Living For The Money Can Create Dark Times
Learning from dark times means, for me, looking at a point in my life where I wanted something very important to me in a way that was unhealthy for me.
A few years ago, I made the mistake of deciding that writing would be the way I make my living in the world. I had seen other writers do it and had personally known a few who managed to pay their bills with book sells and tours. I knew as a poet that level of living was not probable. In America, poetry hardly sells and media forces us to ask the question about poetry’s relevance, about on how to make poetry relevant in the same ways radio stations and mainstream magazines have made music and big/little screen relevant. So, it’s a strange world being a poet and I knew this. What I wanted to do was focus on what could make me money as a poet and that, unfortunately, is submitting to contests.
Submission
The word “submission” is a word that we in the writing field use when submitting, or sending out, our work for potential publication. Sometimes it happens that we are solicited for submissions, which is not always as wonderful as it seems to be but that is for a later post. The term “submission” and its verb form “submit” are strange, right? It’s as though magazines and journals and anthologies are asking you to wear a blind fold, ear plugs, and lay your body out spread eagle so they can flog you. No gag. They want to hear you scream. And sometimes submitting work feels that way. There is no guess work necessary: sending work out to be judged and either rejected or accepted is an emotionally draining process for many writers. So in a lot of ways submission does mean to be submissive, to give up one’s power over the work in order to benefit in a way that seems so unrealistic: other people will be able to see my work and I can say I was in this or that journal for purposes of getting tenure at a university/stuffing my curriculum vitae to capacity/feeling good that I did something that could impress other people.
All of this is part of the commodification of art. We make art, we need money, we make art in order to satisfy that need. It sounds awful and most of the time it is awful. But, if lawyers and bakers can get paid for what they do, artists should get paid as well. This brings me back to square one: poetry simply does not bring financial security. So many poets work main jobs as educators of some sort or for non-profits or as doctors. Any job at all is a job worth having when living the life of a poet. But, I wanted to live the life of a novelist with a poet’s lack of social support. That is where I lost my way.
Bitterness
Bitterness is gross. Not only does it leave the literal and figurative bad taste in your mouth but it eventually leaves one to think that other great tasting foods really aren’t that great. Bitterness is pretty much a virus. You get it and it never goes away. The immune system can suppress it but it never really completely disappears. Much like envy. Much like sadness. We get over it for a time then it comes back when it must because we are humans and only a handful of us have reached spiritual Nirvana to meditate their way into total peace with the universe. That’s not me. And it was not me when I thought I needed to pay my bills and feed myself with poetry, which created an awful sense of desperation when the prize money didn’t come and the publications were not picking up anything I wrote. I wasn’t angry with the lack of success; I was angry because I was broke, tired, hungry, and horrified about my future.
The worse of it all: my work began to suffer. I wrote some of the strangest pieces of writing ever during that time. And this was not that kind of “strange” where you go back an edit the work into brilliance. It was the strange as in “This is not me writing this.” I had lost my way and my love for writing died a slow painful death. I stopped worrying about it. I stopped submitting to prizes. I hardly wrote anything at all.
Learning From Dark Times
To make this long story short, it took mentoring to get me out of that slump. I’ll talk about the importance of mentors really soon. Mentors are so important that I might need to write multiple pieces about it. But I would not be here writing today at this moment if it were not for writers with more experience and who had a lot of love for me telling me to stop worrying about the aftermath before the situation even happened. I had to learn to love what I do despite it not being a high-paying job. It’s not about the money. It’s about making something beautiful and life-changing for someone else. Sometimes doing what you love for money can kill what you love. I learned that the hard way.
In retrospect, one of my darkest times was not necessarily something sourced from something outside of me. Maybe often times this is the case. A looming disaster is seen as a cloud of fog closing in from over the horizon and we say to the storm “This is your fault”. Meanwhile, who we are inside is doing the most damage and we are not always aware of this self-annihilation. And this is something that rarely goes away 100%. But when insecurity or bitterness or anxiety happen, we have to know how to deal with it so that if it ever tries to come back we can say to ourselves “This is not me. This is not who I want to be.”
So my questions: What do you love to do? How do you see yourself as maintaining your love? If what you love to do feeds you financially, would you keep doing it if it ever stopped making money for you?
Resources
The Psychology of Bitterness – 10 Easy Lessons – Very useful and concise overview of bitterness over at The Atlantic.
Writer Jobs at Indeed.com – Just plug in your location in the “where” search box and see what you find.
~Phillip
Glappitnova unites influencers and talent from different industries through storytelling, performances, classes, and events for one crazy 8 day experience in Chicago.The opinions expressed here by Glappitnova.com contributors are their own, not those of Glappitnova.com.
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