What am I doing?

What am I doing? I had a stable job, a comfortable life, and students who loved me. Then what do I decide to do? Up and quit my regular 7am-3pm art teaching job to start my own mobile art center. I had this dream for a few years now to bring charity and art to my south shore community, not only when teaching the public school students in Kingston or East Bridgewater, but to reach as many artists that I possibly could.

So I quit my job.

It was one of the hardest decisions I had ever made. It still scares me to this day. What if I fail? What if I can’t match the amount of money I used to earn? Teaching art classes, hosting art parties, and selling art kits maybe not be as stable as my last job but I love to do it. It keeps me busy from 8am to 10pm every day. I stand by the fact that if you love your job, you work harder everyday in your life to make it work for you.

Running my own company is hard. Like, really, very, exceptionally hard, but it’s the type of challenge I was made to tackle. Mostly because of all the lessons taught by the people surrounding me in my life. I have to creatively problem solve all the time. I have to budget and fix and plan all day every day. Sure, creating art is part of the job but so is advertising, networking, website design, posting, shopping, and CLEANING, are also huge parts of my gig now.

I can confidently say the teacher in me rejoices every time I get to show others how to draw, throw a pot, or paint in a lesson. But this line of work goes so far past being in a classroom. I can meet artists where their skills are. I have work individually on skills they want to learn. I get to donate art and money to different charities to help make artists lives better. My work now gets to reach many towns over. I get the opportunity to teach artists in Marshfield, Plymouth, Pembroke, Kingston, East Bridgewater, Scituate, Rochester (and so many more) of all different ages. That’s an opportunity I’ve never been able to access before.

Finally I feel like I am doing what I can to support the artistic community around me. I hope my journey grows and grows but right now I am still trying to write my own job description. It starts as, “What am I doing?”