I am in my 30s, and my teenage years were the most colorful phase of my life. I had a guitar I never fully learned how to play; I could plunk out weary chords on a piano; I was in architecture school, and could stay awake for 72 straight hours watching my hands bring my imagination to life on tracing paper. I wrote stories and poems in the middle of all of that and drew portraits of girls I had a crush on, so they’d like me even more. Whatever I wanted to do, I did. Life seemed to always be at my beck and call. My life was borderless, airy, and colorful.
Age never announced its arrival as one imagines it would. You just wake up, or more aptly put, you come to the consciousness, that you miss yourself; that you are no longer doing the things that once brought color into your life. Your days feel dreary, and Life weighs down upon you. You feel lost.
This time in my life happened when I started raising a family, working a full-time job, and doing everything I could to get by. In fairness to Life (who has been kind to me all along) I didn’t have it hard even in this phase. I was still an architect — something I always wanted to be, and my daily job still offered the opportunity to do the things that gave my life depth and meaning. Yet, something was missing.
For a while, I took it out on my partner — I made her feel like she and our kids were the reason why my creativity no longer flourished. I was always restless. My life became an essay in contradictions. I wanted to travel the world and write about alien cultures but here I was in traffic waiting for lights that never turn green. I wanted to lock myself in a room for a week and come out with a new novel but I am assailed by the endless chants of daddy, daddy, daddy and I shutter my ears with both palms, at times wishing I could run away. The child in me wanted to lie idle, dream, and play with the gifts I had, but at every instance, I encountered resistance from the many things that my adult life had become. I chased clients all over town, waiting in lobbies of plush offices and feigning accents to get through the door. I had become a designer and accountant in my fledgling little renovation company, and when I wasn’t shouting at a contractor on the phone, I was straining my eyes to read Excel cells and numbers I’d rather not read.
At home, I contended with spooning milk into feeding bottles at odd hours of the night, while being available for conversations, family events, fights and arguments, sick days, and the endless drone of television. In those days, I swung erratically from happy and fortunate, to sad and miserable all the time. In all, I created nothing — or better phrased, I felt that I wasn’t creating anything. Each time I looked over the fence at the single men in my circle, I wished I was a bit more like them — free, unfettered, and creating.
Wishes Granted
Life must have become so tired of my complaining, that it decided to say yes to my wishes. It separated me from my family, and I found myself living all alone in a big house in which I became comfortable listening to the echo of my voice. And all the things I felt I was now free from; all of the creativity I thought I’d unleash on the world now that the obstacles were no longer in the way, did not happen. Even though I now had more time on my hands, I realized the true value of the things I’d considered a distraction to my flourishing. I missed my partner. I missed my kids. I missed the noise.
This realization was the starting point of my awakening.
Adulting had indeed altered my life, but what I’d missed was not appreciating the good that had come with it. Losing that (albeit temporarily) lent me the much-needed counter-perspective to see that all along, my frustrations were channeled in the wrong direction. Family wasn’t the obstacle. It was me. It was my failure to let go of an idyllic past that no longer represented my present realities. It was insistence on being torn between the world I’d romantically created, and the one I inhabited. It was not settling into the good of my situation while trying to find a balance. It was not realizing that in the grand scheme of things, things wait for other things to happen.
Things Can Wait
I wish I could say this realization came in one day — it didn’t. It took over 4 years of searching inside myself and negotiating the balance. In negotiating this though, my biggest learning was that as a child, my ability to do all the things that I did then was precedent upon the liberties the unseen hands of my parents created for me. At the time, for instance, I never had to do any jobs to earn the monthly income my parents paid into my accounts. I had my 24 hours free to do what 24 hours could do. But as an adult, I needed to do much more, and that part of finding balance was my prerogative — blame was lame, and with it came disillusionment. In all, I learned that things could wait, and I had to train myself to let things wait. I became comfortable with leaving an article half-written for a school run without feeling like my child was the obstacle, or holding back on a bucket list item because my partner was not ready. I appreciated my job as what it took to have the life I now lived, and not a mere distraction preventing me from living the life I wanted to live. Not only did I learn to adjust to the present, I learned to ascribe some value to the mundane. A walk with my family was no longer the time I could be completing chapter 8. It was a time to be together, and that had value.
