So, December has come around again, and as has become tradition I’ve donned my hat of reflection. This year rather than delve straight into my highlights – maybe they’ll make an appearance at a later date – I want to be really transparent in sharing my lowest moment.
As I’m sure anyone who’s freelanced in the arts has experienced, thoughts crop up from time to time perhaps in the shape of:
Am I good enough? Am I doing enough?
Do I have enough work to sustain me financially/ artistically/ emotionally?
How much longer is it feasible for me to continue?
When would it be the right time to call it a day?
Midway through 2019 was probably the first time I dared to utter out loud a thought borne of the latter 2 questions…
“Do I have enough fight left in me to keep going as a freelance dance artist?”
This felt like a massive milestone – from thinking something privately and courting with your inner demons, to actually expressing it as a possibility out loud to other people somehow makes it more tangible and concrete. Now, I’m even admitting to it in writing – so this question has really come into a ‘physical’ existence for me this year.
At that moment in time, my freelance work really did feel like a fight where I was taking a lot of heavy blows. Globally, I felt that the organisations I was interacting with had forgotten any sense of shared responsibility or care so far as their freelancers were concerned. Not that I think this was or is necessarily intentional, I think freelancers are just often out of sight and out of mind and so will be the last people to be advocated for within organisations. From my perspective, some of the decision-making taking place is being done by people who have never freelanced themselves and so do not fully understand the impact of the decisions they are implementing on a freelancer’s livelihood, mental health or workload. Plus, of course, an organisation may have many freelancers who are all individual humans and so a process which works for one person may not suit another.
Thankfully, the very week that I asked the above question aloud, I had a coaching session with Kerry Nicholls. Kerry advised me to take a month completely away from the dance world to restore – no teaching, no rehearsing, no performing, no attending classes, no watching dance, no reading about dance, no interacting with dance on social media – permission to step away for a self-prescribed amount of time.
Even just planting the seed that I could take a month off and test the waters away from dance, shifted something in my perspective. The relentless pressure was off and I had the capacity to acknowledge what had been missing recently in the working relationships I was maintaining. These essentially boiled down to three needs which I felt were all too often being overlooked:
Empathy
A sense of your contribution being valued
Communication (based on trust and sharing of knowledge)
As if on cue, I began to form new working relationships where these three needs were being acknowledged, addressed and met wherever possible – what a breath of fresh air to have sprung from a real moment of desperation.
In addition to being able to identify and express more clearly my needs as a result of confronting the question of whether I had it in me continue, I also had a realisation around courage. I can not tell you how brave I think people are to step away from this industry and embark on a change of career, and equally how brave people are to continue – I have so much admiration for friends and colleagues whichever option they have chosen. This year has taught me that I should try to extend some of this admiration (and acknowledgement of the
courage it takes to question what are the best next steps for me) to myself as well.
So, as we look ahead into the next decade, I hope that we all find the time and space to acknowledge what we are in need of, and are able to wait for responses to manifest which we can find and allow in to our lives. From my end, I wish you a decade ahead which prioritises empathy, value and communication in all that you do.