I’m going to start today’s post where I ended yesterday’s: with the idea that THE WORK and THE LIFE are two separate things.
Quick definitions, to catch everybody up:
THE WORK: literally your life’s work, although you can think of it as “the current creative project you want to complete” if you want to keep things simple. The stuff you’d like to be working on, during an ideal day.
THE LIFE: the way you’d like your ideal day to proceed. Maybe you want to rise with the sun and walk along the river that runs behind your home. Maybe you want to sleep in and do a couple hours of work before meeting a friend for lunch. Maybe you want a leisurely breakfast with your family. Maybe you want to wake up and do yoga and fill out your Daily Spreadsheet and look for cause-and-effect relationships between your food and sleep and mood and everything else (hey, that one’s me).
The trouble we get into — and I get into this trouble all the time — is thinking that we can’t have THE LIFE until we complete a certain amount of THE WORK. When we are THE FAMOUS, for example, we’ll be able to take those morning walks, because then we won’t have to deal with our current morning rush because we’ll be famous.
Well.
As I wrote yesterday, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to take those walks now.
Don’t let your desire to buy plants convince you that you need to write a successful young-adult series
So I mentioned the other day that I spent part of this year (way too much of this year?) wanting my career to be like Maggie Stiefvater’s, because then I could have an office with a bunch of musical instruments and plants in it.
There was actually a second reason I wanted that type of career, and we’ll get to that, but let’s start with the office. Go take a look at this post on Maggie Stiefvater’s Tumblr, and you’ll see why I was suddenly asking myself whether I should try a young-adult series like The Raven Cycle. Because maybe that would make me MORE SUCCESSFUL, and if I were MORE SUCCESSFUL I could have more plants… and I was back in the trap again.
Turns out you can just buy more plants. They are relatively inexpensive! (It’s the pots that cost money.) I also bought a piano, which was… not inexpensive.*
And there I was, with THE LIFE I had been dreaming about.
Now I had to figure out what type of work I wanted to do next.
Sometimes the work and the life do correlate
Just over a decade ago, I saw Jonathan Coulton open for They Might Be Giants. I did not know who Jonathan Coulton was at the time. (This would change.) I did know that I was watching this guy sing and play guitar and talk to the audience when he wasn’t singing or playing, and I also knew that I wanted to do that.
So I got myself out of debt as quickly as I could,** and then I bought a guitar (and I probably could have bought the guitar before I got out of debt, but I am an orderly sort) and then I taught myself how to play (it helped that I grew up in a family of musicians and that my undergrad degree is in music composition) and then I started looking into how to book shows.
Two years later I was singing and performing for a room full of fans and friends on the Jonathan Coulton Cruise.
I wasn’t an official cruise performer; I was part of what was called the “shadow cruise,” where attendees created their own slate of performances.
Still. I wanted to be onstage with a guitar, singing and talking to an audience, and doing THE WORK made that happen.
I spent just over a year as a full-time performing musician, during which I got myself back into debt (to the tune — pun intended — of $14,000) and realized that THE LIFE I had created through this work wasn’t working.*** Meanwhile I was picking up these writing gigs, and people were asking me to do more freelance writing work, and that was making a lot more money than the music, and… well, I ended up making a career change.
But the point I’m trying to make is that sometimes you have to do THE WORK to get THE LIFE you want, in the sense that if you want to be onstage performing for people, you have to have something worth performing.
But you don’t have to become THE FAMOUS first, and you don’t even have to hide in your apartment until you write the perfect song. You can go to open-mic night two weeks after you get your new guitar, and you can perform for people. (Ask me how I know.)
I’ve gotten to a lot of places by seeing someone else doing something I wanted to do and then asking myself how I could do it. I watched TED Talks and then started volunteering to be on panels at local SF&F conventions. I read Casey Johnston’s Ask a Swole Woman columns and then got into powerlifting (for about six months before switching to the YMCA’s Les Mills classes, which I liked a lot better).
I started this blog because — well, did you actually go read the Maggie Stiefvater post I linked to earlier? It wasn’t just the home I wanted. It was also the ability to talk freely about THE WORK and, honestly, THE SELF, which is something I don’t always get to do in my current career as a personal-finance writer (who’s also authored a couple of books).
I want to be inspiring and transparent and helpful. I know I’m a particular type of person (INTJ: I see the world through a systems-and-patterns lens) so my particular brand of inspiration might not apply to everybody. But you’re here reading this now, and I hope you come back on Monday for the next post. ❤️
*Yes, we’re going to discuss the way money fits into all of this, because it’s a huge part of both THE WORK and THE LIFE (and while I want to say that you can do a lot of THE WORK on “very little money,” because I did, I also know that my definition of “very little money” is around $20K/year, which is well above the federal poverty line for a single person, and I also had the type of minimum-payment-every-month good credit that allowed me to get into $14K of credit card debt, so yes, money plays a huge role in all of this, we will discuss).
**Oh look it’s the money connection again.
***I am well aware that one of the reasons people aspire towards so-called “creative careers” is because the life they have created through their current work isn’t working; I also know from experience that quitting your executive assistant job to become a full-time performing musician can change your life, so I’m not going to say this is a bad idea, just remember that you can also go for a walk or play your guitar at the open mic without quitting your job, and if you do want to change your work to change your life, remember that THE WORK takes work.