My Day Job Sucks Out All of My Creative Energy...
PRACTICING SAFE MUSIC MENTORING | JANET FELD
It’s pretty common for us artists to piece together multiple gigs to make ends meet. Maybe you teach in a school or after-school program. Or, you teach private lessons in your home studio in between a restaurant and a babysitting gig. Maybe you’re a performing songwriter, orchestra pit musician, church choir director or run an after-school musical theater program.
It’s also common for these gigs to pay poorly in order to earn enough money to live on, we end up working crazy hours.
Long hours and gigs that require a lot of energy can leave us completely drained of our creative energy.
For years, I taught 6 days a week at a Sunday school, K-8 school, a vacation camp program, summer camp, private lessons and evening classes for adults. Somewhere in there, I managed to play some gigs.
After not writing a song for two years (!!), my husband and I went on our first vacation in forever.
We spent the week imitating domesticated pets: napping made us really tired, so we had to rest. That made us hungry, so we needed snacks, followed by sleeping and practicing our passive solar energy collection.
And when we got home, I wrote a song. When it was done, I wept with relief because I'd been terrified that I had nothing left, that I'd never write a song again.
Since then, I've been more mindful about scheduling downtime.
It’s often uncomfortable scheduling dedicated time in our weekly schedule for creative work. How many times have you set the intention to write or learn a new song, just for fun only to allow outside demands to take up the time you’d allotted to do it?
Here are some strategies I use that I hope will be helpful to you:
Sound good? Schedule a date with yourself this coming week and enjoy!
p.s. I was the music director at Camp Grossman for 10 years, and it was one of my fav gigs ever. Check out some sweet feedback from the mom of a camper, Molly, about me singing Joni Mitchell's song, Circle Game during unit music time (also from some of my fab colleagues in the comments):
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