My creative life sometimes feels like a grapevine struggling in a field of turnips. Creativity does not pay my bills. Einstein said, “Science is a wonderful thing as long as one does not have to earn one’s living at it.” So it also can be with creativity. I’m a writer, and I’m also an actor. Therefore I am doubly cursed. For every Julia Roberts or Larry McMurtry, legions wade through community theater and rejection letters at night, while they write code, pour concrete, and answer phones for assholes during the day.

I made a decision years ago, and I can’t recall the moment I made it. Maybe I didn’t realize I was making it. Maybe I got sucked along, like when your wife suggests you go to the arboretum, but you say nothing. The next thing you know, you’re looking at a bunch of damned orchids. At some point I decided that my creative life would be my shadow life. It would be my hobby. My vocation and obligations would lie elsewhere, largely wrapped up in security. I would love my shadow life more, but it would always be a mistress to my day job.

That’s the decision I made, and I’m okay with it. I occasionally find ways to exercise creativity in my “real” job. I create spreadsheets with breathtakingly lovely color schemes. I can make people laugh while telling them things they don’t want to hear. But I find “real world” creative opportunities to be rare.

Maybe I’m deciding something different about my creative life now. That’s a pending question. One reason it’s pending is that I have a friend who years ago embraced the artist’s life in an overwhelming way. She has never deviated from her purpose. She’s almost never had a  “day” job. And she’s achieved a lot of critical success. Financial success is always more elusive of course. That must have been true even for the guy mashing pictures of bison onto the cave wall with his fingers.

My friend’s commitment cost her something. Spouses, children, and friends all had to compete with her creative myopia, and sometimes they lost. When they lost, sometimes they suffered, and so did she.

I don’t believe that all creative people suffer from mental and emotional challenges, but I know that my friend and I do. Treatment helps, but it also hampers her creativity just a bit. That creative handicap would be invisible to most people. To an artist it’s like a championship sprinter losing two-hundredths of a second. It’s huge. Treatment’s unacceptable for her, but an untreated life is a vista of misery, punctuated by peaks of elation.

And yet, this is the payment she’s been willing to make, and I’m not going to tell her she’s wrong. She embraced the creative life. For her, it comes at a high price, but she’s paid it and never considered doing otherwise.

So, I see that this post has turned into an almost complete pit of negativity. I’ll finish by saying that I have no answers for anyone else regarding vocation vs. hobby for their creative lives. I don’t have any answers for myself right now either. But I will say that this time I’m damned if I end up looking at orchids without knowing how I got there.