“Get a job!” The echoed refrains of the elitist box dwellers and left brain thinkers with easy to quantify and market talents. No offense to my left brain box dwellers, the world desperately needs you for all those boring left brain jobs that us right brainers literally cannot do. Jobs that are necessary for the survival of the current techvolution of the species.You lefties keep us alive, counting, and plugged in, and us righties keep you sane, laughing, and give you something to plug in for. Mutual respect would be nice, but often we artists are met with job shaming.

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Get a Job? Are you kidding me with this crap? I have a job. As a matter of point I have FIVE very stressful and very time consuming jobs. Let me introduce you to my jobs.

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1. Mother. I start with mother because dammit it’s a full time job. A completely underappreciated, emotionally exhausting, full-damn-time job! You are at the beck and call of the client all day long (I have three bosses) and you are always on call, day or night. Add a toddler into the mix that literally cannot let his mother go without screaming fits and you have a recipe for emotionally draining disaster. Job duties include (but are not limited to); fecal waste disposal and cleansing, personal jungle gym, private chef, maid, personal care consultant, stylist, secretary of sibling relations, scream control facilitator, chauffer, snot collector, and therapist. The word “Mommy” is synonymous with “house slave” and “in house therapy counsel”. Which brings me to my next job.
    

2. Therapist. This comes in a close second to mother because it’s also a thankless round the clock job. I have personally struggled with my own mental health for as long as I can remember (depression, anxiety, and unchecked empathy) and on the road to my own recovery from a pain medication addiction I learned a thing or two about not only my empathy, but also human psychology. As I said before I’m also an empath so feeling other people’s pain and emotion and trying to fix it is second nature to me. Because of this perfect storm of psychological factors I have a need to help people and make them feel better. I’ve become a very good person to go to for advice, anxiety soothing, or laughter to take your mind off the anxiety. I’m able to patiently listen and try and give advice without attacking or in any way increasing the anxiety of an already anxious person. I understand that when dealing with severe anxiety the anxious person cannot be put under greater anxiety. Panic attack individuals are not going to come down from a panic attack if you start listing all the failings that are causing the attack to begin with. Solution and calm are the only answers. Sometimes I’m tired, in the middle of working/mothering or I’m emotionally fried, but I don’t have a job right so I can stop what I’m doing and listen. Right? Not really, but I usually try to anyway.
    

3. Writer. I wrote a book. Yes you heard me, I sat down and wrote a damn book. At just over 100,000 words I created an entire world and then went back and rewrote the world three times because I’m self-taught. Which means it takes me longer to learn and I make a lot of rookie grammatical mistakes sometimes, but I get there eventually. To put that into perspective. I sat down and wrote the equivalent of a 250 page book and then re-wrote it three times (Cause it SUCKED the first two times), then I sat down and laid out the entire series through book six, created a website, all the artwork for the brand, and worked my butt to the bone to market it. I also know nothing about publishing so getting that book out there has proven difficult. I haven’t given up though, I still send out query letters on a monthly basis and try to update the book whenever I have spare time to learn from my mistakes. I was maintaining a blog and I launched a website, but you know, I don’t have a job.
    

4. Photographer/Artist. These probably should have come first because photography is actually the only thing I’ve ever been paid to do. I went to school for it in the early 2000’s (still mostly film at that time) and then began working inside a commercial portrait studio within six months. I continued to work at the same company as a studio manager and photographer for the next ten years. I only stopped working to take care of my health and was out of commission for three years. As of January 7, 2017 I launched photocass.com with a hurried three months of work, and I am now fighting daily to market the website WITHOUT money in advance for advertising. If I want to advertise, get the word out, and eventually drum up paid work I have to do it myself. Marketing people, I hate to break it to you, but it turns out that what you do isn’t a “Job”. Or at least it isn’t if you have to do it yourself without monetary help.
    

