It's a question that has plagued me. "I do nothing. I do laziness. I run? I... edit..?" I'm as cliche as the next person struggling with his identity, and my answers always get mumbled out somehow and end up a little differently each time.
I quit my managing editor job for the medical school alumni magazine last fall. For the next several weeks I wasn't overly productive. "I'm retired," I'd tell people as glibly as I could, smirking a bit for show. This, of course, masked my mountainous disappointment in where my unfettered tendencies lead and the great fear looming over me about how to proceed with life. What is life? Is it even worth living? How can I justify any type of work? Why am I cursed with privilege? Yada yada. So much pathetics, and I knew it. It's a curious spiral: shame for the ease of life, leading to the inability to enjoy it and live it well, leading to more shame. Brené Brown would be disappointed. Or curious. Or over it, probably.
After the new year, I finally began something that felt like forward motion: a proofreading class through the Christian Editors Network, of which I had signed myself up as a bronze member a few weeks before. I'm still taking that course, so this point in time is not far removed from that one. I've had no great epiphanies or sudden increases in discipline or unsolicited influxes in clients or cash. But editing, and my participation in it, has certainly taken up more real estate in my mind.
I joined the Freelance Editing 101 course a couple weeks ago. And a few days later finally started reading through the Establishing Your Freelance Business 101 material I purchased (well, grandma purchased as a gift for me) over Christmas. It's probably the biggest wave of incoming information I've experienced in a decade—all while also being selected as a juror in a four-day trial, which only added to the feeling of over saturation.
Is over saturation two words? Or should I hyphenate it? Is it okay that I started that sentence with "or"? If so, according to whom?
I think I want to be a copy editor, but I also think it's only because I don't think I have any other skills. But reading and studying all this material is depressing, or at least discouraging. It's a romantic ideal, this dream of being a freelancer that many of us coddle and attempt to retain while awake. I'm told the reality is: heaps of work. And it's work that needs to come from self-motivated hands, from someone who can promote themselves, from someone who is disciplined with his time at home. This is discouraging to me. I struggle mightily with these things, and saying that I struggle feels like a grand overstatement.
They also say to be an editor of quality and credibility, one ought to write, to be published, even. Oh, and that it's probably best in many cases to get things running on the side, because you won't make much money for the first few years.
As I watch my savings dwindle and the list of should-dos grow, it's almost all I can do to just laugh a little. I'm nearly 32. I'm not the age I feel anymore, which is somewhere around 17. (Wait, ages are written out according to Chicago style. Using numerals is Associated Press style. But I'm not changing those because I'm the publisher of this blog, so I can overrule the rules.) I'm trying to trust God, because I believe He is wholly capable to make worlds out of nothing. In ten years I think I'll see little worlds of my own, as it were, that He did make for me. But you know how it is, this darkness in the moment, this silence of the seconds. I am the blind man before surgery, but in this case, I can't just lie around awaiting instructions or mobile beds. Maybe I can eventually, but it has to start with me. I have to get myself dressed, so I can get to the door, so I can let in the person who will take me to the surgery. It's the little things, sometimes.
A couple days ago, I agreed with a good friend to spend 20 minutes blogging today (there we go again, numerals). And here I am.
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| Yes, that's my gloved thumb. Yes, this was taken this morning. |
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