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You Are and Are Not Your Vocation
Even writers, artists, and the like are not their jobs.
When your primary vocation in life is one of the arts, it feels like that’s the centerpiece of your identity. Even when you work to keep a separation between your personal and professional selves, your art is a defining quality of who you are. In my experience this is true for every writer, speaker, sculptor, and painter, just to name a few examples.
Beneath the artist is a living, breathing person. Ergo, you have needs and desires that your art can’t fulfill. That’s because nobody at all has only one role in life.
We all have a multitude of roles. I brand myself professionally as a storyteller. Outside of my professional self, I have many other jobs. I’m also a husband, brother, son, teacher, student, thumb-monkey to cats, housekeeper, and a myriad of other roles and jobs I could name. Each role is unique and potentially completely disconnected from any other job.
Over-identifying with your vocation can create problems like separation of duties, balancing personal, professional, social, and private time. This becomes especially challenging when you go from hobbyist or part-time artist to full-time.
In the words of author Stephen Pressfield, from his brilliant The War of Art,
