overwhelmed

We are overwhelmed.  You hear it in different ways, right?  "We are understaffed", "There's a shortage", "We can't keep up", are the professional lines we all know but there's also the "I'm tired", "I need a day off", and "I want to quit" that you either hear from a trusted friend or see on social media.  The last couple of years have been hard and most of us have struggled to keep our heads above water.  

This seems to show itself more visibly in careers and in individuals who have been juggling too many things for too long.  During quarantine times we heard about nurses and other medical staff who where already stressed when the pandemic emergency hit.  Then we heard about cooks and servers who were suddenly "essential" at their sub-minimum wage jobs.  Teachers even made a little bit of news when they were forced to switch their entire curriculum to online education while dealing with their own at-home families, health issues, and low incomes.  

Eventually we started hearing about "the new normal" as all the normal people wanted to return to the lives they knew prior to 2020.  We may have thought this meant learning to live in a world where this new virus was never going away, but what it actually meant was all of us learning to just continue doing all the extra things we were asked to do during the start of a pandemic.  The nurses are still stressed and overworked, the cooks and servers are still making the same low wages, and the teachers are still doing more with less, even being asked to cover for the teachers who decided they'd had enough.  

This is the world we live in now and watching Netflix doesn't seem to pay as well as any of us would have liked.  We have to adjust and just keep swimming.

I deal with this on a smaller scale in my job as a professor.  Students come to our little academic world having (hopefully) figured out high school.  They learned to juggle some social things, physical changes, and memorizing things.  They learned to drive and now they attempt to live on their own for the first time as they begin college.  For the next four years my art and design colleagues and I begin to toss more and more things in the air for students to juggle.  Sure there's a party this Thursday, but there's also a critique on Monday.  Yes, we realize you have a part time job but you still have to be in class the whole time.  Yes, we realize you have more than one class and that all your projects are due the same week.  Of course you're overwhelmed, we're all overwhelmed.

I like to prepare my seniors for life after graduation.  As my BFA students move into their final semesters, I try to begin providing some practical advice about how to function outside of school.  This means introducing them to the idea that the graph above is for real.  Of course, I don't tell them all that at once.  That would be, well, overwhelming.  Maybe we talk about setting up a studio space in their home.  Then we talk about how to use social media.  One by one we get some of the less intimidating things out of the way until we're eventually talking about saving every receipt, making sure to get a contract before beginning work, and how to motivate yourself to make art.  Oh and those loans, you know you have to pay those back, right?

One of the career groups we leaned on very heavily during 2020 was artists.  Musicians had to learn new ways to perform and make money.  They had to produce new, creative work during a very tough time in order to survive financially.  Actors were banned from productions so they propped up their phones and did dramatic readings online and wrote books and articles on their craft.  Visual artists couldn't have exhibits so they learned to keep working during the plague while they also had to market and sell their own work while struggling to stay in the cultural eye.  Much like the overwhelmed careers mentioned earlier, these artists are now still trying to keep all these balls in the air, even while going back to "work".  This is the new normal.

And it's actually not so new to artists.  That little graph up there is pretty accurate now and it would have been just as accurate 5 years ago.  On any given week, I can check most of those things off my list.  Keep in mind that like most artists, this graph doesn't even represent my full time job, nor does it take having a family into account.  Nor does it take into account the ridiculously uncertain life of the recent graduate who isn't sure where to live, how to pay rent, or when they are supposed to be making art.  

When you talk to an artist and you hear they are excited about a sale or happy about a new body of work, you may want to remind yourself that they're also overwhelmed.  And maybe buy something from them, promote them on social media, or heck, just give them a word of encouragement.  Remember that they were the ones we looked to when we were all stuck at home.  Remember we are all overwhelmed.