been feeling so fucking frustrated for the past few days. like agency, vision, purpose have been festering inside me, wanting to shoot out my eyes, mouth, fingertips, but instead get excreted as dehydrated pellets in the form of agenda items in admin meetings. i know that this is the price i agreed to pay when i exchanged my life as a starving artist for a curator title at a big institution. i spent so long chasing gigs and grants and audience and some signal of significance that when the job opening came 7 years ago, i leapt into it like a quantum portal.
wtf are you even complaining about? how dare you? with this salary and this status and this access? you really want to go back to that rat-infested apartment in brooklyn? to feeling shitty all day about the $2.50 you lost when you entered the subway from the wrong side? to seeing the way that people’s eyes glazed over when you introduced yourself as an artist? “oh, ok,” they’d say, already shifting their shoulders in another direction. you really want to go back to writing poems to romanticize the hunger? to wondering if your grand vision is just an inside joke?
yeah, sometimes. not always, but sometimes. especially this time of the year. i still remember going into smithsonian orientation early june in 2013. i bought all those shirts and ties at j crew convinced they would help me look the part of curator. back then, the imposter syndrome was so thick, i figured i could cobble together maybe 2 years worth of health insurance benefits before they realized i was just a rapper. “fake it till you make it,” i decided. “but always keep it real.”
is that what you think about while you scramble your pasture-raised eggs in the morning? while you get all your cold emails responded to? while you enjoy conversations with your parents that don’t revolve around finding stability? bc if so, feel free to quit your job and stop receiving those checks, and you’ll see the inspiration come back REAL quick!
i don’t know how this one is going to end, tbh. i guess that’s the nature of frustration. i know i can’t just write my way out of all my problems, in the same way that getting this job wasn’t going to give me an automatic, enduring sense of accomplishment. i know there isn’t a way to give voice to this silent suffering without it sounding like i’m downplaying all the people places and things that have happened in the past few years, or to generally seem unappreciative. i know there’s a place for gratitude while also feeling like we’re meant for so much more than this. might even get there someday. might.