All Is Fair in Love and Work: On Making Art Through Heartbreak and Career Change
Photo by my sister, Emma.
Is Normal All That I’m Good For?
When my fellow-artist partner and I broke up in the spring of 2024, shortly after I’d taken a buttoned-up corporateish job in marketing (it’s the first role in which I’ve had to adhere to a dress code), I must have appeared quite lost. In the months that followed, I received a fair share of well-intentioned advice in an effort to help me redefine my identity as a newly-minted corporate girlie and single woman in her (for the first time) 30s. I can’t say that the advice was unsolicited, as I was admittedly quite dazed and confused, wondering how to effectively transition from Sean’s girlfriend back to Sophie and from quiet days at home, in control of my schedule, to the incessant ping of Microsoft Teams messaging, early morning on-foot commutes, and — oh, my heart — couple pairs of pleated trousers on which I have rotation.
(For context: I’d been with my partner, Sean, for three rich, respectful, and pretty fun years — we were fresh in our relationship when I first posted on Medium in January of 2021! — and together navigated career-changing collaborations, something along the lines of entrepreneurship, and even some burgeoning recognition as artists, individually and as a duo. On top of our wild creative endeavors I stacked my daytime career as a digital marketer, prioritizing startup opportunities and fully remote work in which I could wear baseball caps and baggy tees and look like the rest of the gang on Zoom. I swore to myself that I would never see the inside of an office again, so help me God. And even more so, that I would never, ever be forced to wear business casual in my life. But of course, at one point in time, I also swore I’d never be caught dead blogging.)
For the first half of last year, I wandered through the world with a sense of ache for the comfort and familiarity of companionship, and certainly the joys of working from home with abundant flexibility and authority over my lifestyle. So in sharing about my headspace with a friend over the summer — all of my good, bad, and ugly post-breakup and new job musings — I found his take a hot one: “Of course you’re feeling lost! Your boyfriend was your connection to the ‘starving artist’ lifestyle. But, Sophie, you’re more straight-edge than that. You were, like, made for corporate! I know you. And you want security more than you want to be an artist.”
I don’t remember how I responded in the moment, but probably with uncomfortable laughter and maybe a pitiful “haha, totally” while choking back a tear. If I considered my breakup a healing wound, his comment pulled too hard on those still-in stitches. I was embarrassed, frankly, that someone so close to me would think I was perfectly suited to corporate protocol and not at all to the artist’s lifestyle — especially considering those nights I did go to bed hungry, having chosen a trip to Blick over Aldi.
I was more embarrassed than anything, though, to think he might be right. Was I no longer ~an artist~ without my connection to that all-or-nothing, get-money-or-die-trying mentality my partner had worn so well? For him, it was genuine. For me, it was a stretch. I couldn’t help but wonder, between me and the dream, if maybe Sean closed that gap.
I felt more lost than ever, at best; inadequate, silly, and stupid, at worst. I felt plain. I felt average. I felt so shamefully, grossly, annoyingly normal. Like normal, perhaps, is all that I’m good for.
Creative Responsibility Looks Different Across Seasons
The problem with me, and maybe you, too, is that I want nothing to do with normal. Because, for an artist, to be creative is a compliment. To be corporate is a diss. I’m a Leo and an Enneagram 4 (a romantic! an individualist!) and the firstborn of three girls, which don’t dictate but do indicate that I thrive in the limelight and value, more than anything, my freedom to express honest and uninhibited creativity.
Although it didn’t feel like it at the time, regardless of my friend’s commentary, I am, in fact, an artist. It’s just that, post-breakup and peri-9–5, my Creative Responsibility looks a little different right now, tough pill to swallow it may be. It was an uncomfortable transition, breaking up with my full-time artist boyfriend and my full-time artist identity. Once you’ve gotten to thrill-ride life for a little bit, to sit down, shut up, and buckle your seatbelt doesn’t feel like security — it feels like death. (And it is, in a sense, if dying to the ego counts.)
I’m learning, though, it’s in those late nights, standing in my kitchen stirring a carrot-ginger soup, waiting for the dryer to sing me its tune of completion, and scribbling furiously on a piece of Bristol board paper taped to the wall directly right of my stove, that I remember: This is what makes me an artist. That I work a job in marketing to pay my bills and still show up to the canvas isn’t a point of contention, something I have to reconcile — it’s the point itself. Artists make art, marketers market, and no one thing takes away from the validity of another. They’re just SuperStacked — 100% truths layered on top of another. It’s when I push through resistance and defy all excuses, when my neighborhood is asleep and my Microsoft Teams app is finally silent, that I show up for myself and get to commune with Creator, in drawing or writing or snacking or sleeping, that I am everything all at once no matter what I’m doing.
Because, on Saturdays, traipsing through the farmer’s market and thinking not of marketing at all, I’m still a marketer. Those nights I don’t touch my pencil, I’m still an artist, just as I ever was and as I ever will be.
Therein lies the tension of my current season’s Creative Responsibility: the push-pull of a soul that aches to make juxtaposed against a desire for security and self-sufficiency that can, at least, put dinner on the table for myself and Theodore, my puppy-baby. The good news, I’m finding, is that I don’t have to choose. I am both. I am SuperStacked.
To Be An Artist Is Merely a Personal Choice
Unlike other roles, there is thankfully no coursework you need to complete nor title you need to be granted to consider yourself an artist. The label is self-appointed. If you’ve once made art for 10 minutes by scribbling a face on a napkin at the airport bar waiting to board a delayed flight, you are an artist. If the last time you released a piece into the world was because of a college figure drawing course and you graduated college in 1967, you are an artist. If you helped your teenage children negotiate an authentic I’m sorry to each other after a fight in an imaginative way last night, allowing for the growth and gain of all parties, you are a world-shaping artist, you crafty little cabbage.
It’s because you are an artist no matter what, endlessly creating and imagining and problem-solving and dreaming and fighting for another day to do so. It’s a dirty game, this fight in love and work/works of art. Neither of those things — nor anything, really — are fair in this wild and unpredictable existence, except for that each of us is on a level playing field in getting to choose, again and again until the day we die and maybe even then, to just keep going.
