Acceptance

[spryng]

I asked for a raise at work yesterday. A small thing, but also a large thing, because it meant asking for a promotion that I never bothered to strive for before. Work usually gets the shaft after kids/wife/household/writing, but now that I've accepted that writing is going nowhere, I have a little more time/attention for work.

I mean, it's a good job. And, unlike writing, it pays the bills. So maybe I should stop half-assing it and actually be good at it. I don't have much else to show for in my life, and I'm already having something akin to my mid-20s crisis when I felt adrift and listless, with nothing to show for all the hours I'd stolen to write. Here I am again, adrift and listless, on and off depressed, but at least I have my family and I at least I have my job. And, if the economy doesn't explode and the world doesn't end, I can legit retire in 7 years.

I just have to make it that long.

It sucks to have had the chance to have a career in writing and missed it. A lot of it wasn't my fault: the publisher dropping the ball so many times, a global pandemic, moving cross-country with a small tot. Whatever momentum I'd had clawed for myself was thoroughly staked through the heart by the pandemic, every chance and opportunity vanishing on the wind. And now I just don't have the time or energy to claw my way back into it, and I'm so incredibly exhausted from trying anyway.

I don't even want to, anymore. None of what I've written is anything close to the level it needs to be at, and I feel that gap so keenly it hurts. And worse, I know that if I just had the time and space to properly think, not just an unreliable hour stolen every few mornings, I could do better. I don't and I won't anytime soon, so continuing to push at it is just demoralizing me further.

I couldn't accept that before, but the back-to-back illnesses of September and October have kinda forced me to. I haven't written since August and that's... not okay, but also it is?

I need... something though. Some kind of outlet. That I can do quietly in the morning before the kids wake up. Lately it's been journaling (you might have noticed). But I want to try something I haven't before, something new.

I just don't know what.

Comments

[dreamsrundeep]

Seven years! That feels practically within grasp! (And yet, still seven years away.) You've got this!

Writing. I believe that there are seasons for all the things. Not the same/Kind of the same: Running. I was supposed to run a marathon on Nov. 11th. I realized sometime in August that it wasn't bringing me joy and I kind of was dreading my performance. My heart wasn't in it. The harder I tried the worse I felt, etc. So. I stopped pushing. Dropped the marathon. Forgave myself in advance for taking my foot off the gas in that space.

It wasn't making me feel good. And trying harder made me feel worse. So I gave myself some permission to rest.

Maybe give yourself permission to rest. You don't have to stop entirely - journaling is a great alternative. Or maybe trying something new. Or maybe only when the whim strikes you. And at the same time, let yourself just do what you can without being overly critical or measuring yourself against anything. Just finding the joy or release/relief in the small moments without evaluation.

I have full faith that seasons end, too. Maybe when this one does, you won't look the same, either. You may be a different writer when that happens. And that's okay, too. We remake ourselves all the time. All new cells every seven years or something like that.

All of this is meant to encourage you to be kind to yourself and know that the writer is still there. She's just resting. Or maybe different now. There's still time for a career in writing if that's where you want to be and where you end up some day. <3 But also. There's time for many, many things.

[dreamsrundeep]

Also: WAY TO GO. Asking for a raise is hard. AND it's not something women do as often as we should. It's a badass Boss Move.

[spryng]

Thanks <3
I caught the tail-end of your marathon story in real time (I've been so bad about actually checking DW). I'm glad you got a chance to try out rest. That seemed like so much, and when other people are relying on you...

[mrissa]

Every year I sit down and do private journaling about what I want to do with my writing, what themes I want to address, what projects I want to work on, where I want to go with it all. Sometimes I just start writing "I want" and finishing those sentences with things large and small until I feel like I'm getting somewhere useful. Maybe the thing you've been doing as an outlet is a springboard for the next thing you're doing?

In any case: writing careers feel fragile. They feel ephemeral. But "career" is a weird-shaped thing in this field, and writing is something you can quit and then quit quitting if that's right for you. You can set it down for a bit while it's demoralizing and pick it up again when you've had some rest. You will always be a writer. You can point to those three books on the shelf as proof. But the people who claim that if you are always a writer, you are always writing...that's not a writer, that's a perpetual motion machine. You are not a perpetual motion machine. You can take a minute and see what feels right for you in this moment. And if it's different from a previous moment and a later moment, okay.

And your friends still love you. I mean, every hobby and every job has acquaintances. But: you also have friends. And they love you whether you are hustling or not.

[spryng]

I have tried a few times to journal out what I want to write, but never had a good structure to do so. I should steal your "I want" idea, because I also get stuck on the bigger ideas of novels, which in a weird way then feel as if I'm not allowed to have as much to say.

And thank you <3

[mrissa]

I also mean if you want to use it to think of something that's an outlet if you choose to take a break from writing while it's feeling draining to you. But yeah--"I want something I can finish in one week," or "I want something I can hold in my hands," whatever comes out that way, whether it turns out to be not taking a break from writing after all because you're allowed to do things you WANT or not.

<3