Welcome to The Anti-Hustle.
This newsletter has a simple purpose: to inspire you to find your own contentment, despite internal and external pressure to measure your worth by your career.
Here, we’ll meet people actively reclaiming success from the "always-on" mentality that our modern society romanticizes.
I inadvertently took a 5-month break, but I’m officially back with a new story and a new format. Let me know what you think in the comments.
I hope you enjoy it!
Writing has always been a struggle for me. When I get into the practice, the more I do it, the easier it becomes. But when I don’t write for long periods of time, the practice feels stiff and disjointed. Like exercise or yoga, it feels so good when I finish — it’s just the getting there that’s tough.
As an on-again-off-again writer, it feels untrue to call myself an actual writer. This also stems from the idea that I’m not doing it full-time in the “true writer” sense. But much of this is tied to the societal ideal that if you love something if you’re devoted to it, you commit fully. Your identity is tied to what you do and this should be the sole pursuit. This is what gave birth to this newsletter – breaking down this idea that we are only one thing, we can one thing and another. In this interview, I sought to get to my friend’s, “Yes, and…”.
I first met Alaina Clarke through a mutual friend. We became really close when she happened to be in my city for a jewelry show and we met up for dinner. Over the pandemic, we became even closer during our weekly virtual happy hours. Our isolation and hunger for good conversation led us to continue talking for hours every video chat.
Alaina is someone else who has learned to contend with being an artist and holding down a job. She is a big proponent of breaking down the “starving artist” mentality. She strongly believes you can treat your work like a career and still love it.
Alaina Clarke is a metalsmith by trade and recently launched her own business, G.E.M Creative. G.E.M Creative cultivates a diverse equitable environment for all creatives through education and dialogue. It’s a space to learn business practices and leadership skills while developing strategies for long-term success in a way that's complementary to how you create.
When she’s not working on this, she moonlights as an event and project manager and continues to run her jewelry business, A. Clarke Metalsmith.
For this month’s Anti-Hustle, I talked to her about metalsmithing, being an artist, and why putting up boundaries is vital.
There exists this mentality of the starving artist or the refusal to sell out for the sake of making enough money. In many ways, there’s a movement that’s growing away from this and acknowledging the fallacies behind the idea. On the other hand, artists in our culture aren’t supported the way they should be. These lines of thought mixed together, often mean that when it comes to creating a livelihood, creative types are left unsure how to proceed or create art while also working a full-time job. Alaina has lived this journey and was excited to share her story.
Alaina attended an arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She began as a ceramics major, but started studying metalwork at the same time and loved it. Despite having a devotion to ceramics, she ultimately decided to major in metals. While it was a hard decision in some ways, in others it was very easy.
Alaina began working with clay during her sophomore year of high school.
“I just absolutely fell in love with the process and the way that it feels, the therapeutic qualities. And then once I got to throw on the wheel, I was just hooked.”
But when Alaina began taking ceramics classes in college, she didn’t feel safe. The ceramics tech, who was also teaching wheel throwing at the time, began showing her unwanted attention.
“It was just a feeling that I got and I was uncomfortable. I was getting looks and stares and he was trying to pass near to me [during class] closer than he was everybody else. [He was] paying attention to me in a different way than I observed [with] everybody else.”
Alaina brought it up to the head of the department's attention, who didn’t see any cause for alarm. She recalls him saying, “I don't know what you expect me to do about this.”
Alaina wound up reporting the professor. Although it wasn’t a pattern of harassment, she felt uncomfortable. After this, the tech stopped helping her in class. She wasn’t being taught anymore. Luckily, a few older students took her under their wing.
Meanwhile, Alaina found that her metalsmithing classes provided the compassionate environment she needed during a tough time. Her female professors showed her a lot of support. Alaina felt as though she wasn’t a great student, but they saw something in her that they helped nurture. It seemed as if they knew she would never be a full-time artist. Alaina fought against this idea for a long time. It wasn’t until later down the road, in graduate school, that she started to believe it was okay to work a full-time job and be an artist second.
Towards the end of her time at college, she was also diagnosed with celiac disease and was in and out of the hospital often. All of this made it hard for her to be the student she truly wanted to be. But immersed in the metalsmithing world, she found a wealth of compassion and patience.
“I just flourished more in that environment than I would have in a negative environment where people were putting so much pressure on us and [saying], ‘You can't do anything else, be anything else except for a ceramics major!’” she said.
Alaina eventually returned to her school to get a master’s degree in public administration.
Her work there led her to develop a curriculum that would teach creatives more about business and entrepreneurship in a way that was complementary to their particular learning style.
After graduate school, instead of just focusing on her jewelry line, Alaina worked in a range of positions. She didn't want to be labeled by just one type of role.
One of her first jobs was working as a conference director for a metalsmithing organization, which seemed like the perfect combination of all the worlds she had previously been part of. However, it turned out to be an extremely toxic environment. She worked 70 hours a week and had to be on all the time, largely because of her boss. Not only did her boss refuse to respect boundaries, but she was very toxic to be around. She gaslit and manipulated Alaina, pulling her into interpersonal drama and playing mind games.
