Are you sleeping?

Why stop there, are you eating? Are you bathing yourself? Are you regularly performing your ADLs (Activities of Daily Living)?

Whether you are a creative or just trying to get through your 9-to-5 life, making sure to sleep regularly, eat when it’s time, and clean yourself and your environment is a good way to stay healthy and motivated to keep going. For a creative, it might very well be crucial to inspiration. We romanticize the idea of the starving artist, living in a studio or on a friend’s couch, attempting to create the next world-shattering masterpiece of this generation. But that too is just another hustle for the young and the fortunate. What about everyone else, who has to practice their skill, learn how to promote themselves, work full time, have a family, suffer from mental illness, and curb their addictions? Believing that we can struggle but achieve is a fallacy few benefit from. We constantly hear about those few who came from nothing and became everything. But the truth is most people start with a really great privilege and seize the opportunities afforded them. Even some we admire will purposely paint their beginnings as rough and tumultuous when in reality they were content and given the choice to thrive on a different path, or even the same path.

But we really want to believe the lie of the starving artist. Because we’re starving!

And we aren’t sleeping. And we’re killing ourselves. And then we watch as what looks like other starving artists succeed and have the audacity to tell us, “You’re doing great! Keep starving!”

I’m a millennial and had to come to an incredible realization. All my dreams won’t come true if I just believe, even if I just work hard enough. Most of us worked really hard, most of us are still working really hard, but that’s not how it works ironically. So instead of telling you how it works, because that’s counterintuitive and I’m not selling you a course on “following your dreams”, I want you to ask yourself: do you want to be sleepy and hungry when someone finally notices how great you are? How long are you willing to suffer until someone sees you? Or can you still achieve your dream and sleep? Can you art and eat? Can you clean your face and create your work? If you can’t, you need to ask yourself why, genuinely. What about taking care of yourself is second to your creative career? Do you think you can sustain that? Do you thank that’s what everyone else is doing, and if so, do you think they love feeling miserable?

Some might say, ‘well they’re miserable and rich, and that’s where I want to be.‘ And I say, and I’m sorry to say it, but more than likely, you won’t make it to miserable and rich. You’ll just be miserable.

We’re the depressed generation, watching other people succeed when it was supposed to be ALL OF US. And now that you know that it won’t be all of us, how about you try eating, just this once. You can still draw, write, sing later. It’s not actually going anywhere. And maybe even wash your face. No reason to look dirty when you tell people you’re a future virtuoso. And then when you look good and your stomach isn’t grumbling, you might still want to do that art thing. But maybe, just maybe, try to sleep too. I think there’s energy in sleeping to keep you functional. Or so I heard.