“Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.”

― John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

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Image credit: “Best Friends” by Robinn-GK @ Flickr. Creative Commons License.

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I can’t predict when or if I will make a living from my writing and other creative output.

It is necessary to have productivity goals and to work diligently if I am serious about making a living, but at the same time I have to be completely detached from the results.

Otherwise I will undermine completely the feeling of joy that is my creative driver, if I accidentally replace it by fear of not ‘making it quickly enough’ as the (hidden) primary motivation for me to create.

It is easier said than done to make sure that my legitimate and serious goal of making a living from fiction writing and creation is not by default sliding to become my primary motivation for working. It is, in fact, damn hard to avoid – especially if I feel that I have been living financial deprivation and have done so for quite a while.

But there is no other way. I feel this more than ever, now that I’m actually – after a lot of missteps – so close to have a product ready for the market: I have to face the reality that all my efforts might never pay off in any significant way.

Of course the same could be said for most other enterprises in life, but even in these times of financial crises and explosion of new opportunities for writers online – writing is still far from the ‘most promising business’ which will allow me to making a living, even with all the tenacity in the world.

But it is the only way I really want to try. And I say this after having failed on all other accounts in trying to find a livelihood that I felt good about. Since 1994, when I first got out on the job market, NOTHING has worked for me. I have NEVER been able to completely and satisfactorily combine my talents, experience and education into a way of making a living that felt just right.

I’m not saying that I am going to succeed this time, just that I have nothing to lose by trying to go for what I want the most. I wrote that last year at this time but this year I feel it so much more clearly:

There is nothing for me to lose.

There is no other job that holds even a margin of better ‘safety’ or ‘permanency’ as regards delivering regular income I can at least survive on, and perhaps thrive on. So many of my friends and family have been fired in recent times from ‘good, secure jobs’.

I have a job to earn a livelihood, but to prioritise to get a better, ‘safer’ higher-income job above my need to realise what is truly good and valuable in my life – my creativity – is insane because it is an illusion. Nothing is ‘safer’.

There is no other field of endeavour that holds even a margin of promise to provide me with a level of self-expression and – given enough time and tenacity, I admit that – the potential reach to communicate what I want to say to the world, without filter … no other field than my own writing and creative output.

I was schooled in social sciences and communications at university but this education is only used meaningfully if it supports me to realise my own creative potential. It is squandered if I sell it to the lowest bidder on the job market, or try to create a ‘secure’ consultancy business of my own offering traditional communication services, such as web design.

So I’ve come full circle today. I write essentially the same as I did 1 year ago, only now I feel it has become my truth. Not just an ideal I wish to aspire to.

It is a paradox, and perhaps not. It has come at a time when I am so close to entering the ‘writer’s market’ as I ever have been. I ‘only’ lack proof-reading, formatting and finalising of the cover of my first ebook for Amazon before I am ready to earn the first money on my own, dearest creations. I should be making income projections and popping champagne.

But I feel now, more than ever, that that is exactly what I should not. Now is the time to let completely go, because it has become real: I have risked what I have been talking about for years, and I don’t know if I will succeed. And there’s no reason whatsoever to worry about that, because it will only take away the joy of doing what I hitherto have thought I needed financial freedom to enjoy doing – writing and creating.

I don’t need that. It is a goal. It would be nice, but I don’t need it. If I fail so be it. At least I tried for real – and stopped talking.

And my day-job is really not that bad. In some ways it has been a blessing in disguise, because I am able to write part of the time, during my nightshifts. It should not last for the rest of my life. I would feel bad about that. But if it does I won’t feel that ‘my real life’ has been taken away from me.

Only one person can take away my real life – the complete joy of dedicating myself and all my available sparetime to what matters most:

Me.

And I won’t do it anymore. I will give it to myself, instead.

It’s high time …

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