Getting Lost Is a Creative Apprenticeship If You Tell the Story Right

Learn to interpret your experiences in a way that points you toward your purpose.

Growing up, I always felt like I had my eyes on a target beyond the horizon. I knew there was something out there for me, but it seemed forever just out of reach. I kept trying for it even when it took me far from home and I felt utterly lost. I’m a seeker, as I think many creatives are. Having no roadmap for your life is exhilarating, but you will get lost. While it feels awful to go through, these times are your creative apprenticeship. Learning how to interpret your lost times can help you build a life that feels more meaningful and purpose-driven. The key is in how you tell your own story.

I’ll give you some examples from my own life of how this works. There have been two times that I’ve felt desperately lost. The first was when I returned from living overseas in my mid-twenties. I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I ended up taking any job that came my way. One was at a young internet startup, with all the office culture you’d associate with such a place, and another was at a retirement home that included a dementia ward. I had a master’s degree at the time; none of this work required one. A conventional perspective would be that I was wasting my education or taking work beneath me, but those jobs remain among the most valuable experiences of my life. In retrospect, they comprised my creative apprenticeship in the spectrum of the human struggle of becoming, from youth work culture to the experience of getting old. This period of my life informs my fiction more than any other.

Think of this as constructing your creative resume, except the stuff that goes on it is everything that would look bad on a conventional resume. Take experiences that make you feel like a failure in the conventional realm and reinterpret them from the perspective of the creative realm. Unlike formal apprenticeships, you often don’t know what a creative apprenticeship is training you for until after you’re done. It takes form in the way that you tell your own story in retrospect. No one is going to do this for you, give you a stamp of approval that says “Real Artist.” It is up to you to legitimize your own experiences. And let me be clear: your life experiences do qualify you to be an artist, and you can adopt that identity right now. 

The second time I got lost on my journey was when I was trying to finish my dissertation. I only had the mental and emotional energy to write twenty minutes a day. I’d spend the morning working up to my twenty minutes, drag myself from bed to do them, and that was it for me, day over. It was awful, but I knew not finishing would feel worse, so I kept going. I recovered from the writing by reading advice columns. All of them. Dear Sugar, Captain Awkward, Ask Polly, Carolyn Hax, Dear Prudence, Ask a Manager…. I even read Care and Feeding and I don’t have kids. I read the daily questions, I read the archives, and then I googled “advice columns” to find more.

How pitiful was I? So depressed I spent most of my days in bed refreshing websites in hopes they’d put up another question about problems I didn’t even have. Needless to say, my self-esteem was in the gutter. But something was happening. I started practicing answering each question myself before I read the response. Not for any purpose, just because it was another way to distract myself and pass the time. I began having opinions about the quality of the responses, disagreeing with some, learning from others. And around this time my acquaintances were coming to me more and more about problems they were struggling with…because I gave good advice. After I’d finished my dissertation, I began to see that dark time in my life more constructively. What if it wasn’t wasted time but part of my training for my purpose in the world? There was a lot more that happened along the way, but long story short, I’m now a creativity coach. I didn’t set out with this goal in mind, but reframing my experiences from the perspective of creative apprenticeship helped me get here.

Learning how to tell your own story can help you realize that you are legitimately qualified to express who you are in the world in the way that you choose, and viewing your experiences as training – apprenticeship – can help you tell that story. If you want to live a fully liberated creative life without apologies, it’s essential that you believe from the depths of your being that you have a right to do so. And you do. You’ve earned that right. You’ve got this. You’ve trained for it.

So take a look at your own experiences, and in particular the stuff that conventional mores tell you isn’t valuable. How do you spend your down time, when you aren’t involved in stuff you have to do? What we gravitate toward when we are depleted by life responsibilities shows us what sustains and inspires us. You may be thinking something like, “I spend that time scrolling through IG/binging on Netflix/staring at a wall.” Look deeper. What feeds do you follow, what catches your eye? What do you obsess over? What are you fantasizing about? What do you love learning about? What opens the door to that realm where time disappears and you are fully absorbed by what you are doing/thinking/seeing? This is the creative realm, and the more you learn how to work with the creative energy that permeates it, the more meaningful and purpose-driven your life will feel to you. And you might just discover your life purpose.