The secret thoughts of a trailblazing woman.

You might know me. But let me tell you about myself.

I am a 30-something female, trying to find my place in a heavily male-dominated field within the creative arts. I am the wife of a successful, yet very stressed out husband who is also in this field. I am an expert in two related, yet separate areas. And for the last few years, I have been balancing a career juggling something I know I can do well, while also trying to design a career doing the things that I am exceptional at but that no one is willing to pay for yet. I am trying to bring about change on a larger scale, but feel like I am not even scratching the surface in my local community.

I work hard, but am constantly exhausted. I feel guilty for wanting time to myself, or to better myself, or learn, or produce, but my work is not fulfilling enough to sustain my interest. I feel an ethical obligation to fix the issues of my specialty, because it seems like no one else has even noticed the irresponsible ways we train young people in our field. I fear that if I stop pushing, nothing will ever change.

The people around me see my life as being put together, well managed, organized. The public image of my world is not untrue, but it is only the best parts of my life. No one sees the challenges, the tears or the late night conversations trying to figure out how to make it through the next day/weeks/years. No one was there this morning when I hit my head trying to sort the laundry into piles of whites and colors, and fell onto the ground in tears. Not because I was hurt, but because this morning, the straw broke this camel’s back. Again.

I am exhausted knowing that even though I am an exceptional human being who has worked hard for my entire life doing the things I was told to do by my teachers, parents and mentors, I now wake up every day and try to come up with a plan for the next step in my career and for my life.

I try to balance family and friends who don’t live nearby, and who demand my attention constantly through social media, texting, calls, skype and the endless onslaught that is public life in modern society. With a social media following of around 2000 people, i’m not anyone who is considered interesting for any real reason. No companies sponsor me, or pay me for advertising, even though I curate my feeds as if I make a living doing it. I secretly hashtag my insta-stories, try to get noticed by my favorite clothing companies, and am constantly secretly looking for places to shoot a good selfie. Because if you don’t do this, are you even a real person?

You might know me. You also might be me.

I have a thousand different theories about why I am finding it so hard to find my place in the world. They all seem to fit certain aspects of my life perfectly, but none seem to truly capture everything, and none seem to give me solutions to get me back to a place of reset, or feeling refreshed. Feeling exhausted and burnt out? Go and take a vacation. Feeling bored? Go to a movie or out for dinner. Need more companionship? Get a pet. Need more money? Work harder.

But what do you do when none of these things help, and you just feel like you wasted a week of your life not working while you were on vacation? Or being worried that someone will fill your place if you leave for a few days? Or when you realise that getting a pet actually costs you more money, so you have to figure out how to juggle that extra side hustle to bring in more income each month?

Do you know me?

I exist in a world that is not ready for me. I might have been trained traditionally, but seeing how quickly things have changed around me, and how quickly traditional jobs in my field have disappeared, I have known for years that I can’t aim for the safety of tradition. I graduated during the recession. “Jobs” haven’t really existed for my colleagues and I. We make our own work. But we were never trained for this.

So I spend hours each day learning, thinking and trying to find where I can fit. When I leave my paying jobs, I jump into the non-paying world of my future. I have to find the next thing. I have to be the first to do it. I have to make a difference. I have to make it financially sustainable. Because I know that I can’t survive living as I do now.

But the other catch? No one is ready to pay me for my work. Even though I am at the forefront of exploration into this next phase of our field, there is no market for it. So many of us are happy to stay in the “tradition”, pulling the wool over our own eyes because the dream of stability has been held up as the carrot on the end of the stick in front of us for our entire lives. I have to dream and work and learn and grow for the moment that the field is ready for me. I have to be the secret trailblazer who asks the questions, yells at the sky and cries into pillows out of frustration until the rest of you follow.

I do endless research on countless topics in order to prepare myself for the work to come, then have to sit by and watch friends, colleagues and strangers take credit for my work. The conversations we have over dinner or coffee where I offer my advice to help your personal challenges, turn into the foundations for your next blog post/article/speaking gig. I speak up and you call me selfish. I stop sharing and you call me a bad friend.

This text is my catharsis. You may know me. You might be me. But I am not staying silent anymore.

These are the secret thoughts of a trailblazing woman.

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