I have come to an impasse.  For years, decades – in fact, I have taken the roads others have encouraged or demanded of me or abandoned those that asked too much or too little.  Now, at the midpoint of my life, I find myself with nothing to show but expired certifications, unused degrees, and dusty accolades no longer relevant to any course I care to walk. 

My brief adventure in theater ended when I declined a spot on the casting couch.  I assumed the girl who got that part accepted.  Having encountered the same offer at my next big audition, I lost my taste for the business.  If I wanted to be a sex worker, I would swing from a pole and make considerably more money with significantly less rejection and effort.  I decided to wait tables and recalibrate.

A few years later, I went to school for Education, but all ambition I had to inspire children went out the window when I was told by a principle my lesson plans were “too interesting and creative,” that I needed to “focus on the [state-mandated, standardized] test,” and I needed to “stop working so hard.”  I switched districts and found new footing, but my first child came and I decided to stay home during the early years.  When I returned, five years later, I found out I had to start over.  From the bottom.  That meant substitute teaching and working as an aide, making copies and helping students use the toilet for poverty wages and welfare insurance.  At the time, I was a single parent with a chronic “non-payer” for a co-parent, busting my tail to survive.  In advocation for my students with unique needs, I’d made a pest of myself in the eyes of administration.  After three years of bureaucratic melodrama and literal ass-wiping, having been passed over for a promotions twice because I was “too valuable” in my position, I decided maybe this line of bullshit – I mean, work – just wasn’t for me.

So, off I went to real estate – the BYO of business.  Bring your own license.  Bring your own funding.  Bring your own training.  Bring your own signs, folders, business cards, office fees, copies, access to necessary associations and inventory lists, …  Hell, bring your own customers.  You’re basically paying thousands of dollars each year to the state and the office to provide you with a theoretical structure in which to operate your independent business.  I adore working with people on the sale and purchase of properties.  Trouble is, you need people to work with, and without thousands to spend annually on BYO marketing, research, and advertising, you’re chasing your tail.

Exhausted from trying to catch the fluffy end of my own existence, I circled back around to where I tend to end up: standing alone and in peril, wondering what the next thing is.  What I am finally realizing is that the reason I was ever any good at anything at all is because I write well, the thing that I enjoy doing the most is writing, and that no one – despite countless applications and efforts, no one – is going to pay me to do it for them.

Sure, I could take the fraction of a penny per word jobs.  I could earn a whopping $20 for ten 1700 word articles per week.  (Yes, that was an actual job posting.)  I could also shovel shit at the zoo.  I’d certainly earn more money in less time.  I have a family to feed, and I don’t have time to waste helping those who are both incapable of working my craft and unwilling to adequately compensate me to work it for them.  Eight years after ghostwriting a novelette that never made it to print, I am still kicking myself for letting the rough draft slip away into the expanse of great work never to see the light of day, dropped by hands unable to carry it across the finish line.  It’s almost as saddening as the freelance writing prospects out there.

Meanwhile, the web dumps pages of new content written by communications majors without the good sense or grammar of a middle schooler writing a bullshit essay on a standardized test.  Yet, these jobs are impossibly hard to get and pay little more than one would earn managing the local table-service chain, refunding overcooked steaks and calling Ubers for the Flagged On A Friday regulars. 

Thus, here, we find the impasse.

What is a writer to do in a world that values craft less than word count or click-throughs?  …Where those looking for quality in content are dreamers with shallow pockets hoping to turn a nickel into bait for the broke and talented?  …Where the Learned It On TikToker crowd wants to pay you $15 to write them a book they’ll upload to Audible and make thousands on?

If there is no money in writing for others, one must writer for oneself, and that means getting publishing.

There is no other direction I can go.  Trapped in a labyrinth of failed career choices and dead ends, I have no path but the one laid out before me, the one that leads to the only way out. It’s the one on which I will write my way out.

Many years ago, upon completing my master’s in education, I considered getting a doctorate and pursuing a career as a college professor.  My father cautioned me about the necessity to “publish or perish” when working in the highest levels of education.  A professor who does not write a critical manuscript in their field is as good as gone.  It seems this adorable, albeit threatening, alliterative is now true to life for me anyway. 

As a person who has made a career of leaving jobs that proved financially or spiritually impoverishing, and who has only ever really been skillful at one thing, writing my way out of this life and into the one I want is the only option.  I simply must get my manuscripts bound and on shelves. 

And so the music rings in my head, “Live, life, live, [write] or die.”