Real Talk: On transparency, careers, and living your dream

 

Transparency. It’s a hell of a thing. One scary hell of a thing. So it’s time for a little real talk when it comes to living your dream.

…Or well…. living my dream.

Hey. I said it was a hell of a thing. I did not say that it was a hell of a thing that I’ve done so well with lately.

It used to be that I would blog about more than just news to do with my books. At the very least, I’d tell you guys what I’d been reading. But sometimes, I’d share what, in my publishing journey, was working. Or sometimes, I’d talk about what had been going on in my life.

I look back through my more recent posts and it’s all exclamation points and excitement. And hey, don’t get me wrong… I am excited about those things, but they don’t exactly offer a complete picture of me and my life.

Transparency. Real talk. It’s what I’m going to go for more now. And that means some of the less exciting stuff along with all of my happy news.

So. While we’re talking about scary things, I’ll tell you how, after just a year of being there, I quit my corporate day job in July and that I “author” full-time now. My mental state getting up and going to that job every day boiled down to a melting pot of simmering resentment and misery, with a dash of depression thrown in. Even when I arrived home from work, it was like a cloud hung over me– there was always that knowledge in the back of my mind that I had to go back.

While we’re talking about scary things, I’ll tell you that I don’t make nearly enough for a living on my author income, which is now the only money I have coming in, and how absurdly grateful I am that I still live with my parents. (Most of the time. Other days, that nasty voice inside me likes to list it as one of my failures.)

I’ll tell you that I still have days where I’m too plagued with self-doubt to do anything but sit in a dark room, mindlessly binge-watching on Netflix. I’ll tell you how often I struggle with self-loathing, berating myself for everything from eating that piece of cake to not writing that day to daring to think I deserved to write as a career in the first place.

…Man, this is turning out to be a Debbie Downer of a post, so let me tell you some other things.

• I have more good days than bad days now.
• I can never contain a grin when someone asks me questions about one of my books, or asks me to sign a book, or when I’m pointed to a lovely review of my work.
• I get way more writing and editing done than I ever did around my day job, and devoting myself to it full-time has definitely made a difference in the income I earn from it, minuscule as it may be.
• My creative wheels turn more often than they are braked now.
• I still wake up around the same time, but rarely am I so exhausted from the day that I have to go to bed by 8 P.M., as I often did before.

Like any job, there are pros and cons to the change I made, but this one has more ups than downs.

And a friend reminded me the other day: “Jen, you’re already living your dream.”

And this is just step 1.