I‘m a stubborn person.
That’s not to say that I don’t like to listen to advice. I frequently look into other people’s opinions all the time, because that gives me a lot of ideas and how doing things one way may yield results of a certain nature. But, at the end of the day, I do my own research, take what I can live with, and I make a decision from there.
I hear a lot of writing advice and how it’s almost impossible to make even a comfortable living out of this career, and how luck plays a big role, and how you need hard work. All true things, of course. But…
There’s the truth, and then there’s how I react to the truth. You know that little voice in your head that goes, “Well, so maybe this isn’t for you, then. What makes you think you’re the exception? If chances are this isn’t going to work out, why bother?”
Yeah. I like to strangle it.
When I was 15, I first encountered similar advice with regards to my relationship. Most people told me there was almost no chance in hell that what I had was “true love”. That most high school relationships don’t last. So even when things got tough, we approached it with a, “We’ll work on it,” mindset. That was 15 years ago and not only are we still together, but our relationship is as strong–stronger, actually–than when we were kids.
That’s the short story.
The long story is that we went through every possible upheaval you can think of. Family problems, so my boyfriend moved out at 17 years old and had to support himself working 3 part-time jobs (because nobody, for a time, would give a kid a full-time job), and we got married at 20 with no support from his side of the family. Young, career-less…I had my daughter before I finished college.
I was pregnant with my son when I actually graduated college (while working a full time job). Somehow during this whole entire ordeal, we were able to build our own detached house in the Greater Vancouver area before we hit 30, which if you Google it is something that people think is impossible for millennials to achieve in this area, at least not without a rich family to back them up. I did mention I came from a poor family who lived in the slums before we immigrated to Canada, right?
What I’ve learned, over these years, is that when people say something is difficult, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible. You can negate odds with work ethic. If a 100% effort means a one in a thousand chance, then you better damn well know how to put in 100000%. Does it sound insane? So is what we did (the insanity basically came down to cutting our grocery bills to about half of what most people spend and my husband working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, for 5 years).
You learn the rules, and then you figure out how to work around the rules, or break the rules, or make your own Goddamned rules. Redefine “success”. To me, it just means I love writing enough to have re-framed my life so that I can actually afford to write comfortably. Maybe that’s all there is to it, and maybe that’s enough.
Bla bla bla The Agartes Epilogues bla bla…
