The whiskey bottle is half full

Creatives are a funky lot.

We’re cranks and skeptics, cynics and ne’er-do-wells, often poorly groomed. But we’re also one thing that may surprise you: Optimists.

How could we not be?

We spend most of our day grinding out work that we know will mostly be met with blank stares and furrowed brows.

But we keep at it.

We face a multi-layered process designed to chew up that work up and spit it back to us in the most inoffensive and uninteresting form possible.

And still, we keep at it.

We deal with the constant chatter from our inner voice(s) that tell(s) us we’re complete frauds and we’ll never, ever crack this stupid brief because we’ve never been able to truly crack a brief even once in our lives.

And yet, for some insane reason, we keep at it.

And then, when we finally get through a project, sell something we can at least not be completely disgusted by, and can bask in our hard fought trudge to mediocrity, we find ourselves watching TV with a friend, who giggles uncontrollably at the most inane, intelligence-insulting commercial, one that’s so bad it will be held up at agencies as a case study of what not to do, reinforcing our deep seated fear that our work not only doesn’t matter but that it couldn’t possibly be appreciated by anyone but our own mothers (if we’re lucky), so we grab the nearest bottle of brown liquid, pour it directly onto our eyeballs to mask the oncoming onslaught of tears, and revel in the burning, stinging pain that we so obviously deserve.

But the next day, the sun somehow manages to climb above the horizon, the tears subside, and the whiskey-soaked humiliation is all but a foggy memory. So, we pull ourselves out of bed, drag ourselves to our tiny desk in our overcrowded, overly bright office, and we do it all again.

Because we are optimists, dammit.