Panic Monday: the ever-evolving writing crisis

You'll notice that I've not-so-subtly changed my alliterative 'Manic Monday' title to 'Panic Monday.'

For which there's a very good reason.

The other day as my roommate/best friend was discussing applying for a well-paying job in her field, I had a really unsettling, startling thought that has continued to unnerve me from the moment I had it:

I will likely never be financially stable in my field unless I’m successful at publishing a manuscript.

It’s true that I’m a working journalist, but even writing for a large city (which I’m not) newspaper is rocky, with print media continuing to evolve with the ever-growing interwebs. And while I would never rule out a gig working for The New York Times, I’m also not certain I’m passionate enough about journalism to want something like that badly enough to make it happen for myself.

I like journalism well enough and I'm so grateful to be an employed writer, but my love affair with writing has never really been about the truth – which defines journalism at its very core – but about falling into another world, providing an escape from the harsher realities of the universe.

And since I sort of gave up screenwriting by leaving Los Angeles (not that I couldn’t ever write a movie outside of the city, but writing for television is pretty much out of the question now), my only other real avenue is novel-writing. I’ve pondered other things – like starting a proofreading business or trying to make a living out of blogging – but I find it almost detrimental to split my focus between passions when I already have trouble sitting down to write.

It’s true that I’m a procrastinator at heart, but a lot of that stems largely from my fear of failure and the unrealistic expectations I place on myself. I have this idea of what I need something to be and the idea that I might not meet my own creative expectation sometimes stops me before I begin.

Hence why I’m only 40 pages into a story I started over a year ago.

And you can see how largely problematic it is that I’ve created even more pressure by thinking, hey, if you can’t make this work, what the hell are you gonna do? Because now it’s even more essential that I find a way to make this happen for myself.

I realize that I’m only 24 and I have time to accomplish these goals. But I also have other dreams – outside of my career goals – that are a lot harder to realize if I don’t have stability. Things like traveling and moving to another city. I don’t really wanna remain in my hometown any longer than two years and it’s going to be incredibly difficult to relocate to a city like Boston (my dream right now, though that could likely change as I haven’t even been there) if I can’t move beyond my circumstances of making barely a livable wage.

This would be the point of my blog where I have an answer to my problem or at least a few shaky words of wisdom that hopefully don’t sound too much like they’ve fallen out of a fortune cookie.

But today, I don’t have those answers.