So there are a couple of memes I've seen going around that I wholeheartedly agree with. The memes all state in various ways that it's okay to be bad at doing something creative and to still enjoy the hell out of doing it. That is 100% true, you can be a terrible musician and still love playing music, terrible painter and still love painting. Absolutely! I support you 100% in your creative endeavours that bring you joy. But I would like to take a moment to discuss the inverse of this that rarely gets mentioned.

It is okay to be very talented at something and to only perform that talent when you want to. It's okay to be a talented musician who really only likes getting together to play a ceilidh with their friends now and then. It's okay to be a talented painter who only likes to paint sporadically when the mood takes them. It's okay to be an actor who only wants to do the odd community theatre play every now and then. It's okay to be a talented writer who really only wants to scribble poems and stories in a note book for yourself. It's okay to only use your talents to make your life happier when you want to do so. It's okay to only want to employ your talents with friends and people close to you. You are under no obligation to turn the talents that make you happy into a hustle. It's okay to not want to turn something you're very good at and love doing into a job. Your talents are yours and it's not selfish to decide you're going to use them to make yourself happy. It's not selfish to decide who you're going to allow to have access to them. Now matter how good you are at doing something there is nothing at all wrong with only doing that thing when you want to with no concerns about making it pay. It's okay for the only pay off to be the happiness it gives you.

We have a weird dialectic in our society that tells young talent that on the one hand they're stupid for going into the arts when it's a field that, with the exception of a very few elite, pays very little and yet also tells these artists that if they're not hustling every minute to exploit their talents for a dollar that they're "wasting their gift". This attitude is what causes artists to burn out. It's causes them to suddenly hate the thing that used to give them joy. Now some artists love the thrill of the hustle, and hey all the more power to you. But for some of us the hustle wears us down and sucks the joy out of creating and makes us fall out of love with the very thing we are exceptionally talented at.

Your talents are not a gift, they are something you earned through practice and study. Even for those few individuals who are born with brains already wired to excel at art, their talent is still their own. You do not need burdens and obligations heaped upon you just because you are really good at doing something. It is perfectly valid for you to wish to employ your talents, no matter how exceptional they are, to make your time on this Earth happier for yourself without any desire to turn it into an occupation. You have every right to decide when, where, how, and with whom you chose to share them. That's not selfishness, that's self care.