On understanding.

Over the past decade or decade-and-a-half, I notice that some of the most sympathetic people who get where I’m at in life are actually the various artists that I know.

They don’t find it odd that people go around to different things and try different things out, since it’s like they would in a practice, and they don’t find it odd that people don’t get traction for stuff, since that happens in a practice, too.

That’s all on top of how essentially all the different research and writing and even much activism I do can often be like an intense ongoing practice that occurs on top of any dayjob that I might hold.

There’s also very specific social dynamics and personal experiences that they just instantly get, too.

Like, when I was saying how I was encountering rough patches for not having branding as a person with different parts of the various work I was doing, my one (art school) colleague who wears (women’s) clothes was automatically just like, yeah, the world really doesn’t ever let you really be more than one thing, like it was wisdom he had from seeing career trajectories of different artists, many of whom never even get known for one single thing.

And, when I had that exceptionally crazy intense experience where I was bringing forth my one huge research finding, I saw the one local animator who I vaguely know, and I apologized for being out of it and I said that I might be odd and out-of-it since I was just in the midst of all this stuff and my head was elsewhere and I had actually just realized some more stuff in another major insight on a long late winter walk right before I saw her, and I also said that I was just very afraid of death right then, and she immediately observed that she felt the *exact* same way many years ago when she was deep in the middle of this one big project that she is known for, where she was actually pleading to the universe, please, don’t let me die know, I need to get this THING out of me, and when she said ‘this THING” and she noted how it was just inside of her, it was like she was exactly describing my feelings, with my unbirthed research finding.

All very odd, but very interesting.

Many artists also have a very open and accepting and non-judgmental vibe, too, and are on board with people who do passion projects.