Multi-hyphenate Freak Mode™️ 🏎️💨
resisting packaging and simplifying ourselves for consumption
Going to art school means at some point sitting through a lecture about story structure and Joseph Campbells Hero’s journey (or maybe I’ve bored you with this creative allegory before). We get sweet hero cuties call to adventure, we cross the threshold from ordinary world into the unknown! We journey to the magical elixir, come back home and celebrate with the people! The End! etc etc.
If I were to try to explain my creative career (so far) it would not be easy to package up. It’s not linear, its not cute, it doesn’t make for a great headline to sell my life story or an instagram ad to get you to buy something. It also its like one nice word to put in an ig bio. It starts in freelance illustration makes a squiggly path to managing kickstarters and marketing campaigns. Left turns into 9-5 marketing girlies and pivots to not-for-profit boo. I’ve created installation works for festivals and cities. I’ve taught yoga classes in parks and pilates in art galleries. I’ve been paid to write sing, dance. I’ve read radio ads, voice acted, really anything that 1. sounded fun and cool and not boring 2. would pay my oat latte habbit
The actual creative path isn’t linear. Our journey doesn’t have some nice tied bow of start middle and end.
I understand why artists freak out over picking one thing to package up and choose to market. It’s a desire of capitalism, to be as consumable as possible. To be understandable, highly marketable, viral, overnight sensation! Clear story structure and plot!
I continue to do the most™️ in my current job as a full time artist freelancer. Any bio I try to write follows a string of hyphens like podcaster-poet-writer-artist-editor-coach-director-consultant-big ideas haver. Yesterday I hovered over a button signing up for a standup open mic
The container doesn’t inform the idea, its very much the other way around. I think a multi-hyphenate knows the ideas shape the container. So that we end up trusting and following that spark, instead of trying to finagle it into something it doesn’t want to be. The drama comes (I think) when we are trying to avoid multi-hyphenate freak mode. When we start tinkering and trying to control the outcome. When we ask what parts of ourselves to avoid or cut off our re-package or start separate instagram accounts for or decide NOT to follow because “I am already knee deep in historical french weaving practises, I can’t possibly explore ancestral trauma and identity the through the oboe even thought there is a song in my heart” – or something like that.
Our job as artists is to translate idea to medium.
I don’t paint because I am a painter. I paint because the idea asked to be a painting. I don’t write because I am a writer I write because the idea is writing. And maybe the idea could also be a painting and a movie and an off off off Broadway play, but I can only know and trust that if I listen to the idea. If I embrace all possibilities and forms of artist.
Embracing the multi-hyphenate freak mode is similar (or maybe a part!) of trusting the process. A not cute thing we throw around at each other. Easy to say when things are good, flowing, some version of stillness. But trusting the process, being a multi-hyphenate, actually means doing those things. Even when it is hard. Especially when its hard. Its a constant practise. Its a balance of playing with perfectionism and failure tolerance (which btw
just wrote a stellar piece on)When I think of the greatest art I have consumed I didn’t pick it up because it WAS a painting or a book. I didn’t go out searching for something to move me. It was the shape of someones idea that struck something into my heart. Not the medium. (Im just gonna now point you in the direction of
“I regret to inform you that you actually are creative, too.”I read and follow and consume the human being behind the art, not the art in the context of itself. I want the 3D in my art, I want the human, I want to know what you find interesting, what seed of an idea your pulling through. And I think ultimately, if I were to put a bow on it. That is how we fight these demons of capitalism, by not being linear, by unclenching from the ideas of outcomes and marketability for marketability sake.
I don’t think our ideas are random. I think at the heart of it all we’re finding the commonality, the intersection of all that we explore in the multi-hyphen. So like yes I am a podcaster-poet-writer-printmaker-stand up-creative-director-strategist-yeller-on-roof-tops-artist-freak-weirdo, but the how I make something, the outcome, doesn’t matter. The why, the idea, the seed. Thats the nuggets of this thing.
Many blessings on your creative journey. May it be as squiggly, rando, full of twists turns and an unfettered embrace of the unknown 🪄May you embrace each creative project in your wholeness 🪄
FINDINGS 🗺️
You didn’t think I was just gonna leave you hanging? This month inside the Creators Dispatch Open Studio! HOW TO BE A MULTI HYPHENATE! (obvi!! 💁🏻♀️)We’re bringing all parts of ourselves to the table and laying them all out on the floor and getting good at talking about all parts of us
Workshops are for paid subscribers of the Creators Dispatch! Monthly subscribers get access to locked essays, and monthly community events. To join our community for $15 CAD/ month + get access to workshop recordings in podcast form, archive of paid essays + past episode of the Creators Dispatch podcast
The Performance of Pitching AKA How to tell stories in business (that actually make you money!) Feb 7th @7pm EST a free.99 storytelling workshop with Do You Ever Media 🎭
Did you miss last week’s dispatch?
xx
Phoebe 💕
*typos are left to reflect the fury passion and 3D humaness of being a passionate freak in the world – and you know not a robot *beep boop* I am just a human girlie living on earth with a mortal brain 🤸♀️(and also like, don’t be an ableist freak🥰)
Thanks for reading the Creators Dispatch. A weekly essay about the creative journey! Here I write about being an artist, human, angry woman on the internet and living in the dumpster fire of a world that says not to make your art. If what I say here inspires you (or pisses you off 🥰) share my work with the group chat, or your best friends neighbour. Word of mouth is the most special and radical way of sharing – plus it helps put the Zuck 🏄♂️ out of business 👼