“Art’s Not a Real Job,” He Said.

Let me tell you what a “real job” is.

A real job is dying in an office.

A real job is building someone else’s empire while your soul goes numb.

A real job is selling your fire for a pension and your creativity for a chair in a grey room.

Art?

Art is resurrection.

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My ex once insulted me by saying:

“Art’s not a real job.”

But I wasn’t working a job.

I was answering a calling.

A cosmic contract sealed long before he ever tried to shrink me.

I wasn’t painting for money.

I was surviving a spiritual war.

My canvases weren’t products. They were altars.

My words weren’t content. They were prophecy.

Each stroke of paint, each line I wrote, each mark I made was a conversation with the unseen.

I was translating grief, rage, ecstasy, and truth into forms that refused to lie.

Even when the world told me to stop.

Even when he tried to stop me.

I kept going.

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Artists are channels.

We touch the divine, speak in color, and bleed poetry.

We are not hobbyists.

We are rebel priests and rogue prophets.

We are mirrors. We are disruptors.

We are healers without the white coats.

We are what survives when empires fall.

We hold the memory of what has been lost.

We carry visions no one else remembers.

We are the voice of what the world tries to bury.

And yes, sometimes that voice shakes.

Sometimes it screams.

But it does not die.

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To create is to defy capitalism’s spell.

It is to say:

• “My soul is sovereign.”

• “My time is sacred.”

• “My truth cannot be clocked in or taxed into silence.”

Creating in a world that doesn’t want you to feel is not passive.

It is radical.

It is priestess work.

It is an act of rebellion against everything that asks you to shrink, conform, or hide.

It is an initiation — painful, exhilarating, and holy.

It is the only work worth doing.

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Art is not a luxury.

Art is medicine.

Art keeps the sacred alive when religion fails.

Art keeps the truth alive when media lies.

Art keeps you alive — when you thought you couldn’t survive.

It is your blood made visible.

Your tears crystallized into form.

Your rage and love intertwined in color, word, sound, and movement.

Even when others call it frivolous.

Even when they tell you it doesn’t “count.”

Even when a man who cannot see your soul scoffs at it.

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So no.

Art is not a job.

Art is a devotion.

A rebellion.

A holy, unpaid internship with God.

It is your covenant with the infinite.

It is your declaration that your life matters.

And some of us?

We’re lifers.

We do not stop.

We do not apologize.

We do not compromise the altar of our heart.

Art is not a pastime.

Art is not a career.

Art is a portal, a prayer, and a resurrection all at once.

And if he couldn’t see that — it only proved it more.

Because what he called “not a real job” is exactly what the universe meant for me to do.

To create. To witness. To awaken.

And through it, to survive.

And through it, to rise.