When People Treat Your Work Like It’s Not a Real Job

An essay on creative labor, legitimacy, and the work that becomes real only through time.

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Being both a humanitarian and a creative puts you on a particular kind of fault line. You live in a world that measures worth in billable hours and deliverables, while you work in currencies that resist clean accounting: trust, attention, time, belief.

People will ask what you really do. The question usually arrives with a smile, as if imagination or care were hobbies you’ve indulged instead of a livelihood you’ve built. Cultural projects, creative collaborations, ethical experiments; these tend to register as side pursuits rather than work.

But the work is real.

It’s early mornings and late nights. Logistics and language barriers. Funding gaps and fragile partnerships. It’s managing hope alongside spreadsheets, building something that doesn’t yet exist because you can’t accept a world where it doesn’t.

For a long time, I thought I needed to explain this. To translate the invisible labor into something legible—budgets behind songs, systems behind murals, planning behind every moment that looked spontaneous from the outside. I tried to make the work understandable before allowing it to be valid.

Eventually, I stopped.

What I do involves business, just not always the kind that fits neatly into conventional frameworks.

Creative work, at its most honest, functions like enterprise. It requires risk tolerance, long horizons, emotional intelligence, and the discipline to return even when the numbers don’t yet justify the effort. It demands judgment calls that can’t be optimized, and accountability that isn’t always rewarded immediately.

I don’t build products alone. I try to build conditions—spaces where people can show up fully, contribute meaningfully, and see their work circulate with dignity intact. That kind of labor rarely fits inside a job title, which is precisely why it’s often overlooked.

The problem isn’t that the work isn’t real.

It’s that our definitions of “real” are too narrow.

We’ve grown comfortable valuing only what produces immediate, visible returns. But many of the systems we rely on—culture, trust, continuity—are built slowly, by people willing to invest without applause. The creative economy runs on exactly that kind of commitment.

Now, when people ask what I really do, I answer plainly.

I work at the intersection of imagination and impact.

I help ideas take form.

I stay long enough for the work to take shape.

If that doesn’t fit neatly into a title, that’s not a flaw. It’s a signal.

Some forms of value take time before they’re recognized. And some kinds of work don’t need permission to be legitimate, they only need to be practiced, consistently, until the world learns how to read them.