I hate working.
I think I’ve established this by now, but it bears repeating: I HATE WORKING. I associate working—having a full-time job, or even freelancing at this point—with a lack of autonomy. And the work I’ve been doing for the past few years—content bullshit—is… how do you say… completely meaningless to me. IT DOES NOT SPARK JOY.
Still, the last full-time job I had gave me a freedom I hadn’t experienced in a long time: freedom from being broke as shit. I wasn’t even getting paid that much, lol, but I was making enough money to not be worried about money. Deciding to leave that job for my mental health and well-being was really hard: I had to choose between being broke and being overwhelmingly miserable.
I promised myself that with the severance pay I got, I would take a step back and focus on my creativity. But a month after I left, I started a new contract gig because I was just so fucking worried about being poor, being forced to live with a scarcity mindset. I thought that maybe if I worked a contract, part-time gig, I’d still have enough mental and emotional energy to be creative—to write yeah, but also to do things I always meant to do but never had the time or energy for. Painting, crafting, procrastinating on this scarf I was making for Liz for two years and still haven’t sent to her SORRY LIZ.
Unfortunately, I always get wrapped the fuck up in whatever job I have. So even though I was only working three days a week, the overwhelming sense that I was working towards nothing took up too much space in my brain. I wrote a little, here and there, but not to the extent that I should have been, what with more free time and less excuses.
I had been thinking about this cyclical thing I’ve got going, where I either work and have enough money to live off of, but not enough energy to do the things I want, or I’m poor and have enough time to do the things I want, but am too stressed out about where my dollar bills are coming from. And then I saw this tweet.
I feel like this is a perfect encapsulation of how I’ve been feeling: The neverending struggle: survival, making shit, being broke, not being broke. I guess what I want, more than anything, is to be able to just create without worrying about having a gig on the side, or figuring out how to make money from being creative. Just creativity for creativity’s sake. Dream big, am I right?
Like, I had this whole idea where I was going to start a content strategy business as a way to make cash, because that’s a reasonable thing to do and I could do it and do it well. But the other day I realized that like, I don’t actually want to do that, lol. I was feeling so anxious and weird about it and I finally took that as a sign that … I should really really try at doing my own thing. At least for the rest of 2022.
And so. My new promise to myself is to take the rest of the year to really focus on writing, submitting, trying to get somewhere with this lil’ dream of mine. If my main problem is that I always get too involved in the work I do, I could at least work towards something I actually… like? LOL.
Wish me luck. See you next week!