For the past month or so I’ve been much better about spending time with other human beings and not working myself to death (please clap). But spending time with people outside of work still means talking about work and thinking about work as a concept. Some of my friends have stressful low-paying jobs and others have stressful high-paying ones (and other combos thereof), but most people I’m close with are engaged in some kind of standard, salaried, at-least-getting-some-kinda-benefits form of labor, and it’s often what they want to talk about, since it takes up much of their time. I’m rapidly becoming the poor friend, or the weird friend anyway, as I struggle to balance multiple freelance gigs and make a go of being a writer in a serious way. After two years of this experiment, I’m not quite sure what to make of my attempt and how to explain it to my friends—except to say that I think it’s more or less impossible to be genuinely “serious” about writing. It’s not—currently, anyway—a serious profession.
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