Who Needs a Therapist When (Pt. 6)

Me. I need a therapist. Thank you internet for being one. All tips will go to someday affording a real professional.

So, I consider myself an author. A novelist to be really unnecessarily specific. I've been writing and trying to get published for the better part of two decades now. I'm a veteran NaNoWriMo-er and a perpetual reviser of have a half dozen mostly completed manuscripts. Over the last several years, I've managed to carve out a few publications: One short story, some poems, and a few essays. Before that, I went on to get my masters in creative writing.

Suffice it to say, writing is an integral piece of who I think I am. It is one of the core tenets of my identity. I don't know how to explain to people who don't feel that commitment to a vocation. I don't know how to explain that the point of writing is to write. Publishing is good, but is mostly a tool to increase readership and fund the hobby. What I want—what I need—is to write.

I haven't been doing much writing lately.

This happens most times when my mental health takes a dive. The problem is that I get caught in a stress cycle—either I have enough money and work 80 hours a week, or I only work 30 or 40 and spend every waking moment worrying about paying bills. All of that leaves me with enough energy to write about a blog article on good days.

My writer friends do not understand. After all, writing has a strong tradition of being done in the cracks and crevices of modern life. Dhonielle Clayton wrote her first published book in the wee hours of the night, between an unpaid internship and two other jobs. J.K. Rowling was only able to write when her infant child was asleep. Anthony Trollope and Joseph Heller both worked full-time when they wrote their masterpieces.

Compared to that, it seems silly to point to the creeping emotional death of underemployment as the reason why I don't get much writing done. But it is why. I'm an emotional wreck, and I can't even figure out how to channel that emotion into writing.

Maybe it is ridiculous to point to things like universal basic income, or a sugar daddy, or just lower fucking costs of living as a solution. But I also can't shake the feeling that what I want to be doing, all day, everyday, is to write. And I am genuinely tired of trying to find the energy and the time to cram a few hundred words in. I have a dozen projects I want to work on, and I'm sick of the fact that the only ones that get time are the ones that are at the stage where publication is the next step.

I have, over the years, tried to give up writing. Since I haven't exactly been writing, that mostly looks like trying to let go of some unspoken, subconscious urge. The problem there? I don't want to let go. I resent that I have to choose, year after year, whether to eat or do what I love. I resent that other writers have the resources to focus on that. I resent that I still need a day job, and probably always will.

Maybe it is a lack of imagination and unwillingness to let go of a dream that I've spent over half my life furthering. Maybe my self/income forced ultimatum is a good thing (if I don't get into my PhD program this fall, I need to find a day job that is a real career instead of one that makes me want to actively die). Maybe I'll find different ways to be creative, or maybe I'll find that the rigor of a 40-hour drone life opens new passages to writing on the side.

But all I really want is for an agent or publisher to see one of my books and love it. I want to be paid real, livable amounts of money to write so that all this effort doesn't feel like such a waste of energy spent on financial security.

I know it's a fever dream at best. I know what royalty rates and advances look like these days.

But I can't shake this bug. I can't seem to give up this dream, even when everything else is broken.

Let's just hope it pays off before I completely lose my mind, or my life to it.

Last Week's (Pt. 5)

Part 1