Passion and Need

PASSION AND NEED

BY Esther Young

All throughout my twenties, my hustle revolved around balancing passion and need. I balanced full-time jobs with gigs on the side, which ranged from interviewing artists and writing articles to hosting live events and performing. It wasn’t that I needed the side income so much that I craved the fulfillment that my side work could give me. 

For better or worse, I’m one of those people you could label an all-around “creative.” My long-running passion is songwriting–just tinkering in my universe of music and prose–, but I also thrive in spaces where you put others on, listen for their message, and draw it out like communal medicine. Naturally, I got involved in plenty of people-centered creative projects as my “5-9.” And all the time, I dealt with the trade-off in my own capacity for personal projects.

Every year, every conflation of creative deadlines, after every rough day at work, I asked myself the same question: when would I leave? When would I quit and lean into my “passion” gigs to sustain myself creatively and financially?

“Every year, every conflation of creative deadlines, after every rough day at work, I asked myself the same question: when would I leave? When would I quit and lean into my “passion” gigs to sustain myself creatively and financially?”

It’s a loaded question. You have to contend with your privilege—what it means to give up the employment and the salary that so many others would gladly replace you for—to even entertain the question. You’ve got no student debt, loans, caregiving responsibilities, or a disability that relies on employer-sponsored benefits.

And then you have to decide how “skilled” you really are. What if, when you bow out of this conformist setting–where you reconvince yourself daily that someone else’s agenda can be your own–you discover that you cannot sustain a living? What if, in an ironic twist, you lose your newfound independence due to financial need?

I feel both fortunate and proud to say that, in the last year of my 20s, this scrutinizing nature of mine–some combination of audacity and nonconformity–got me pushed out of my job. It launched me precisely into this lifestyle I once fantasized about.

Now, everything I do to sustain myself is nourishing. My “passion” work has become my actual work, and I do not have to lie to anyone. 

Moreover, I am excited to engage in creative work-trades and skill-swapping as an anti-capitalist practice. For example, instead of paying for a dance studio membership, I gladly give my time as a front desk ambassador. Some of my piano students pay me in skills of their own. This system runs on value alignment–no third party decides our worth for us–and it runs on lived experience, where something about the way you grew up means you can teach me something I don’t already embody

My nervous system is resetting, too. Now, I get to apply my energy to refining the skills that contribute to the world I want to live in, and giving what I can. This is the opposite of having to remold myself every morning for work, readying myself to “unsee” hypocrisy and to temper my emotions for “tactful” conversations that were really about flattering those with more power.

I have always meant to tell an authentic story through my work. Now I am.