Creative Rehabilitation Practices for Professionals

Hi. Are you a person who makes their living in the ~*cReaTive aRtS?*~ Are you keeping the lights on and the rent paid by the sweat of your soul?

Does this feel a little… different than you thought it would?

Here’s the fight I have in my head all the time. Maybe you have this one too, or something like it:

First, I’m incredibly lucky. Most people who do art of any kind do not make a living at it. My living might be tenuous (ahahahah what’s a savings account?) but it is real, in that I do pay the rent and the light bill doing what I do (which in my case is write, draw, say jokes onstage, and teach). I am *making a living doing what I love.*

Second: LOVE???? Are you kidding me? A “joke” I often make is that the only thing I hate more than drawing is not drawing. Drawing breaks my heart. Drawing can be incredibly painful. I will never, ever come anywhere close to where I would like to be with drawing. I feel this way with writing too sometimes, but I have less baggage concerning writing - if it’s not working, I feel more cheerful about fixing and moving on. I reserve my real shame-spirals for my visual artwork. I almost never draw for any kind of pleasure (except on the subway, when I draw my fellow straphangers).

I have said for years that I wished I could go to some kind of spiritual retreat or mental health facility that would help me repair my relationship to my art (like Nell’s plus… guides?). Well, I don’t know if that kind of thing exists, but I figure if it did it would probably only be for the very rich (I pay *rent* in New York, not a *mortgage.* What am I, a Rockefeller?). So I figured I would take a stab at making one myself - hence this little program here. 

This program is divided into seven sections (like Genesis! The original creative story!). Whether you spend an hour, a day, or a week on each is up to you. The sections are: FEAR - WAR - DESIRE - MONEY - SELF - COMMUNITY - LOVE. Each week you will receive an email with an essay exploring the topic at hand, with prompts and exercises designed to help you overcome, integrate, and make peace with all of the particular issues that can make paid creative work so fraught.

This course is for any professional working in any creative discipline (writers, artists, comics, bring all your baggage). You need not make you entire living off your art. We will tackle one section per week. We will use Mighty Networks to discuss each week’s lessons and exercises, and how we felt about them. These modules will be moderated and facilitated by yours truly (HI IT’S ME EMILY). Each week will conclude with a Zoom meeting (optional! You may have had entirely enough of Zoom!). This program will begin on May 17th, 2024.