After rejection
The hidden reality of creative work
Yesterday morning I woke up to the 4th rejection email I’d received in a week. This time I was expecting it – I’d lost hope.
Let’s go back a couple of months. I’d decided to invest in some creative business mentoring for the first time ever. I was lucky enough to have won £1000 after unknowingly being shortlisted for the Arts Foundation Future Awards at the start of this year. Not knowing what to do with the money yet I tucked it away in a pot until 6 months later I listened to a friend telling me about some business mentoring she’d be doing for her one woman business and how useful it had been for her.
Something clicked for me and I decided I too wanted to give this a go. Having been out of formal education for 7 years I’ve always felt like something is missing not have the support of someone more experienced, further down the line and with distance from your practise to act as a sounding board and an advisor.
A few weeks later I invested my winnings and started working with Emma. We worked to extract my values, we articulated the three pillars of my practise and we made a plan for how to fund and finance these various activities. I was feeling more optimistic about my practise than I had been in years. It felt like there was a plan that took into consideration money – both how I would fund things and I how would make enough to be able to support myself to be able to put as much time and energy into this work as it needed.
I identified various funding pots, part-time employment opportunities, residencies and workshops call outs all to meet these needs. I made time in my week to apply around my current work that brings in the immediate income I need to live. And when the deadlines came around I sent off my applications, optimistic that this was going to be my year where I fully throw myself into my own work with all my might, supported by these various avenues.
Cut back to today, 3 months later and my plan has come crashing down.
This week I was turned away from a job after making it to interview, I was declined the residency, the funding and the workshop opportunity. Never in 10 years of working within the creative field have a I received such a tidal wave of ‘No’s’ one after another. Of course, I’ve had no’s many times before. Over the years I must have applied for nearing double figures of job opportunities, residencies, grants and artist callouts. And I’ve had many no’s, but they’ve been interspersed with yes’s. Just enough to keep me going, to keep up my self-esteem, and be able to tell others about the positives that they want to hear – or so I believed.
This week was really brutal and for the first time ever I took to social media to share it. I re-downloaded Instagram on my phone after a self enforced break and I posted, sharing a snippet of these disappointments. Looking back a few days later I’m not sure what inspired me to do it – maybe I’d just had enough of sharing the positives when I wasn’t really feeling positive at all. Or maybe I was asking for help or for someone to notice the hard work that rarely gets recognised.
The response shocked me. I’m not someone that uses social media to build a large following, I don’t try to post what the algorithm wants. I don’t have any kind of social media plan, I’m sporadic and I get sick of it on almost a monthly basis which resolves in me deleting the app for weeks at a time. So receiving hundreds of Likes and now over 40 comments is without a doubt the biggest response I’ve ever had to a post. And the private messages have kept coming in since from people sharing their stories with me, and congratulating me on this so-called bravery of sharing such unattractive news (my words not theirs).
So what does that all mean?
For one, I didn’t realise how much people hide these disappointments from public view, so much so that this post elicited such a response. My partner had said to me last week after one of my rejections, why don’t you write about it on Substack? And my instant response had been – you can only share these struggles and disappointments once you’re successful, otherwise you just look like a big flop! Yes, the person that’s built their own business and is now turning over a mil a year can share online their early days struggles, when they were sleeping on a friends sofa and eating beans on toast for dinner. It’s alluring and inspiring, because they’ve made it.
But what if you haven’t made it? That story is just depressing.
But despite this I did share it, and I honestly have no idea why and what came over me. But I’m so glad I did because it resonated in a way I never expected and it showed me how much creatives and people working in the arts are struggling. Their creativity is not being put into the art itself but into how you try to fund your work. The precious time you carve out, outside of earning a basic living, is being put into endless applications which can take weeks to work on. So much energy is being consumed by these constant efforts to grasp an opportunity with odds so low it’s a wonder any of us bother. But bother we do, because there is always hope. Always a shred of hope that this time we’ll be the lucky 1 of 500 that actually get’s the post. (Ok I made up those figures, but it’s something like that.)
Where to go from here?
I received validation from sharing and that felt good. I felt better and I felt less alone. I received the dopamine hit of social media and understand why people get addicted to oversharing. It’s what social media wants. Our vulnerabilities laid bare, but it’s what we all want from each other too. To feel like we’re not the only one’s facing disappointments – plummeting our hours of planning, work and hope into nothingness.
For me, I’m not sure of the next steps. I haven’t decided whether to give up, take on a new career, or switch to using the simple tried and tested system of capitalism to take peoples money for a product I can sell. Or perhaps learn a trade that makes me more employable. Or whether to persevere with the pursuit of trying to create work and experiences that are experimental, socially minded, affordable and accessible to as many people as possible.
Watch this space to find out what comes next…. (spoiler: I have no idea!)
Some useful bits to click on:
Why do I keep facing rejection from creative opportunities (and what to do about it!)
An interesting analysis of How the rejection letter reflects neoliberal logic
Creative business mentoring for visual artists and craft makers Work With Em
(It’s probably worth mentioning this article or series of events is by no means a reflection of Emma and her amazing mentoring skills. What I haven’t mentioned here is that after all this I feel supported knowing I have so many resources and untapped avenues from my work with Emma to fall back on that I haven’t yet explored. Emma’s mentoring style is incredibly compassionate, supportive and motivating based in years of creative practise as a textile designer herself).