This month I have no guaranteed income for the first time since January 2020, which was six months into my career. Back then, I left my job because I hated it and was making more doing ad hoc freelance writing than I was on the books. Things worked out fine enough, but also they didn’t. I’ve written about this crossroads between dreams and security before. The pattern is I get especially depressed albeit financially comfortable, and decide to go out on a limb, and then I swing between the depression I had felt anyway about time slipping me by and not having really done what I wanted to do, and anxiety about money but also a determination to just get things done while I can. Historically, the stress helps me push toward where I want to be and hopefully, even if I’m a car that keeps stalling, I make it to where I want to go.
This time, where we are now, I have left my contracted work, which wasn’t doing anything to fulfil me and was actively worsening my persistent depression. So I’m here again, as I was in 2020, with no guaranteed income (even if I have a better web for catching whatever work can fly my way).
I’ve done this because I have no less than four book proposals on the go, and want to work on them as a priority. Frankly: I lost all faith in features journalism as a place that makes good work as a standard, a long time ago. There are exceptions in the obvious places but the tea is I think most of features writing and commissioning and editing is pretty crap. This is why I called the newsletter medi(a)ocre in the first place, over a year ago. I hoped I could fashion a place where I look at the good and why it is better than the rest routinely (constructive criticism and celebration of good work) but I haven’t had the heart to, not in an entire year, as I don’t feel good about enough of what’s out there and would just be full of shade and negatives.
(Whether this is a me problem or not I don’t know. I don’t want to get into a tangent about the philosophy of what makes good writing or whether tastes have shifted and how that isn’t objective or conducive to a change in quality, though if you catch me at the right time I’ll be happy to do this.
It’s true I want to push away from the work I have been doing into work of more substance and challenge (my head won’t go the other way) – I know I’m spiritually done with writing 1500 features for less than £300 as something that feels good in any way shape or form. But anyway, back to what I’m on about…)
On top of that, the industry has flickered from dangerously precarious to financially unviable.
Anyway,
Being jobless goes against the very core of my being. For my family and background work may as well be the principle of being alive: to do, to provide, to contribute. We are mules, we don’t stop walking the field, we plough on. These aren’t words they’d use, I also don’t know how I feel about it politically – but I know it to be true of the world I have been brought into, and the way in which my body responds to inactivity: fear, anxiety, guilt, shame. More typically I have a culture of working until I burn out than anything else, and I’m wired to prefer this as a way of life. I find it hard to not, it feels very much within me as a method of functioning.
I had my first job when I was 12, stacking shelves on two pounds an hour. I’ve worked, outside of “my career”, twelve different jobs. A tour guide, teaching guitar, behind the bar, a kitchen porter, a junior chef, delivering coal, retail, a barista, in a brewery just helping out, the same in a coffee roastery, and a musician.
Work is what we do, even if it gets in the way of dreams. Especially if it does, perhaps. Dreams don’t pay rent – unless they’re fulfilled, which they almost certainly won’t be (and sure, won’t be if you work instead of setting out to achieve them, such is the catch 22 of life for me) for people like us anyway.
I am fighting against this best I can. As is obvious, mundane mediocre work makes me want to off myself, and even if I fall back into the trap of working for security (in a creative field which is a halfway house but still) I feel good about having chosen to follow the path of doing what I’d like to do, not what might work out well.
On this path, in the distance has been a blurry horizon increasingly presenting itself as not a mirage. These days, it is closer in view than ever. This place is where I want to be and I can almost sort of see it as something I can exist within. The issue I have is, taking on any sort of work pushes me in other directions, and means I could run out of fuel before I get there and not find the gas to get back on track. But what if I run out of fuel without the money to get more?
Since I’ve been able to drive, I’ve never let my car go under a quarter full. If I get near that, when going down a hill I often put the car in neutral and let it roll, to save fuel, and I head to the next station prompt. My dad takes the piss out of me for my worries always. He uses my car now that I’m living in London and his has died, and when I go home it’s regularly in the red, looking like the dial says minus fuel, but when I’ve had to drive it, I’ve never run out of fuel. There’s probably a lesson in that, but it is also just an anecdote.
This month I am trying to chase the dream, and maybe next month, maybe the one after. We’ll see what I can afford both in mind and bank account.
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Another anecdote is that generally I don’t feel old and believe I am comfortable in the currency of time, but I saw a Ford Fiesta today with an 03 number plate, making it 21 years old. To me, it looked like a normal car. That is, not an old car like the ones from the nineties that blow out the fumes of a previous generation when they grumble past, and not like a new car all silent and clean and cold and hardly there at all. But this car is 21 years old, and I imagine young people today see my normal car as an old car, and my new car as a normal car, and so I have to concede that I have aged.