An Apology.
A creative life can make you 32 flavors of moody that your significant other didn’t sign up for.
Twenty-five years ago, my college creative partner and I started a business. Ostensibly an advertising business, but really more like a creative idea shop that became luckily entangled with more than our fair share of Fortune 100 –heck, Fortune 10 – brands. We’ve been as lucky as we were hardworking, but never particularly large, employing between 40 and 60 people at any one time after a couple years of just the two of us doing pretty much everything. Designing, writing, illustrating, photographing, production managing, account managing and new business-ing.
When you start a business, you don’t really think about the fact that you’re signing your significant other up for the worst parts of it. Your employees may see a confident, measured, rarely-complaining creative decisionmaker. My wife knows better.
Your business partner may get the best parts of you, but your home partner often gets the worst. After two and a half decades, I apologize. To all the spouses and home-partners of small business entrepreneurs, in fact.
My wife had a way of seeing right through my stiff upper lip to my mood:
“How worried should I be?” she’d say if I came home bleak.
“Not as worried as when our former employer lost its biggest client on the day it moved into its new building.”
“How about on a scale where that’s a 9?” She’d say.
“Today was… maybe a 7?”
For all the days away in exciting coastal cities in fancy hotels without them; the all-nighters at the office without them; the weekends that should have been that camping trip but was traded for a bleary recovery fully-fetal on the couch; or for the scripts that had to be rewritten, stealing vacation days together from them in a land six time zones away from the office.
For that delayed Valentine’s Day in 2002. Or the phone that rings on Labor Day 2005 to do emergency comms after Hurricane Katrina because no other agency would pick up the phone on a national holiday. For that time we arrived home from the airport, useless after being up all night on a bar crawl with the team from ESPN in midtown. (And we still didn’t get the business.)
And for the moods. The mood when a client kills something wonderful. Or the mood when the client kills something wonderful for a perfectly valid reason. The mood when a client slips away. Or when a great employee slips away for a job in a better city. Or a better agency. Or the mood after an expensive make-good. Or when there’s a global financial panic. Or a global pandemic. And another global financial panic. Or another Trump term. And another global financial panic.
“How worried should I be?” She asked.
“Today was… maybe an 8?”
And some days, it’s not because the sky is falling, but there’s simply the mood when anything even slightly creative refuses to free itself from your brain with just hours to deadline. And when something does free itself, what’s now running around outside your head isn’t the cleverest escapee.
Then, worse, the client falls in love with it, and you’re stuck producing something that really should have been something else, anything else, oh God, anything else.
“Today felt like a 12, but it was mostly a 3, really”
Work-life balance is truly important for your mental health. But apparently not mine. Our families didn’t sign up for the steamer trunks of moody luggage a business owner brings home. They were drafted.
My wife more or less successfully navigated, and managed, all the moods I couldn’t quite leave at the office. Even when I tried to leave them at the office, she would see right through it and ask, “how worried should I be?” I’d offer a rating and she would then be treated to a 40-minute one-man show in a long-running series titled, Nothing is Fair and Here’s Why it’s Not Fair Now.
There were the shuffled plans, cancelled plans, small panics, and not quite so small panics – and, mostly with grace, she helped make happen what eventually happened. And what happened, in the main, was pretty good.
We’re going to go ride horses in the central coast chapparal next week. I’m sure things are now permanently delegated in a manner that will make my meeting a horse there a certainty. But that certainty took a quarter century.
Healthier people than me say life is life and work is work, but that’s only if that work isn’t your life’s work.
And I’d ask, is doing work that you can comfortably turn off and not care about when you get home really worth spending over one half your life doing?
To be fair, more than half the moods in my moodiness period were good ones. A creative life is still the best kind. There’s nothing better in the world than coming up with something out of thin air and then getting paid for it — and eventually paid enough to hire other people to do it too.
But for not sharing more of that mood more often, I also apologize.
Moving forward, in this world of synthetic artists and parroting, ingratiating robot writers, living a creative life is only going to get tougher. And tougher on the people you love as you live it. Do what you can to not have to apologize for it all after 25 years.
How worried should you be? About a 7.
Expanded from an idea Mark Bradley had for our upcoming book, Twenty-Five Years of BaM. No AI was used in the creation of this story.
