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Writer's picturegrace mcknight

Making a Living : My Creative Road Map

Updated: Apr 5, 2022

When planning your future, it’s a big step, it’s a promise, not only for your present self but your future self. It engages a particular mindset that allows you to create a roadmap. However, committing to a particular future is profoundly difficult. The saying of ‘you can have it all’ particularly within the female industry sometimes blurs that roadmap. It’s difficult to compromise on your dreams and goals and find a balance where you can have it all, however sometimes you must find trust.

Fig 1

Trust

Trust in allowing your passions to lead you, hoping that everything else will fall into place. A struggle within the millennial generation is living in the future and it’s hindering us profusely in the present. An example of this I see future self being successful and traveling the world with my work, however, this future self, I have all the skills I need to be successful yet currently I’m only just starting to develop these skills. This struggle on learning these skills often manifest this future life into a fantasy that I won’t achieve. When going for interviews and being turned away due to the lack of these skills it made this future I had envisioned was becoming more and more of a fantasy and no longer a reality.



Honesty

Being truly honest, it was a hard set back, both physically and emotionally, coming off the back end of my BA (hons) degree and a pandemic. I had shut of that creative mind set and convinced myself that I could no longer go any further within my career. The biggest struggle I’ve found within my own career is patience and confidence. I started researching into reigniting my passion for the industry and had a conversation with an old teacher about his experience when trying to break into the industry. He explained that there always that wall in front of you within the industry however you can either envision it as a solid unmoveable wall or a soft curtain that you weave your way through. I realised that this unhealthy mind set of living in the future has really held me back on my passions. The realisation that not everyone will understand your work, not everyone will like your work, but ultimately, it’s also not for everyone. When researching anything we as a collective will always pinpoint that one negative in feedback or a review and it shrouds over all the positives and changes this mindset of a positive thing into a negative.


Compartmentalisation and Change


Before I started my MA, I realised I had to change my mindset into thinking more positively otherwise I wouldn’t be moving forward on my creative path. By taking on small tasks and setting weekly goals and not allowing self-destruction mode to set in, has allowed me to

re-focus on taking the correct steps to achieve my future and for it not be a fantasy.


Commitment


The first lecture tasked us with filling out a road map to understand three things; what you can do; what you want to work on, and what you want to achieve. This task allowed a focus to form on what I want out of this course and out of my career. It’s difficult to tell people what you want out of life, a dream, to say it out loud or see it on paper is daunting.


Admitting it to someone or even yourself truly exposes vulnerability and your core purpose of your future. I’ve learnt from this lecture that having the confidence to not only tell myself this, recently I found it’s something I need to work on which I need to take through into this group module. This task has allowed me to understand what I need to do, such as, being more open, push getting those skills in order to achieve this dream, but, also be confident with the skills I already have and trust them and myself within my work.


Illustration list:
Fig 1 - Own work
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