I’ve had to navigate a lot of doubts to get to where I am today. For a long time, I thought that nobody wanted to hear what I had to say, and that I was just a normal person, trying to plaster my name beneath the great authors from whom I’d learned. I didn’t believe that I was capable of separating myself from all of the other budding writers. What did I know that they didn’t? There was no way that writers could have real jobs, right?
Just as unsettling as my own doubts were the doubts that came from others. While I hustled away, looking for writing gigs, my parents asked: “But how are you paying the bills?” not understanding that I was being paid to write. Unless you were a lawyer, a teacher, or a doctor, you didn’t have a real job. They didn’t understand that you can monetize words in the same way that you monetize gasoline, plastic pellets, and education.
Some of Us Have Real Jobs
And then, after I became fully self-sufficient as a writer, one of my friends made a backhanded comment, saying: “Some of us have real jobs to go to,” while I sat on his couch with a laptop in hand.
During the earlier days of my career, I might’ve wavered, agreeing that what I was doing wasn’t real. Or that my work didn’t matter. If my life were to be snuffed out, there’d be no great loss to literature. But I was far enough into my journey to know better. I let his comment slide off with a slight grimace. And then I began wondering why he perpetuated that idea.
In his mind, do you have to work for someone else in order to have a “real job”? Does there have to be some degree of misery in order for it to count? Is there a magical number that your paychecks have to reach before you can call what you’re doing a “real job”? Is it the freedom of a freelance job that confuses him?
Having navigated my own perceived limitations, I discovered that those are just the things that we tell ourselves to keep ourselves “happy” in miserable circumstances.
Navigating Perceived Limitations
I don’t feel a need to make a case for myself, or to argue that my job is a “real job”, because it doesn’t really matter if anyone perceives my work to be real. But I do find myself curious about those underlying assumptions.
Are you tethered to a position, spending hours of your life to meet an arbitrary expectation? Is there something else that you’ve pictured yourself doing, but you’ve never been brave enough to believe that it was possible? What is “real” anyways?
By most standards, my life has always been unconventional. As a young person, I had to confront the discomfort of being different, which probably set me up to tune out the naysayers a little bit faster than others. I went to school in the basement of our home until I turned 13, and then I began wandering the halls of a “real” highschool. And today, the paperwork says that I have an address, but I don’t. I’ve discovered that, just like a job can be “fake”, so can the concept of home. And everything great that I’ve ever done has come from asking: “But what if there’s another way?”
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