Drop the "Aspiring."
Or, how to more confidently embody your creative self with the King of Wands
🚨 Who’s ready for a tarot challenge!? My 10-Day Blossom with Tarot Challenge starts on 5/23, the full Flower Moon. This themed daily tarot challenge is designed to help you blossom into your best self with a little help from your tarot cards. It is open to all paid supporters, so if that’s not you yet, please upgrade before 5/23 for just $5 to join us. You’ll get an email each day with a special tarot question, tarot spread, or other tarot exercise, a daily comments section to hang out with fellow tarot challengers, plus a beautiful challenge e-journal!🚨
I rejoined X (formerly Twitter) for reasons that escape me now even though they made perfect sense one morning at 5:00 am, a couple hours into my insomnia.
I soon thereafter came across a tweet (post?) that had received hundreds of laughs and likes and reposts. As I scrolled through the comments, I couldn’t believe nobody had been as saddened by it as me. At least on the record.
It went something like this:
Somebody tell me why I own 100 cookbooks by real chefs and cooks and yet every night I end up Googling “easy weeknight dinner” and following a recipe from some blog I will never visit again named Turnips and Tulip Bulbs or Girl with a Whisk Tattoo.
I don’t know why I felt like I had to paraphrase the original tweet (post?) instead of just embedding it. But I did, which means yes, I came up with those fictional food blog names myself. I would hate for them to go to waste. If there are any budding food bloggers on here, please feel free to use them.
This tweet (post?) made me chuckle. I’m quite familiar with the phenomenon she’s talking about and have done it hundreds of times myself! (Anybody else?) But why did it also make me frown?
Because she could have said
“cookbooks by professional chefs and cooks” or
“cookbooks by famous chefs and cooks” or
“renowned chefs and cooks” or
“award-winning chefs and cooks”
but instead she chose to say “cookbooks by real chefs and cooks.”
Because unless you have published a cookbook, you are not a “real” cook.
Because unless you get paid by some institution, you are not a “real” cook.
Because unless some third party - and it has to be the right third party by the way, not just anybody - has deemed you worthy of the title, you are not a “real” cook.
Never mind that these food bloggers make delicious and easy-to-follow recipes.
Never mind that they’ve been doing it for years.
Above all, never mind that they have bailed out the tweeter (poster?) herself out of many a weeknight dinner jam!
None of that mattered. They still weren’t “real” cooks in her eyes. They were “aspiring” at best, wannabes at worst.
And this tweeter’s (poster’s?) sentiment is all too common.
I still remember an incident from fifteen years ago at an art gallery with my now-mother-in-law. We were mingling and she was chatting with some stranger about pastels or oil paints or something: “Is that your primary medium? I’m an artist too.”
At which point, her “friend” - and I use that term so unbelievably loosely - felt the need to clarify, “Well, she’s an elementary school teacher.”
Her point? You are not a “real” or legitimate artist - or anything - unless you get paid to do it and others recognize you as such. And unless you fall into this category, do not dare call yourself that. You are “aspiring” at best.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes we are aspiring! When I was still in law school, I was an aspiring lawyer. I aspired to pass the bar exam and legally be able to represent clients in court. I couldn’t call myself a lawyer just yet. When I was in grad school years later, I was an aspiring professor. I aspired to learn how to teach and to complete my degree and get hired by colleges so I could be assigned courses.
But what’s funny is that even in those cases, if there’s a hint of creativity involved, all bets are off.
I was telling my sister a funny story about a friend I had hung out with recently. “What does her husband do again?” she interrupted.
“He’s a filmmaker. So anyway, we’re at the dinner table and then all of a sudden…”
“Filmmaker? Okay, sure thing,” she responded with a disdain that came out of nowhere for a person she didn’t even know.
“What? He went to film school. He now makes films. Does he need to be George Lucas or something before your highness will agree that he is, in fact, a filmmaker?”
Why do we have this ugliest of tendencies to think somebody creative or entrepreneurial isn’t “real” until they are famous or wealthy or wildly successful?
And why was I admittedly so triggered by such comments, even when they weren’t directed at me?
I decided to consult my tarot cards. Here’s how they helped me identify not only what my more immediate problem was, but what I could do to fix it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Office Hours with The Tarot Professor to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.