Finding the right balance to remain creative is a lifelong vocation one must pursue in the face of constantly changing life situations. It helps you feel like you are doing what you are here to do, without feeling like you are losing out in the process. These few steps have helped me greatly with balancing adulting with the freedom I enjoyed in the years before bills, account statements, bawling children, and equally busy partners.
1. Keep Notes. Set Milestones
Because I no longer had unlimited time to do most things from start to finish in a sitting, I learned to keep notes and set milestones. What I could have created in 28 straight hours of caffeine-fueled hypercreativity in my youth, now took 5 days because there were many more interjections. However, I learned not to make this the precondition for not doing those things, or not finishing them either. Instead, I set milestones and pause at those milestones whenever I need to take a break. I keep notes on what needs to happen next and go about my other life activities. When I returned to it 4 days later, because I had a board meeting, a training session, and a school play to attend the day after that … I picked up from where I left without a loss of zeal and creativity.
Keeping notes and setting milestones has helped me greatly in getting the best of both worlds I inhabit now.
2. Unfinished Work? It’s Not That Much of a Big Deal
Growing up, there was a sign in our family living room — in yellow letters on a small black plastic plate — that read.
“Behind every successful person, is a whole pile of unwashed laundry.”
It didn’t make sense until I became that person. But now that I’ve become that person, I am settling down with knowing that I don’t have to do everything, or finish everything. I only have to make a decision per time on what can be finished and what can wait. With that, I stopped feeling guilty for the unfinished. If my pencil portrait of a face stopped at the eyes because I had a gazillion other things to do, so be it. I only needed to be mindful that those other things were more important than the portrait. Keeping buckets of half-done tasks scattered all over the place no longer bothered me as much as it did when I equated not finishing to a failure of creativity.
That said, for those things that are important, I expend twice the energy pushing myself to finish regardless of how long it takes. The real failure isn’t leaving things half-done. It is not finishing what is important.
3. Money: The Ultimate Perk of Adulting
As an adult who has enjoyed the good graces of considerable progress in my career, I am increasingly seeing the connection between money and time. I no longer have to do some things I did by myself in my youth. I can now easily pay people, with considerably more skill than I had then, to do it. For all the woes of adulting, being in a position to use money to achieve one’s objectives trumps its all. And this is what freedom in this phase of my life now means. It is no longer having 24 hours to do everything, It is having 24 hours to do things that other people cannot do for you. Even in my creative leanings, I can now hire a researcher to work alongside me as I create. I can hire editors to do the editing, or CGI experts to turn the idea into a visual spectacle.
What I lost exchanging my time for money, I could now regain by exchanging my money for other people’s time. In my creative pursuits, this has given me even more leverage. I can now focus on the juicy bits of whatever it is I am trying to create, and pay others to fill in the blanks. In the process, I get even better outcomes than I would have had I tried doing it all by myself.
4. Regime
About family, I have learned to create regimes. I’ve learned to set ground rules for moderation so that I can be to them what I need to be to them, and beto myself (and the world) what my gift demands. Setting up family time and work time became increasingly important in finding my balance. During the COVID lockdowns of 2020, instituting a regime became even more critical to sustaining our collective mental health as a family. I created a curriculum in which I self-taught our kids 4 hours a day for almost 8 months while keeping a full-time job, and writing my second book. Making it work required a strict regimen, and everyone’s collaboration; and we pulled it off. We all contributed to drawing the weekly plan and committed to abiding by it. At the end of the pandemic, our kids didn’t complain for one day that they were bored, sad, or burdened by the shadow the pandemic had cast upon the world around them. My second book was completed and published, and a third manuscript — my first attempt at writing a non-linear story novel, was also completed.
In all, keeping a regime and making the most of the time allotted for my creative pursuits put me in a much better position than I had been in my complaining years when I thought everything, and everyone else but me was the problem.
Final Word
For the creative, not doing what you feel you were created to do can be depressing, and I’ve been there. But blaming other people for your situation is futile. Finding value in the other things and learning to strike a balance is critical to flourishing as time and life situation changes. To the reader who hopes to someday find that balance, my heart is with you — keep on, you will find it. To those who already have, may your lights lead the way for the rest of us to the place of fulfillment.
Osundolire Ifelanwa
… in the grand scheme of things, things wait for other things to happen. This struck a chord in me. I’m at a point where all the things I blamed others for not being able to do look like they are about to start happening and I now understand it was only just a matter of time.
It was a lovely read per usual.