? Make your life a crusading marketing campaign? How the fuck is that freedom?
I have had a couple of weeks fueled by a relentless series of unfortunate events. In addition to quitting my job due to community conflicts (my primary source of income), my laptop display has imploded from the inside out, and my bank account is at its lowest level in two years. I struggle to answer emails or have fun without a weighted blanket of vibrating anxiety. There have been too many little catastrophes to list.
I’m afraid to ask for help because everyone needs help right now. Who am I to drink from a drying spring? Who am I to want to continue moving toward my dreams in the face of systemic oppression and mirages? Even though I am a cultural worker, it has always been hard for me to receive help. I am trying to teach myself how to be a good community member too.
To be open is to be a paradoxical anchor: a familiar face and an unknown being to those who can see my online and real-life bodies. To endure the entitlement of the parasocial community member, to be afraid to have social boundaries, to find joy in connecting one soul to another, and to make seamless, traversable communal rivers despite the emotional tsunamis of the internal mind and eyes. To wrangle with stress, grief, and loss. I haven't written in almost a month because the openness it has given me has cleared my mind. Within a community of whispers, it scares my body to feel freedom of thought, to remember who I am.
Within the scope of the universe, my spiraling is miniscule. I say all these anxieties to say that I want to be a full-time cultural worker. I want to be a conduit- a connection within deep space. I want to make books about Detroit, make songs about Detroit, make quilts in Detroit, heal together, and be able to say the real shit, the real stories of this place. My fear and anxiety, however, are crippling my ability to make a choice. What will happen if I try to pursue this full-time work and fail? Will my partner and I lose our apartment because I can't pay rent? What will we do if we get sick and can't pick up gig work? If I leave my job, will I be able to find another? (It's too late; alright, I took that risk.) Will my mom let me use her EBT card to make chicken and side dishes for the fourth time this month? How can I keep smiling through this surprise conversation when I know people think I'm doing better off than I actually am and wouldn't be able to make what I make now without abundant support from the people I love? Isn't it unfair to ask them to bear a larger brunt so I can maybe be happy and live out a dream that is mainly mine? Why can't I prove my disability and how it makes me not able to handle a normal job, so I wouldn't have to choke down my desire to live out my life every time I fuck up at work? Why am I so struck with fear to quit? Why have I already quit on my ability to be free before I even give myself a chance? With the universe as my map, can’t any number of choices still lead to a life fufilled?
When I dream, I am free from fear. I have the freedom from fear to surprise myself with my strength and navigate the world as my work calls me. If it doesn't work out, it might not work out. But if I try, I can't regret my choice to see if things could work out. I may need to push myself in the right direction and trust my purpose; things might work out. And if it doesn't, that's actually okay, too. I can do something else and live out a different dream. Maybe. There is power in being open as a cultural worker, as a steward of a Truth. This I know for sure. There is truth in being as expansive as everything that is.
It's a different week now, and August aches on. I cry often and drink a lot of fruit juice. The dichotomies of being honest and vulnerable by example pinball onward. I think that I will forever be learning to live with my choice to be open, and learning about the newness I can bring to my life within a practice of vulnerability. It’s hard as hell to choose a different way of being, to actually care. I'm scared as hell, but I am choosing it. Choosing, to be open.
smc