My blog entry last week may have seemed bland and unoriginal. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to post at that time. While eating some vegetables with dip for lunch, I read in the newspaper my friend and colleague had died the prior Saturday. She was only 45 years old and died less than two years after being diagnosed with colon cancer. This occurrence naturally led me to evaluate my life even more than usual. It got me thinking about the answer to the question: If I only had ten years left to live, is there anything I would choose to do differently today? And if I would choose to do something differently today if I was going to die in ten years, shouldn’t I be doing it differently anyway? But would quitting my paycheck job to concentrate on a full time writing career be stupid and/or irresponsible? Would waiting until I get my kids off to college to start a full time writing career be more sensible? But after waiting those ten years, will it be too late?
There is no easy answer, of course. In today’s economy, I think I should just be grateful I have a good paying job. Though it provides less and less personal satisfaction, I don’t hate it. Sometimes, I think I should just suck it up and accept the American Monday through Friday life—spending every waking minute pining for Friday evening, drudging through my life getting only an 80/20 cost-benefit or annual working-nonworking day ratio. Putting in 80 cents and getting only 20 cents seems like a bad investment to me. The thought of accepting that without at least striving to attain even a 50/50 ratio depresses me and I’m not sure how long I’d be able keep my head above the quick sand of depression I suspect would be sucking me in. But almost equally depressing would be not having enough money to provide for my kids.
My biggest obstacle is the unknown. Knowing I’d be around another forty years, another five years or somewhere in between would answer the question of what to do with my professional life. Similarly, the answer would be much clearer if I knew I’d be able to make an adequate living writing or if I knew I’d never get a single piece published. For me, money has never been more important than quality of life. It is a matter of balance. What price do I put on quality of life? How much loss of quality of life would I be willing to tolerate for how much income? It is both a direct and indirect correlation because a certain level of income is necessary to achieve a certain quality of life. Part of my quality of life comes from being able to take vacations and do things with my family. To have those opportunities requires a certain amount of money, a level I’m not sure I could achieve with a full time writing career. But is it worth spending so much of my waking hours doing something I don’t enjoy, that’s not fulfilling, and not commiserate with my skills and abilities for a week or two away?
I’ve been accused in the past of being idealistic. I believe my life is a product of the choices I make. I’ve always believed I could be anything I wanted to be and I could achieve any goal I chose if I worked hard enough and made the right choices to get there. I believe the success of my life will be measured by always spending my time doing the things I enjoy and that are personally satisfying. The thought of not being idealistic in this way makes me ask: What’s the point? If I give up the dream of being a writer and live those 80 days for the sake of those 20, would I be able to still LIVE or would I eventually wither away, dying inside? A solution for many aspiring writers I know is to write part-time while keeping their paycheck jobs which I’ve done for the past nearly 15 months. I work 30 hours/week most of the time at my paycheck job and then write whenever I can steal the time outside of that. I’ve made progress; I finished a young adult novel, am currently collecting rejection letters, and have maintained a weekly blog for nearly 6 months. Maybe I’m just not patient enough—but then again there’s no reason to think I have the luxury of patience. It gets harder and harder to push myself away from my writing at 7:45 a.m. every morning to get ready to go to my paycheck job. It gets harder and harder to file away what could be successful writing projects because I’m not sure I’ll ever have the time to get to them. And it gets harder to force myself to concentrate on my paycheck task when my manuscript or current idea is screaming at me to work on it. But as I get older and subsequently, more grown up, it gets harder to give up the sure thing—or at least as sure as things can get.
There are so many questions and not enough answers. I’m not sure what I’ll decide to do, when or if I’ll even decide at all. The only thing I really know is I’ll never have any answer if I stop asking myself the questions. I don’t want to give up my idealism or the dream of something more satisfying and meaningful. To me, to give up that would equate to giving up living. I’ve lost too many to not know the value of living.
