What is a Shadow Career and how do you know you have one? I learned what a shadow career was through the writings of Steven Pressfield, a writer and author about the creative life. He coined the term “shadow career” to mean a job or calling we take on while running away from our true calling in life. While I read this work by Pressfield, I was in the process of working at least two “shadow career jobs.” Now, I won’t go rehash all that Pressfield says about the shadow career, I am going to come at this idea from my own experience with resistance and distractions from my true calling, which I will call, “real work.”
Resistance
Pressfield talks about this general obstacle of resistance in his books, especially the War of Art. It takes many forms and is a relentless force that creatives have to reckon with. Some of the ways that I have experience resistance are perfectionism, fatigue, comparison, and distractability. These are things any creative would face often, but these are especially dangerous for neurodivergent people. Distractions don’t start and end with creative pursuits; they are everywhere, all the time. I can’t get through a single day without something distracting me from what I meant to do, derailing me from a task, and causing me to lose time and energy trying to get back to the subject at hand.
Fear
Often while doing the real work, we face regular failures, feeling out of control, or like we can’t get a quick result or fix for something aching inside us. A shadow career offers a distraction and balm for these feelings, and gives us an excuse to drop the real work and live an easier, less painful life. Here are some other terms that can fall under the category of fear:
Control
We value control of our own lives, and in a lot of cases, being creative means you have to relinquish that essence of control to be able to discover new ways of thinking and moving through the process. Being over-controlling of your creativity is a recipe for getting and staying stuck. The Shadow Career masks this stuckness as necessary and a personal failing, and not the reality of what it is. You have to allow the creative side of you free occasionally, or else it will grow stagnant and freeze in place, not allowing you to make anything you love anymore.
Stability
We all want to feel safe and secure, and having a job that will always be there, will pay on time, and will offer us benefits and an avenue to future higher earnings is something everyone aspires to. This isn’t to say that stability and our real work cannot go hand in hand, but often, the creative call to art is not one paved in gold. Another stability fable is that bad times are ahead and you got to ditch the frivolous artistic life and start packing goods away for the upcoming hard times. That, by all means, isn’t even a fable, but a piece of solid, survival advice. But it can also foster a “scarcity mindset” and when you always are afraid of this one day when everything will fall apart, you can never enjoy the moment, you can never rest easy in knowing that for the moment, you’re okay. It breeds anxiety and in our anxious moments, we defer to self-preservative, selfish, and honestly, self-destructive patterns just to have a moment of feeling safe again.
Excuses
“There’s no money in it.”
“I have no talent for it anyways.”
“This job is a stepping stone to more important creative skills.”
“I’m making connections.”
“This way, I can keep doing my real work on the side and people will take me seriously.”
“Every creative has a day job they hate, I’m no exception.” While some of these excuses hold more water than others, they’re all roadblocks that take away from the real work at hand. There’s no secret way to make the real work happen more officially or unofficially, you just have to do it. At the end of the day, the real work has to be done separately, in secret, or not at all while the Shadow Career holds control of us through these excuses. The only way you truly fail in this regard is if you completely give up on the real work and don’t tell anyone about it. Keep pushing forward.
Ego
How is anyone supposed to take us seriously when we’re over here, being creative, and not being that one important employee or business person? A shadow career offers a safe haven for the artist dealing with imposter syndrome, takes the real work down to the level of hobby or side project, and makes the whole thing feel low stakes and chill.
The Shiny Veneer of Luxury
Seeing people post on social media all their trips and nice clothes and things make us feel like the starving artist avenue through life is a chump’s errand and we jump ship away from our real work to make it closer to that sparkly life of pleasure. But let’s be clear, this is the same idea as winning the lottery. I myself can’t speak for the validity of social posts of yachts and ski trips while working for yourself online, but I do know that it cannot offer the happiness or satisfaction one might feel from setting their creative goals and achieving them. Yeah, maybe you won’t become a famous author, but if you never write the stinkin’ book, you’ll never get to know.
Imposter Syndrome
When we feel like phonies, we can’t take that creative endeavor as seriously as we need to because the haven of the security and assurance of the Shadow Career takes over. Just know this, a lot of us feel like phonies and have inferiority complexes, especially those of us who like to flex our accomplishments and talk about our process on the regular; you might be in the presence of a fellow imposter and neither one of you is actually chasing that true work and have the same Shadow Career.
Ableism
Only work that you have to get up and do physically, or do mentally, and produce a regularly occurring result is seen as legitimate work. Legitimizing certain work over other, specifically creative work, leads to ableist notions and feelings and makes life even more hostile and difficult for people who already struggle with disability .As someone who believes that our collective society has only gotten better with adjustments and accommodations for the disabled, I can no longer believe that there is no value in creative work or fields and no excuses to not advocate for as many creative jobs as possible. Having an ableist mindset, especially when you are neurodivergent and creative, is like having a backpack full of rocks strapped to your back and hiking up a hill, like trying to climb the same stairs every day when you have a broken leg and there’s an elevator or ramp just a few feet away. It’s not helpful.
Conclusion
While working at a job that you can take pride in and contribute to your health and safety is completely normal and logical, it cannot take the place of the real work. If you are a creative person and you have something inside you that your are struggling to bring to life through creative process, a shadow career is a very tempting prospect. The neurotypical world at large might encourage you, and in subtle ways, try to force you into a shadow career and think nothing of it. You might agree with the world in the beginning, but sooner or later, you will feel the compulsions, the urges, to create and have no room or permission to go after it. This is why, no matter how many tables I wipe down, no matter how many documents I prepare, no matter how many phone calls I take, and no matter how many odd jobs have to come and go in my lifetime, I will always call myself a creative and a writer, because that is my real work and what I was put on this planet to do. In the end, this real work is what will matter to me when I die, not how many times I failed at it, was criticized for it, or how much money it put in my pocket. It was the fact that I did it at all that counts.