Hey, I’m in the midst of that - of going from full-time tech work after nearly a decade, to a career as an artist (in film and music, mainly).
I wonder what you mean by “working in the arts.” The examples you offer are pretty diverse! Literature, writing and journalism: on one hand, literature is pretty much only an artistic, creative venture. At the other end, journalism isn’t going to feel very creatively engaging by contrast. But it is working in the arts in the same way being an arts administrator might be.
Your job is to figure out what you need. What’s driving this desire to switch careers? I suspect that you don’t really wanna be a journalist - but that the same pragmatism that makes you worry that you’d be transitioning too late already is also making you pick something that sounds more practical, rather than picking something that you actually want.
In short, you need to find out what you actually need. And it might be that you need to try on the artist label for size. It might not fit, but if you start to feel like you are motivated by expressing yourself, then it might be the thing for you. Also, I’ve learned that there are tons of other creative people who make great things who do not need to do it every day. Find out if you just need this as a hobby, or if you really need to do it once a day.
Working as an artist is tough, but so is anything. I couldn’t really make my career in tech feel okay. It’s been far easier for me to be what I always should have been.
But it took me a decade to realize I needed to make that transition because it also took me that long to accept I was an artist. Therapy helped. Also, actually doing artistic work helped. I learned how to write songs, I picked up other instruments. I started screenwriting, and got accepted to a writing lab.
That last bit happened last year - it’s where I met many other awesome folks who were making their careers work. But again, that happened because it built on this long journey I had to accepting my own self. I was always this creative, but for my own “personal reasons,” I wasn’t allowed to have that as a kid.
The advice I have is that a lot of the cliches are true.
Per Bukowski, you shouldn’t make any sort of leap unless it comes bursting out of you like a rocket, but if you’ve learned all sorts of reasons to abandon this part of yourself, well, it can take a long time for the rocket ship to take off.
That’s when you take the leap. The transition involves so much more work that gets you to that point, by allowing yourself to open yourself up and feel who your really are, and by learning your tools. But one day you’ll know you’ve got to jump. And that’ll be terrifying! But hey, you’ll know it’s time.