get the shackles of my feet so i can dance..

Fridays at work are always challenging.. You can see the finish line to the week and your brain just refuses to function properly and keeps digressing to things which are a little more fun than the endless spreadsheets that dominate the rest of the working week... So in my hundredth attempt to negotiate with my  brain and convince it that 'spreadsheets - good, blogsurfing - baaaad',  the brain refused to give up so I gave in and opened yet another browser window. In my gmail inbox I found an newsletter from Look At Me. Any excuse will do... so I decided to check out the newsletter. There I found an article about what a photographer's assistant's life was all about (I would refer you to it but it was written in Russian so majority of you won't find it of much use). It was a surprisingly detailed article with what seemed like a more or less realistic account (as opposed to the normal sugar coating) of what actually happens.

As I was reading the article, I kept thinking that it sounded pretty cool.. hard work, but still very exciting. As I quite often do, I had the "I wish I could do that" thought.. and then I thought: well, why the hell not? What is stopping me from copy pasting a stock standard resignation letter from the internet and stepping out into the 'unknown' and trying myself as a photographer's assistant? The answer came from the same place where the question did - my head, except this time it sounded a bit like my mother and went something along the lines of "oh, dont be stupid! that is not even a serious job! you need to concentrate on what's important!"

The truth is... I dont think I even know what's important anymore.. I have spent so much time, money and effort on getting an education, then another education, then some other 'very important and highly sought after' qualification, then spent another 4 years proving something to mainly myself and a few sundry others that I can survive and succeed in a corporate giant beast that now looking back it would seem like a bit of a waste of resources to drop everything in a pursuit of a profession that is probably even less forgiving than the corporate world. In the corporate world you can learn things, you can earn degrees and then if all fails take 2 years off to get your MBA and come back and whoop some more ass. In the creative world not many people care what school you went to and what marks you got if your product is rubbish. The process of validation does not entail annual reviews and boxes on a  checklist... It involves luck, connections and talent (in that particular order!).

They say that the biggest walls around us the ones we put up ourselves. If that's the case, then I live in a castle... And yet, Carrie Bradshaw style, you "couldn't help but wonder" what it would be like to wake up every morning and go to a job you absolutely love and which produces something unique, something beautiful.. literally on daily basis. Don't get me wrong, not that I don't think spreadsheets are not beautiful.. they can  be very aesthetically appealing depending on the colour palettes you use. Or not.

And of course I would be lying if I said money did not play a role in this whole internal debate. It does. very much so. The book I am currently reading had a brilliant quote in it: "money comes and goes. lifestyle comes and stays".  Enough said.

So until I work up the courage and earn enough money.. to copy and paste that resignation letter, I'm gonna keep on filling my little knowledge pot about what it's like 'on the other side' with useful information, keep on buying lottery tickets (because lets face it, then i could have my cake and eat it too) and keep on hoping that there are some things in life that are just meant to be. Hopefully it will all work out for me before my 80th birthday!

xx