I am taking a short break in my list of jobs to explain one thing; my health is not normal. I have degenerative disk disease, I’ve been fused from my L3 to my sacrum, and we don’t need to talk about the bulging disk currently residing in the evil that is my spine. I live in pain. My first surgery nearly killed me, and it took seven years and homelessness to break the bonds of prescription drug addiction. During that seven years I developed a nasty stomach problem, courtesy of legal drugs, that continues to haunt me to this day even though I REFUSE to take any kind of prescriptions besides antibiotics (and I had better be dying). Currently I’m a chronic insomniac, live in pain, have no natural appetite, and I’m constantly nauseated. I work very hard to cover my health issues so you can’t see them. I don’t want you to see them. Life isn’t about pain and misery and wallowing in hardship. It’s about beauty and laughter and embracing the simple joys. This leads me to my last job.

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1. Activist/singer. I grouped these together because they go hand in hand for me. I started singing in my church choir because I LOVE music (all music; from rock to metal to classical to gospel) and it helped to soothe the pain. Suddenly I’d become a part of a community, I felt close to the God of my understanding, and it saved my life. Church led me to many different causes, one being the River City Mixed chorus (Nebraska’s only LGBT mixed community chorus) which allowed me to add my voice in the benefit of others. Both of these things combined helped me get to a place where I was healthy. When I could finally buy a camera again I hit the streets and embraced my passion. In a little over three months I had photographed seven rallies/vigils and five families, edited over a thousand photos and sacrificed countless hours and sleep to that cause. Which I am happy to do, but it is work and work is still work even if you aren’t paid for it.
    

Life isn’t just hard work, life is just plain hard. Since the day I excitedly received my new camera in the mail back in November of 2016 I’ve had an absolute roller coaster of fuckery and I’m ready to get off this bullshit ride. It’s like a Final Destination movie; inescapable horror scene after scene and just when you think they escape, everyone dies in literally the most gruesome way possible!!!
 

Here is where my favorite song from Spring Awakening floats into my head……

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“Yeah you’re fucked all right and all for spite. You can kiss your sorry ass goodbye. Totally fucked while they mess you up, cause you know they’re gonna try. Totally fucked!”

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Here is my series of Totally Fucked events.(my apologies on the language, but I have reached that point) Let’s start about a year ago with my SSDI denial. We could start with my first “minor” back surgery. The one where the doctor nicked a blood vessel and I bled internally, the one that filled my abdomen with blood for three months and started the spiral of addiction, but I prefer to start AFTER I managed pull myself out of the gutter.

 

Because of my health I had applied for Social Security Disability four years ago. Last June I had my hearing. I was Denied. Due to my age, prior addiction, and lack of medical documentation for two years (I had lost my health insurance and was homeless during that time so I couldn’t get medical attention. And at this stage in my degeneration “medical treatment” means drugs so I say FUCK NO to that!), I didn’t have the means to defend myself and I lost.

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I didn’t give up, I renewed my efforts on the book and pushed forward. Rejection after rejection came back and in the fall of 2016 I entered into an agreement with my mother to give me until the end of 2017 to establish myself and move out. I moved back in with my mom AFTER I kicked my prescription addiction because I had a family to raise, my disability was pending, and she had the space. All signs from my earlier medical records indicated I would win the case so there was no reason to fear for the future. Clearly that didn’t work out for me, but my family saw how hard I was working and gave me time.

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As the year drug on I realized that selling a book was hard and I needed to supplement my income. A “regular” job isn’t an option, because my stomach can go bad at any moment and it often takes me days to physically recover from strenuous activity. However, I’m a photographer and I can make that work for me. I just needed a camera. In November 2016, after weeks of watching Ebay for the perfect camera within the price range of my meager budget, I found my Canon 60D and won the bid. I was damn gleeful and stalked my post office for a week until it arrived. The glee was short lived.

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Two weeks after it arrived, both my maternal grandparents suffered major health issues at the hands of old age. We had to transition them into assisted living and they were moved in right before Christmas. I am EXTREMELY close with my grandparents so I put my business on hold and helped in any way I could. As soon as they were settled I scheduled all my promotional sittings for the week of break before New Year’s and pushed my January first launch deadline back to the seventh. I gave myself one week to edit five family sittings and build an entire website from scratch with no help.

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I succeeded in launching the website on time. No sleep, an IV drip of caffeine, and Doctor Pepper by the truck load carried me through, but I still finished in time for my own (extended) deadline.

