Double Agent
Image Description: A double exposure image of a person in a furry hat turning their head. Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
I am a Double Agent and have been most of my life.
No, I am not a spy or a traitor to my country. I don’t lurk in the shadows. I don’t have a cool watch that I talk to (sorry, Apple). I am terrible at keeping secrets. My agency is out in the open. I am a hyphenate. I make documentaries. I write things. I paint. I make collages. I manage international exchange programs. I build documentary community.
Recently I was looking at my profile after taking a LinkedIn Learning class. When you reach a certain age, time sort of slows down so you forget how many years ago something happened when it doesn’t feel all that long ago. I realized that I have been working steadily as an adult for more than 30 years and that, almost all that time, I had been a double agent. An artist and a project manager, working mostly in contexts of providing others with professional development.
All along the way, I have faced reactions to this double agency. One colleague many many years ago told me I couldn’t be a real filmmaker because I clearly didn’t have the passion. Otherwise, I would have gone to New York or Los Angeles. I would have devoted my life entirely to making art regardless of the financial realities. I would have to be hungry, both figuratively and literally.
Perhaps it is my Piscean nature, but I have always had a healthy balance of dreaminess and practicality. Just as I don’t think of creative challenges in binary terms, I don’t see being idealistic and realistic as opposites, no matter what the thesaurus says. I have wanted to be independent in my life, earning a steady living but not being so caught up in monetary gain that it kept me from working on my art.
There was another kind of reaction too that put limiting definitions on my work. It was impossible to have a dual career. I would have to choose. Either I would have a “day job” that would support my “real work” of making art or I would have a “real job” and the art would just be a hobby. I don’t begrudge hobbies. I consider my painting and collage work things I enjoy doing for fun, without specific goals other than enjoyment. My film work and my writing is a different matter. They may not pay all my bills, but I dedicate myself to them with the same seriousness and purpose as I have with my work with international exchange programs. And that work is far from a day job. It is a career I have been involved with in different capacities since I was 19 years old. It gives me purpose, involves a ton of creativity, and makes a difference in the world. In many ways, I see it as another way of telling stories even if it is not among the artistic disciplines that most of us think of when we think of art.
In 30+ years, I have come to terms with these presumptions that are made about what makes someone an artist, what distinguishes a professional from an amateur, and whether there is only one path in a creative career. I may not be the most prolific artist in terms of my output, simply because there aren’t enough hours in the day, but I am always working on creative projects. Heck, I even co-directed a film about other artist-hyphenates.
Recently, I have been working on the seeds of an initiative for one of the film organizations I am involved with. We had to provide our bios for a proposal. I was traveling and couldn’t respond to this right away, so someone else plugged in some biographical information they found online from my profile for my international exchange organization. I realized, in reading how they cut and paste my bio, that it didn’t emphasize many of the things that would be involved with the particular project we were working to get off the ground, so I rewrote it with emphasis on more relevant work. This was a clear reminder that, even in how we present ourselves to the world in different contexts, we can almost come across as though we are two different people. I know a colleague filmmaker who has a completely separate career as a lawyer, but you would never know it from his film website. Meanwhile another colleague filmmaker is about to start law school, one of many people who reassessed where they are going with their careers during the pandemic. She is taking an exciting leap, but she isn’t quitting her filmmaking either.
Just as we are in an era when society is more accepting of gender fluidity, being multi-racial, and having intersectional identities, can we also use this liberated thinking when it comes to work, something that occupies the majority of our waking hours? We are no longer in an era where one must be expected to follow a singular straight-line career. We can be many things at different times in our lives. Or even at the same time. We don’t need to give in to limiting definitions or borders. We can be the agents of our own double identities.
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