Midnight Mumbling

Gucci Skinny was hype when malnutrition from cheap food was common and when most of the middle class had desk jobs. Symbol of control over women who now had more rights.

** request **

- INFP: The Healer

- Pisces

- Hufflepuff

- Lawful Good

- Enneagram: Type 9, The Peacemaker

- Jungian Archetype: The Lover

If a client says they can’t afford to pay you but you’ll get good exposure, one of two things is happening:

1. They are lying. They can afford to pay you, but they are choosing not to. They will pay the printer to print the books, they will pay the mail service to deliver them, and you’d better believe they’re going to pay themselves for sending you an email explaining that they can’t afford to pay you. They think you are a sucker, and if you take the job you’ll be telling them they are right.

2. They are not lying. They have zero budget, no audience and no real distribution system. They’ll still be paying the printer and mail service because people who work in those professions don’t work for free just because someone promises them a recommendation. But they aren’t paying themselves, they’re running on an incredibly small margin, and there’s a good chance they won’t exist as a corporate entity in a few years. Publishing your work with them will give you less exposure than putting it on tumblr or Instagram for free would. It will never lead to a paying job. 

If a client starts ranting about the “short-sightedness” of artists, or otherwise complains about artists in general in their opening offer to you, run. Run as fast as you would run if a blind date spent the whole of dinner ranting about how horrible your entire gender is. Yes, there are doubtlessly clients who’ve been screwed over by artists in the past, but the ones who complain about artists in general will not respect you, they will not treat you well. 

Working for free does not prove that you are passionate about something. It proves that you do not need to be paid for your work. How many doctors went into medicine because they are passionate about saving lives? Do you think any of them are asked to perform heart surgery for free?

No one will ever pay $50 for something if they can get something similar for $5. When you charge next to nothing for art that you’ve worked for hours on, art that required years of training to create, you are telling your client that it is worth next to nothing. They will remember that the next time they want to hire an artist.

People who are looking to exploit artists know that artists are hard on themselves. They know that most artists don’t think their work is good enough to charge top dollar. They know that artists have been told from the first day they started taking their art seriously as a career that they’ll never make any money off it, that it’s not a real job, that it has no value to society. They know how to push artists’ insecurities about their profession in order to convince them that that demanding fair compensation is unrealistic and uncooperative.

If you’re just desperate for a job in the arts, any job in the arts, give yourself a job. Start a webcomic, or give yourself illustration assignments that you post on social media regularly, create work for a gallery show even if you don’t have one yet, or make a book. Give yourself a job. If you’re going to work for free, you may as well be working for yourself, setting your own hours and following your own interests. Having original art with original characters and ideas in your portfolio, and making sure your art is visible online will get the attention of publishers who are actually looking to hire people for good jobs. Drawing a shitty comic for a defunct publisher based on someone else’s shitty ideas will not.

MBTI: how they think and how they engage with the environment. Since their extroverted functions point outward, what are you seeing them use? Ne? Se? Te? Fe? What are they withholding from you? It’ll be Si, Ni, Fi, or Ti.

Enneagram: what their motives / fears are and what their coping strategy is. What’s their main drive? Perfection for themselves and others? 1. Helpfulness and needing/wanting love (sometimes being manipulative to get it)? 2. Being hard-working and achieving but disconnected from their feelings? 3. The need to be unique and different and stand out? 4. Bookish, withdrawn, secretive, and analytical? 5. Anxious but funny, inconsistent and distrustful? 6. Scattered and fun-loving, always in search of adventure? 7. Controlling and aggressive? 8. Peace-loving and passive? 9.

Some characters are way, way harder than others to figure out – their motives are obscure, they’re not well written, or they’re inconsistent or one-dimensional. People in real life can take longer sometimes, though on occasion a person’s personality or Enneagram stands out right away given their communication style or interests.

Most of the FJs I know are very private about their feelings. The MOST private ones have 5 and/or 9 in their tritypes. You may want to look into those.

But Fe’s seem to be more easily able to verbalize them when necessary.

I’m not sure how to express what Fi is like except… try to imagine describing an inner sensation to someone who has never done anything similar. Like, scuba diving. You can tell someone what it’s “like” to be under the water with all the fish, but you can’t make them feel what you felt. You can’t tell them exactly how the water feels on your skin, or the pressure underwater. You cannot make them feel as if they are there. You would either under-sell what it’s like (and feel you hadn’t done it justice) or wind up using metaphors.

That’s what Fi is like, inside.

There is so much going on in a Fi – and it’s all impressionistic. Abstract. Hard to define. A word like “happy” or “sad” doesn’t even begin to cover it. That’s why you wind up with metaphors. “The pain ripped me apart.” “It was like someone threw my heart into a wood chipper.” “I felt like my soul burst into a thousand stars.” Read poetry. A lot of it is Fi-driven. I can’t express how I feel unless I become poetic. Unless I use imagery. A Fi doesn’t know where one intense emotion ends and another begins, because they are all entwined. How do you pick them apart and share them? Where do you even start?

Any words you use won’t be ENOUGH. It can’t begin to touch the feeling.

That’s why sometimes a Fi won’t put up a fight about what they are feeling even if others aren’t understanding it, because it’s just easier to nod and let them think you are feeling THIS (because THIS is appropriate to the situation you are in, according to Fe) than to try to explain something you cannot put into words.