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June 22, 2011

The unbearable lightness of unemployment

Permit me today a digression into the life of a soon to be full time writer. Today I quit my day job.  Well, I mentally quit a while back, but today I walked up to my boss and handed in my resignation.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked my day job and most of the people I worked with.
But it was interfering with the time I wanted to spend writing.  I had, by saying I had too much to do at work, a built-in excuse for not writing.  I’m shedding that excuse and paring my life down to the bare bones of simply being able to put fingers to keyboard whenever the spirit moves me.  And whenever the plumber is not unclogging the sink.
Easy for you to say.
Well, it wasn’t easy.  Having a day by day job allows you a little socialization that you don’t always get sitting at home at the keyboard and talking to the statue of Buddha on the floor next to you.
The gift it does give is freedom.  Freedom from intraoffice politics that sap my strength.  Freedom from having to be in bed by 11PM if I want to get up and go to work at 5AM even if my inner muses are all night owls. Freedom to really understand what drives me to scribble in the dead of night.
The drawbacks are obvious.  I’m going to be poor and in debt.  I’ve reworked my budget innumerable times.  I’m already poor and in debt.  I’m just going to be poorer and more in debt.
But I have dreamed, since I started writing when I was 14, of being free to do this.
As so many pundits have said “life is a journey”  I’ve stopped living it one stupid day at a time, resentful of every time I got in the car and slogged to work. I am now going to inhale it in big gulps grateful for every single one of those breaths. 
Or at least I think I will .  After July 14th.

1 comment:

  1. It's so easy to put something off because you have "something else" you "must" do. No excuses any more! (And perhaps you'll learn even more thoroughly the "joys" of book promotion....) :-)

    Sandra

    ReplyDelete