While in this position, Alaina sensed there was an unwritten rule that she had to be a metalsmith first and any other job should be secondary. But her long work hours meant she could no longer be creative. While part of the pressure came from herself, a bigger part came from the community she was involved with.
Alaina leaned into this mindset. She launched a jewelry line while working on art shows. It soon began to weigh on her — heavily.
That summer, she decided to quit the director job and focus on her jewelry. She felt mentally unwell from the gaslighting her ex-boss had heaped on her. Jewelry became her main source of income. She wasn’t making enough to support herself, but it helped heal her. That year became something of a gap year, during which she worked and lived with family.
In 2019, prior to the pandemic, Alaina moved to Ferndale, Michigan. She was ready for a new environment and wanted to get a better sense of the economic impact the arts had in other places in the state. She naturally thought of Detroit because of its vibrant and well-funded art community.
While she still never planned to become a full-time jewelry designer, she wanted to continue to support the arts. She began thinking more about the economic impact of artists on communities. That’s when she was struck by a realization: her now myriad experiences had given her a deeper understanding than most of the inner workings of successful businesses at both the corporate and grassroots levels. As an artist herself, she was uniquely positioned to take a big step and launch her most daring venture yet: G.E.M. Creative. She essentially wanted to help creatives learn how to treat their work like a business. Her belief is that you can be an artist without constantly struggling to make ends meet. You should be able to step away from your work at the end of the day, just like any other job.
Rather than go all-in on her new business, Alaina wanted to keep creating. “I think it's really important for me to be practicing, as I’m teaching other people how to do this, so I can stay current in the field. It’s a ‘yes and…’ situation. Yes, I do this and I do this because they work so symbiotically with each other. I can't be one without the other.”
Metalsmithing is refreshing for Alaina. She doesn’t need to do it every day and can schedule time to devote to it. For her, making jewelry is a release, so much different than working at a computer or teaching. “I think the hardest part about jewelry or about maybe any artistic practice is that like anything else, sometimes you just have an off day and you have to be okay with it.”
When something isn’t working for her, she tries to walk away and come back when she’s refreshed instead of pushing through her frustration.
In fact, she says, “I think that's why I was really drawn to your Anti-Hustle idea because I'm in this phase right now where I'm in anti-hustle [mode]. Of course, I work my butt off but I'm not working more than 40 hours a week because I take my mental and emotional health really seriously.”
Alaina brings this mindset to her business as well. Whenever she first meets clients one-on-one, she asks them how they are. When they respond, “I’m fine!”, she pushes back with, “No, how are you?” That’s when the real answer comes out.
She spends the first 15 minutes letting them vent because it makes for a more productive meeting. Not only does it help the client feel better, but she’s a neutral person to whom they can air their frustrations.
Much of the teaching Alaina is doing focuses on the artist’s “why”: Why are they creating? What’s their story?
For Alaina, her “why” is a work in progress. “I don't think I could say it in a sentence. I think the mission of G.E.M. Creatives is to empower creatives to be entrepreneurs. That's what we do. [Artists] may not necessarily make enough money to apply for an entrepreneurship competition or have investors — they may not even want investors. But that doesn't mean that they still don't want to succeed.”
She connects strongly to adrienne marie brown’s emergent strategy theory, based on the concept that small changes over time make big waves. Alaina likes speaking to people who feel like they don’t have a voice or have been passed over. She believes those people are the most observant because they aren’t self-serving. She feels pulled to the folks who are doing the quiet work, the work that sustains but isn’t noticed because it’s not trendy or flashy. For the people who want to create a business practice that funds our local economy but don’t have fantasies about becoming wealthy, Alaina wants to help them create a map to success.
Despite her new focus, at her roots, Alaina loves creating jewelry. Her first collection was actually a tribute to her best friend of over 20 years. She wound up designing two new jewelry lines based on their alter egos they created in high school.
For Alaina, this led to even more creation. Her simple yet beautiful pieces work for customers who are always working or on the go but still want nice jewelry. They fit not just a personality but also a lifestyle.
Her newest collection, the Strong Women collection, is inspired by the strong women who surround her. She even honored me and designed an India [piece], which of course filled my heart with joy and made me blush.
When she’s not thinking about art or jewelry, Alaina likes to dabble in yoga and pilates. During the pandemic, she began doing this more and it became fun for her, which was a novel concept. Alaina is the first to admit that she likes to be skilled at something and in control when she’s doing it. Letting go and allowing failure to be a part of the process is difficult.
During the pandemic, she also got more involved in gardening. She has learned a lot of new things about it. She also learned how important physical touch was for her well-being.
“Living alone during a pandemic was probably one of the hardest things for me personally, not [having] somebody there to just put a hand on my shoulder. Through gardening, that was another form of physical touch that helped sustain me, and I was not expecting that at all. But putting my hands in the dirt and moving things around and growing living, breathing things, then being able to consume them. Maybe it wasn't necessarily physical touch, but it sustained the love language. I found a different way to communicate that with myself.”
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