#but yeah that means chronic pain for the foreseeable future

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

More than anything, I want to make a living doing something creative. I want to draw, I want to animate, I want to write, I want to film, I have so many ideas but no skill and no attention span. Neither of those are insurmountable hurdles, I can improve both with practice, but the more I observe creative industries the more I realize they're not nearly as lucrative as they appear from the outside.

Before I deleted my twitter account, one of my mutuals was a professional animator who has worked on dozens of shows for Disney and Warner Bros, and they're struggling to make ends meet. They're more talented than I could ever dream of becoming, and they have to couch surf in order to not become homeless. A ton of Emmy and Oscar award winners, the best of the best of the best, live in squalor and can't even afford insurance. They're all living the dream, they're undeniably successful by every other metric, but financially they're in the hole.

What chance do I have? If they couldn't make it work, how could I?

A youtuber I've followed for years just posted a video saying they have to give up animating for the foreseeable future because their art has done irreparable damage to both their wrists; they have chronic pain, and even after six months of physical therapy they simply can't work anymore. They're famous, they have millions of subscribers and thousands of monthly patrons, and their livelihood just went up in smoke.

Again, what chance do I have?

If I put in the effort to get good at something, even half as good as any of these creatives, even 1% as good, I'll be in the same miserable, penniless boat as they are. It feels like fighting against entropy, a ton of hard work to try and stave off the inevitable. If you let up for even a second, you lose so much progress that it doesn't seem worth it to keep trying. I will never be as famous or as talented as my favorite artists because I don't have the temperament to keep going against the odds. I'm weaker than they are. They have every right to be proud of their work for its own sake, but they still have to eat. You can feel good about making something, but if it doesn't pay the bills it's hard to stay motivated.

The dream of making it big and never having to work again is just that, a dream. It's like winning the lottery; yeah, sure, "somebody has to win," but that doesn't mean you will, and there's no correlation between input and output; the odds are so long that spending ten or a hundred or a thousand times more money doesn't significantly increase your chances of winning. A million times zero is still zero. In the case of art, hard work does not guarantee success. It's all random! A handful of people make it big by chance and the rest of us look to them as inspirations, but even if you do EXACTLY what they did you're not gonna wind up like them.

The act of creation should be emotionally fulfilling, AND you should be able to make a living doing it...

[hunterinabrowncoat]

Things people don’t tell you about chronic illness #349875

Abled people have a really hard time accepting “I am not going to get better from this” as a prognosis.

I couldn’t tell you the amount of times I’ve told my tutor that my condition is congenital, that it’s in my DNA, that there is no cure, that I’m going to be dealing with this and living with this for the rest of my life. Yet almost every time I bring it up with him, he says that he’s still holding out hope that I might get better.

You’ll get tired of hearing this over and over and over again.

“You never know, it might get better!”

“Well I knew someone once who had similar problems and [insert alternative diet or exercise program here] was really useful and really helped!”

“I mean with all the medical advancements they’re making nowadays, there’s bound to be a cure someday”

The really difficult thing about these is that most of them are true. Yeah, there is a one in a million chance that you could be the Case Which Baffles Doctors™ where you spontaneously, miraculously get better. But in all likelihood you won’t.

Some people with some conditions find that certain diets or certain types of exercise really help them manage their condition. But that’s probably not true for you.

And maybe someday they will find a super cool isn’t-science-awesome cure. But you probably won’t be around to see it.

And you can’t construct your entire life and your emotional well being around a bunch of “maybe”s. You have to plan your life around the bleak prospect of being ill for the rest of your life. You have to make accommodations for that. You have to come to terms with the fact that you’re ill or in pain and it’s going to be that way for the foreseeable future. And other people will have a problem with that.

It’s actually a lot harder for other people, namely ablebodied and healthy people, to accept that things won’t get better. It makes them feel totally powerless. They can’t do anything to fix it. They can’t make it go away. And you’ve just told them that you’re going to suffer for the rest of your life the way you’re suffering now. They feel totally helpless; the see what they percieve to be a hopeless situation, and feel the need to say something, anything to make it better.

But it’s not healthy.

You need to be able to grieve the life that you thought you’d have. You need to grieve the “normal life” that you lost. And just like if you’d lost a loved one, it’s not healthy when you’re trying to grieve so that you can move on and come to terms with what’s happened, and everyone you know keeps trying to tell you that your “old life” - a healthy pain-free life - hasn’t actually died, they’re just sleeping right now.

And it’s okay to correct people. To remind them that your health isn’t going to get better. Because the world needs to get used to disabled people being there. It needs to learn to be okay with disabled, chronically ill, and terminally ill people existing, and continuing their lives after their diagnosis.