Charlie Hammond

Starting is hard isn’t it.

Continuing is also hard.

I’m doing a lot of thinking at the moment. Some are thoughts about creativity. Some are thoughts about money. Some are thoughts about the past, about who I am and what forces may have shaped me.

But here is a blog. A little something to wet your appetite and learn more about who I am. A little place for me to stretch my creative legs.

Writing can be difficult sometimes because its hard to know where to start. Or where to tell people you are starting. Feels false to start. To pretend the story started here. Or there. Well I’m in the middle of something.

This year or so I’ve been moving through things, like a tired salmon trying to get up water. I’d say I was recovering from some serious creative and life burnout.

I’m not going to go into granular detail about it, but this year I’ve been learning a lot, and taking some time to reflect and connect some dots. It has been, at times, frustrating slow. I wanted to make these life decisions, these realisations, and BAM, be able to instantly make some changes and take life in a new direction. But I’ve had to battle a lot of internal resistance and also realise that change is slow sometimes. Sometimes its little daily steps. And sometimes its a big emotional chat you’ve been holding onto. But often for the latter you need to have done the former, the step-by-step things that allow you to arrive at a place.

So what have I been doing, and what do I actually do for a living.

Well, currently I work as a Giggle Doctor for Theodora’s Children’s Charity. And occasionally I work as a street performer for Pif Paf Theatre and Reckless Invention. And over the past year I’ve been exploring Clowning as Therapeutic Practice through an Arts Council funded Develop Your Creative Practice.

And a lot of this past year has been about me finding and articulating the value of the work that I do. I mean everyone says it’s important work, or that must be so rewarding, or that the arts are vital, but as someone who is paid to do this work, my life does not feel reflective of these things. Especially when you are in your mid-30’s and your friends are buying houses and suddenly you realise, ‘oh, no wait’.

And then there has been this interesting change for me as I really did start to articulate and express the value of the work, both to myself and to others around me. Suddenly I started to feel much more frustration and anger, and a realisation that my life needs to change because this way of working is unsustainable. And that is largely due to it being undervalued, underpaid, which then lends itself to more anger, and sadness, and a kind of grief.

Now I’m coming towards the end of this DYCP journey, and work-wise I am currently still essentially doing the same kinds of work, but I’ve done a lot of learning, and now in some ways is the hard part of stepping into change.

To the painful but rewarding process of change everyone!

You can find more about me in my About section.

For those interested in street theatre here’s nice little post I did about working with Michael Justice of Reckless.