Working too close to the sun

The eternal tension of the creative who runs a creative business

[Quick one before we get into it.

I’ve had a bit of time off Substack, as I’ve been launching my new copywriting brand BodyCopy (which obviously inspired this piece!). You can find me over on Instagram where I chat more about finding the joy in writing for your business and fucking with the marketing rulebook.]

Ok let’s go.

This one is a shout-out to my fellow creative business owners.

I call us the obliques. The ones running a business that in some way connects back to our art, but still permits us to eat.

The artist in graphic design. The copywriter by day, short story writer by night. The poet working at the creative agency on the next Nike campaign. The ones trying to balance growing an audience online with building a creative community. The ones making three reels a week only to run out of time to edit their own film. The ones writing client captions and coming to their own page dry.

It’s a lot.

For many of us, there was a decision at some moment in time that probably went something like this: Realisation that for the foreseeable future you cannot make a living from your art, or enough of one to survive. Deep soul searching anguish, coupled with deep cold hatred of the capitalist system that devalues art so entirely. Unbounded frustration also that you are not good enough (I prefer to blame the system personally). Next, you consider how to work in parallel to the creative pursuit and still survive on more than that 2012 tin of kidney beans at the back of the cupboard alone. How to not be swallowed up by some other grey 9-5. You land on the relevant creative business closest to the art.

Job done, right?

WRONG.

Because ultimately, we’re working too close to the sun! Sure, we’re working closer to the creative pursuit that sends our soul into a swooning spin. But also. The business / job is the very thing forcing us to look away from it.

Christ.

What we didn't count upon was the constant tension that would follow. To balance the demands of running a creative business with actually living a creative life is HARD.

Because by running a business we actually quite like, rather than a 'just fine' office job that neither inspires us nor takes anything from us, we end up expending all our creative energy on the business itself. In caring more for the work we do, we lessen our capacity to make the art.

So the heat that scorches us and sends us spiralling is the creative demands of the business. And the fire that melts our tentative wings - moulted feathers, a beeswax prayer to bind them - and sends us tumbling into the sea, is our own nearness to the thing we love.

But I don’t think we’d have it any other way. I am writing for a living! I enjoy my work! Hell, I love my clients too.

And the tension doesn’t disappear: I’ll probably still have the bi-monthly meltdown that I haven’t finished that 3-year old story draft yet. But I think instead of trying to swallow it down like a golf ball in the throat, we open our mouths and let the world see its iridescence. We show this tension some love.

We acknowledge it for what it is - our inner artist constantly worried we'll get the balance wrong, worried we'll diminish it, worried we'll extinguish the creative spark entirely. But I think by acknowledging the tension, we shrink it, slightly. We sand it off, maybe just rounding off those weird dimples in the golf ball's exterior, maybe giving us just a little more space to breathe around it.

We can also hold it up to the light. Look directly at it. Work out if there’s small shifts we can make to shrink it. For me that’s PROBABLY more compartmentalisation. Tighter work vs creativity boundaries. Clearer distinction. It’s also getting into closer community with folk like you - which is kinda the whole point of Thrash. It’s where we can crack open a warm cider, vent about the challenges and the fury and the ‘alot-ness’ of running a creative business and living a creative life, and feel our shoulders collectively drop like 2mm.

And as the cider kicks in and the warm words of our creative companions hit the back of the cochlea, we realise… we wouldn’t actually have it any other way.

So we settle for the scorching, we settle for the singed skin, we settle into the red hot tension, because it sure does look beautiful from up here.

THRASH is the after-party for jaded creatives. Come crack open a can & find your people.