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Launching a website’s great, but getting traffic there is hard. I don’t have money for marketing. What did I do then?

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I didn’t get a chance to find out. Four days later I had an ovarian cyst rupture and it knocked me down hard for five full days.

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Three days later, on January 20th 2017, Darth Orange became leader of the formerly free world.

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The day after The Empire took over, 3 million women lead the resistance and marched around the world. I was lucky enough to be there with my camera. I was lucky enough to be on the streets doing what I love and fighting for all the things I believe. I was alive again, I was #WomanStrong.

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In the following two weeks I was present at seven rallies and vigils with my camera.

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Then came the flu and Nailgate (I am not explaining that one, but just know it was bad).

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On February 14, 2017 my paternal grandmother died. With seven rallies/vigils worth of work to do and a barely recovered family we drove to Iowa. My father had asked me to sing so I bottled my emotions up tight and sang at my grandma’s funeral. I kept it together even though I felt it slipping.

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I arrived back in Omaha to find out that I had missed a meeting with Employment First. Which I shouldn’t have had since I’m self-employed and my last interactions had me in transitional reporting, but there was a mistake and I’d been put back on active for “no longer working”. I receive ADC and Food Stamp benefits and was put on transitional reporting when I launched my photography business. My projected income would be enough that I would lose ADC (which I didn’t care about), but my food benefits would be protected for 6 months as I launched my business to give me a chance for income to start coming in.

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They screwed up and misran the budget. I lost my transitional reporting benefits status and will have to reapply for Food Benefits. My projected income is greater than the cap for food benefits. I just lost the ability to feed my children, yet I have no money coming in.

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That last straw, the ability to properly feed my children, that is what put the final crack in a barely held together individual. I am not a person who cares about money. I never have. I am not materialistic because I have seen firsthand the perils of retail therapy (watching it taught me that stuff doesn’t bring happiness, experience does). So I would just as soon volunteer my time and energies to making other people laugh and feel beautiful than do it for the almighty dollar. However, we live in a capitalist society that runs on money and greed. Things get done with money. Things are EASIER with money. I can’t feed my children without money, I can’t put a roof over their heads without money, I can’t pay for my car without money. I can’t afford the programs or technology for my business without money.

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How in the hell do I turn five full-time jobs into one that brings income so people can stop saying “get a job” to someone who works from 6am until usually 1 or 2am every day. Because I work five jobs every day with no breaks or vacation time, no benefits or medical leave, and no pay. They are all extremely stressful yet flexible enough to work with my unpredictable health and that is what matters. If I am sick and nauseated, I can still work. If my back is in spasm and I can barely move, I can still work. If I had even a part-time “job” I would lose it faster than I could get a new one because of my health.

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Literally the hardest thing for me to do is ask for money or support, but I have to ask now.

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Do you like my work?

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Does it make you smile or bring beauty into your day?

 

Do you have a project you need a crazy artist for?

 

Do you need a photographer or know someone who does?

 

Would you like to collaborate?

 

Are you a supporter of the arts?

 

Do you support other moms who are killing themselves with five jobs when society tells them they don’t have one?

 

Do you support expression and the resistance?

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Are you a rich philanthropist who wants to throw money at a starving artist because you believe in the art and message?

 

Would you like a copy of my book to read, critique, and either rave about or help me improve upon it?

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If any of the above applies to you, please do at least one of the following to help. (all three would be better, but I appreciate any help so even a “Like” makes me happy).

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Share my Website and Facebook page with your friends, then follow me on Instagram and twitter. http://www.photocass.com, http://www.facebook.com/photocass, @rockinphotocass (twitter) and @portraitsbyphotocass (Instagram) 

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Make a donation at http://www.paypal.me/PhotoCassDonate

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Or contact me for a print, booking, or to purchase an online copy of my book #Cataclysmic. at Portraitsbyphotocass@gmail.com

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Being an artist is not as easy as going in and applying for a job. It is selling yourself in an age where social media is queen and everything is subjective. I am doing the best I can, but sometimes even the strongest women need to ask for help.

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This is me asking; please Help!