Making Dreams Real: Trusting Your Own Process

Twenty years ago when I lived in another part of the country, I had a friend who taught English to refugees but whose real passion was acting. She'd lived in New York, played roles in off-Broadway theaters and had even toured Europe & the Soviet Union in a production of The Wizard of Oz as the Wicked Witch of the West. When I met her, her acting career had stalled and despite a decent job, she always felt restless. Her other friends and I urged her to audition for parts in community theater just to get on track again.

Instead, she did what many people with university degrees do during an economic downturn: she cycled back into grad school. For someone else, getting a PhD in theater might have been a smart move but my friend didn't enjoy teaching theater nearly as much as she loved doing theater. She amassed more debt than she could handle, couldn't get enough teaching hours to support herself (we lived in college town where it seemed like half the population had MFAs...sort of like PDX, in fact) and still wasn't doing what she loved most.

During hard times it's still tempting to believe that going "back to school" is the solution to both long-term unemployment and creative doldrums. And sometimes, certain types of group learning under the guidance of an experienced teacher can jump start a stuck career, whether it's a day job or after-hours passion. A weekend intensive or workshop can generate enough ideas to last a year, not to mention mutual support and companionship in the creative process.

Be very careful, however, of mistaking credentials for competence, especially in what's often called "creative" fields (I believe all work done well is creative; I'm just using the term here because it's familiar). Of the five women in my writers' group, I'm the only one who has a four-year degree, and I'm not the best writer among us. That honor goes to a member who left community college after her first semester and currently works in retail management.

In fact, a good percentage of my smartest, most articulate friends are not college graduates. After three decades of being in the workplace full-time & being involved in numerous community music and writing projects, I've seen that going to university is like taking vitamins. It's great for those who already have a good foundation - in the case of college, a good foundation includes common sense, critical thinking skills and a strong sense of purpose; with vitamins, the foundation is a good diet. But without the foundation, getting a degree is almost as useless as gulping 20 supplements a day while subsisting on twinkies and Mountain Dew.

We often distrust our own instincts, including gut feelings about what's right for us, where our greatest talents lie and what we can give the world. I believe that this distrust comes from living in a culture where the smallest decision is often relegated to "experts." Students are expected to specialize in something rather than being good generalists who can handle many types of situations and tasks. I suspect most of us are Renaissance people at heart; excessive specialization does all of us a disservice.

If you're stalled, some good group energy might be just what you need. But don't believe for a moment that you need outside certification to validate your own creativity. Find support but continue to trust your own process.