The Loneliest Part of Being Creative Is Explaining What You Actually Do

The dental hygienist has asked me what I do for a living, and I am, again, trying to figure out which version of the answer to give her.

I could say designer, which is technically accurate for maybe forty percent of my week and buys me roughly one follow-up question (usually “oh, like graphic design?”) before the conversation moves to whether I floss. I could say writer, which is accurate for another thirty percent and tends to generate more questions (what do you write, have I read it, are you on Amazon) which I do not especially want to field while a hygienist is holding a metal hook near my gums. I could say illustrator, which is accurate for maybe fifteen percent and produces a specific kind of indulgent smile that means she has mentally classified me as unemployed with a hobby. I could say brand consultant, which is accurate for about ten percent and which I hate saying because it sounds like exactly the kind of LinkedIn-register self-description I spent years developing a personal aversion to. None of these answers is wrong. All of them are incomplete, and the completeness of my actual work-life is not, in fact, explainable in a dentist’s chair.

“Freelance creative,” I say, which is the answer I have settled on after years of experimenting with the others, and which means approximately nothing to anybody who isn’t already one.

“Oh, that must be so fun,” she says. This is the standard response. I nod. She returns to my teeth.

What the day actually contains

A working creative day, for me, usually contains: approximately two hours of client-facing work (the billable part), approximately two hours of admin (invoicing, email, scheduling, contracts, the unpaid infrastructure that makes the billable part possible), approximately two hours of actual making (drawing, writing, designing), approximately one hour of reading-that-counts-as-work (research, competitive scanning, skill development, taste-maintenance, the quiet input-diet that feeds the output), approximately one hour of walking or staring out a window (the thing civilians cannot metabolize as work but which is structurally necessary for the making to happen), and approximately two hours of what I can only describe as thinking in the background while I do other things, which is where maybe 60% of the actual creative decisions get made.

The thinking-in-the-background is the part I cannot describe to the dental hygienist. It is also the part that determines whether any given week’s output is good or mediocre. It happens while I’m making coffee. It happens while I’m folding laundry. It happens at 3am when I can’t sleep. It happens in the shower, which is the cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because it is so consistently true that almost every working creative I know relies on showering as a cognitive workflow tool. You cannot bill for thinking in the shower. You also cannot make the work without it. The gap between the billable hours and the actual-work hours is the permanent, private, unspeakable shape of a creative-professional life.

Why this is lonely

The loneliness is not about the hours alone in a room (though there are many of those). The loneliness is about the shape of the work not being describable to the people who love you.

My father, who was an accountant for most of his working life, once asked me, with genuine curiosity, what I “actually produced” in a working day. He was not being snide. He had spent thirty years tracking exactly how many tax returns he had completed in a given quarter and exactly what each one had paid, and the legibility of his work to himself had been part of what kept the work sustainable for three decades. He wanted to know what my equivalent was. The honest answer was: “about seventy minutes of a drawing that I will probably redraw tomorrow, six paragraphs of a piece that will not be finished for two more weeks, four emails, and approximately forty minutes of walking around thinking about whether the drawing is the right approach.” I did not know how to make that answer feel real to him, because in his terms it wasn’t real. In my terms it was a productive day. Neither of us was wrong.

The loneliness of being creative is, in significant part, the loneliness of having a work-life shape that doesn’t map onto the templates most people use to understand what work is. The hours don’t look like hours. The output doesn’t look like output. The results don’t arrive on a schedule anyone can validate from outside. Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation contains a line about this, roughly: the narrator describes her own working life as a series of “small, embarrassing conclusions arrived at slowly,” and I have underlined that line in three different copies of the book over the years because it is exactly the shape of my days. Small. Embarrassing. Slow. The work is real. It is also very hard to make legible to anyone who does not already recognize the form.

The specific small conversations

There are specific conversations that come up again and again in a working creative’s life, each one of them a small lonely moment.

“What are you working on?” (You have seven projects at various stages. You explain two of them. You trail off. You say “a bunch of stuff.” They nod.)

“When’s the book coming out?” (You have been working on the book for three years. You do not know when it’s coming out. You say “next year probably” every year, and they have started to stop asking.)

“But what do you do during the day?” (You make things. You explain this. They want a shape of a day. You cannot give it to them because there isn’t one.)

“Do you wish you had a real job?” (Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. The question itself contains the assumption that what you have is not real.)

“Are you going to make money from this?” (Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. The question is fair and also unanswerable in advance.)

“I wish I could do what you do.” (You want to tell them about the taxes, the health insurance anxiety, the 3am administrative panic, the invoice-chasing, the specific shape of mid-month dread when the grocery list is the same length as the checking account. You do not tell them. You smile and say it’s rewarding work.)

These conversations are the daily infrastructure of the loneliness. Each one, individually, is manageable. Cumulatively, across years, they wear you down, because they reveal that the work you do is not, in any fundamental sense, shared with the people around you. You can describe it to other working creatives (and the conversations are relieving when you can), but the civilian population, lovingly, does not have the frame.

The slow solution

What I have come to accept, fifteen years in, is that the loneliness is structural and will not be solved by finding better words for the work. The work is actually hard to describe. The descriptions I have are as close as I can get, and the closer I try to get, the more pretentious or over-specific I sound, and neither serves the conversation.

What has helped, in specific ways: a small group of other working creatives who do share the frame, and whom I can describe my days to without having to translate. An honest relationship with the people in my life who don’t share the frame, in which we have tacitly agreed not to demand legibility from each other. Robin Sloan’s end-of-year essays on robinsloan.com (which model a specific kind of public-but-not-performative account of a working creative year, and which I recommend as a genre) have given me permission to account for my own years in similar ways. And, quietly, the gradual accumulation of finished work, which over time becomes its own answer to the question “what do you do”; you point at the work, and the work speaks for itself in ways no explanation ever could.

Back in the dentist’s chair, the hygienist is telling me about her son’s soccer practice. I am thinking about the drawing I left on my drafting table. Neither of us is having the wrong conversation. We are having the conversation that two people with incompatible work-shapes can actually have, which is the conversation about her son, which is fine, which is, in a specific way, the entire practice of coexisting with people whose creative lives do not map onto yours.

I tip her well. I go back to the studio. I make the drawing. It takes three hours. It is, in the end, seventy minutes of drawing and a hundred and ten minutes of staring, and the staring was the part where the drawing actually got made. Nobody who was not there will ever know the difference. It will look, on a finished page, like I drew for three hours.

It’s fine. The work is the work. The loneliness is the price of entry. And the small, slow, embarrassing conclusions, as Offill put it, keep arriving, one at a time, and turning out to be, in aggregate, the whole life.