Artist, Not Bookkeeper
There are no gold stars!
Last Sunday, I lingered for a while in the paint aisle of the hardware store, trying to remember the materials I already had at the studio. It wasn’t long before another customer, a middle-aged man in Carhartt, approached me. He picked up a paint set wrapped in plastic, complete with rollers, trays, and tape, and tried to hand it to me. “This is what you need,” he said. Wrong.
Dear reader, lately I’ve been thinking about the unsolicited and often terrible advice people offer. Given that I’m a woman trying to do anything, I was born a walking target for suggestions.
Making art in the public eye and running a business intensifies the rate at which people try to tell me what to do. A life of art, adventures, and experiments creates an overflow of advice-giving opportunities.
What’s confusing is that the more I prove I can take care of myself through my endeavors, which is how I currently measure my success, the more advice I seem to get. I thought the inverse would be true. It makes sense to offer advice to somebody waving their arms for a safety buoy, but I’ve never floundered. I trust in the process, even when it’s hard.
I opened my poster shop in May of 2021. Unsupervised followed one year later, and ROCK SHOP is about to complete the Holy Trinity of my pursuits. In order to avoid my ass being handed to me, my businesses require regular jousting with state and federal bureaucracies. Somehow, nobody’s advice ever touches on this.
Depending on the season, keeping the books dialed can become so consuming that I don’t feel like an artist at all. I become a paper pusher who keeps the lights on for what would be a fruitful creative life, but the artist in me can’t find the key to the front door beneath a mountain of receipts and permits and invoices that are constantly erupting from my satchel. I’ve long sought to alleviate this frustration by outsourcing some of my tasks to people willing to do them, but I’ve been hesitant to invest. I’ve been told to do it myself, (allegedly) being the only dignified way to achieve self-made comfort.
People have told me how to repair the broken latch on my van door, and that I need to get Twitter. People have told me to host retreats, and my personal favorite — to hire a virtual assistant to run my Instagram. And for the last two and half years, people have told me not to bother getting a bookkeeper because I can easily download Quickbooks and do it on my own.
I listened. I didn’t hire a bookkeeper. I also didn’t download Quickbooks or start doing my own books either. (Spoiler alert: I’m an artist, not a bookkeeper.)
“Download Quickbooks” lived on my to-do list for two and a half years, until I realized that being able to do everything myself isn’t actually that important to me. I don’t need to be the hero of every story.
The people who tell me to do my own books clearly overestimate how many shits I give about profit and loss margins, and underestimate how gifted I am at other things — and how much time and consideration those other things need.
It’s not cheap to hire a bookkeeper. It costs money to find someone who will devote themselves to the path of my money. But what needs more protection? My money, or my time on the path of creativity? Frugality isn’t a prerequisite of savvy business planning. How much is my time actually worth? How much value do I place on not burning out?
In December, I hired Lois. At the tail end of our first meeting, I choked up. The order she brought to the chaos was swift and soothing. I apologized for being emotional. “It’s just that… I can’t believe I waited so long and that everybody was so wrong,” I said.
Lois has been keen to show me what she does so that I can learn by proxy. But the more her work is revealed to me, the deeper my conviction grows: This is work I never would have done by myself, nor work I ever wish to do.
Dear reader, you don’t need to know how to do everything to be proficient, profitable, or sexy. You don’t have to make the paper if you’re an artist. You don’t have to mill the flour if you’re a baker. You don’t have to do the math of life alone if you don’t want to. There is someone out there who wants to help you.
Don’t wait. Surrender today.
Love,
Anna
As a bookkeeper...Thank You! It may not be the sexiest of jobs but damn it we do important work. We take care of people.
"Given that I’m a woman trying to do anything, I was born a walking target for suggestions." lol! the way i felt this.