Day 14 - 14th January

FOOL

Dirty discomfort

Like dirty debt

Heavy underfoot

There is an explosion

Always an explosion

Always someone else's fault.

Laundered back to tidiness – not cleanliness

Caked under make-up.

All must fall

In Puella's shadow.

The same fucking stories

Told or untold

Again and again.

I was one such story

Strident and stumbling

Homespun clothing

Perished now.

It was not blessed.

Breastplate is put on over nothing

Onto bare skin

It will callous

With heart’s sorrow

An insistent squire

Not unkind

Tells me they are laughing with, not at.

Imagine that.

A foolish, ragged pilgrim

Disgraced before the court

Must leave

Of his own accord.

Only when all his nonsense is atoned for

Will the drawbridge open again

Christ knows how long that will take.

I wait

But not patiently

Like a dickhead.

This is taking a long time.

And not yet five minutes has passed.

You will be told in advance

That there is no space for aggression in the birthing suite.

And you know it to be true.

Just roaming about the place.

Follow the instructions on the packet.

I know no more than you

And yet I think I do

And you do too

And that has us both fucked.

I’m lost.

Show me that map again?

To see them, as they are

Is an unlovable experience

Your limitations

Revealed in theirs

Naked. Disjointed and confused.

But that's the rocky road to surrender.

The air is rarified so your heart beats faster

To compensate.

And then you realise

Why the skin beneath the breastplate

Is free after all.

Niall Campbell

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The Sacrificial Vocational Generation

The sacrificial vocational generation is a term I occasionally use with clients.

This term makes a lot of sense to frustrated creatives, and I can personally relate. It often takes some time for this to come to the fore because it feels like a betrayal. I have to explain how one’s parents did the best they could, but in supporting integral components of the young creative or artist, it wasn’t remotely good enough.

This is a time where I feel ethically obliged to engage in calibrated self-disclosure. To not do so would seem unethical—and unhelpful.

The sacrificial vocational generation seems to be a phase that lineages must go through at least once on the path to upward social mobility, but it can interfere with the sovereignty and agency of the individual. It functions like this:

Your parents or grandparents grew up in privation in childhood. It could be financial (often societally mandated, maybe due to class systems in Britain or India, or systemic issues in places like apartheid South Africa). It doesn't have to be egregious, but any notion of living abundantly was treated with suspicion.

Alternatively, they were financially secure but faced displacement due to war or economic migration.

For many in multicultural Australia, there’s often an intergenerational baton handover—a tacit expectation to compete and hand it on, usually tied to upward social mobility (e.g., subsistence existence becomes blue collar, then white collar).

This dynamic also applies to families with longstanding status and financial capital (common among upper-middle-class families in Western Australia), where there’s an expectation to consolidate and maintain this societal tier that has been hard won by your forebears.

Regardless, there’s a deep expectation that your choices aren’t really your own, though this is confusingly combined with a genuine wish for you to have a fulfilling and seemingly autonomous life full of “things that were not available to us.” It’s this one-two punch of love and opportunity tied with fear and restrictions that creates the golden handcuffs many frustrated creatives experience in middle life.

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How This Played Out in My Life

My parents grew up poorer than they realised in post-WWII Northern Ireland as Catholics, ostensibly second-class citizens. The welfare state of the 1950s was immensely beneficial, enabling decent education and free healthcare. Within a generation, the social order shifted: the underprivileged could now compete with the elites. This social mobility planted seeds for the civil unrest of the troubles, but also paradoxically for the Northern Irish peace process, which would bloom decades later as these equally well-educated Catholics hit adulthood and started to rightly want more.

For my parents’ generation, this quantum shift transformed subsistence living into lower- or middle-class stability. They became teachers, nurses, and clerical workers. However, this was, on some level, middle-class cosplay. Deep down, they knew their children’s efforts would solidify this push and assuage their scarcity mindset, which still lingered.

For us, the expectation was clear: if they were teachers, we were to become principals. Nurses? We’d be doctors. Draftsmen? Architects. They sought safety—an insatiable need—but safety, while comforting, negates freedom.

Wee were to be the sacrificial vocational generation.

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What This Means for Frustrated Creatives

The push—escaping dangerous, oppressive environments—instilled a scarcity mindset in baby boomers of all stripes, kryptonite for artists. Meanwhile, the pull of success they were experiencing perpetuated rigid expectations and created a feedback loop for how one must "get ahead."

Their script worked for them, so it’s inconceivable to them that it wouldn’t work for us. But creativity doesn’t fit neatly into this narrative. If you subscribe to this paradigm, it really is sensible to do your artsy things on the side. But if you have no other choice, this life—this lovely life full of things you actually did want and would want for your children—becomes a confusing life-lie. The feeling that you are failing and letting everyone down starts to echo, not just in your personal present, but in the collective past for all those people who came before you and apparently would have killed to have the chances you do. I have done a lot of work to become grateful for this opportunity, whilst also knowing it isn't for me. Both of these things can be true at once. On some level I think this is perhaps unavoidable. But I have paid my dues fully. I have done enough to service this intergenerational project. Becoming an artist is actually a part of it, because it is the royal road out of scarcity town, which is, on paper at least, the project my parents were engaged in. I'm just going a different route up the same mountian, because I sensed an impasse.

A lot of the people I work with need someone like myself to tell them that that is quite enough. Not as a schoolmistress scolding the child, but as a boxing coach, knowing that their fighter in the ring will never take a knee, whose courage and grit is now beyond doubt, who has nothing left to prove to everyone standing in the arena, who is so invested and punch-drunk that they struggle to stop, and who needs someone who is absolutely, one hundred percent in their corner to throw the towel into the ring and let them process the grief of losing the bout.

But over time, they’ll realise they won something much more dignified and important. They won their agency. The only thing left in this ring for you now, denuded of all prizes, is brain damage at the end of a punch you won’t see coming. You will, of course, fight with your corner man—that’s in your makeup. You’ll shout at the referee. You’ll show everyone that you can keep going. We all know this. There’s nothing left to prove. The arena is soaked with your blood, sweat, and tears.

You’ve already made the sacrifice. You’ve earned the degrees, the titles, the prizes. Now it’s time to prioritise your soul’s calling.

Throw away the map mummy and daddy gave you. It got you to the castle, which is always near at hand, but it won’t get you in. In your pocket is a compass. Trust your compass. It’s yours and yours alone.