In the past month I’ve met my fair share of new people, so for the first time in at least a little while, I’ve been repeatedly asked the following question: “So, what do you like to do for fun?”  

I’m a chatty person and on the spectrum of open-ness, I’m probably as un-clammed up as you can get. Not only that, but the answer to this question has remained unchanged for most of my life – it’s always been writing, duh, so you’d think it’d be easy enough to answer. But if I’m being honest, I don’t always lead with that. For one, saying you like to write makes it sound like you’re a writer, and that is a whole bucket of imposter syndrome I’m not going to touch in this sentence or the next. For two, saying I like to write almost always prompts a follow up question of “Oh! What do you write?” and…I don’t feel like I have an interesting or valid response to that.  

I’ve realized that the answer to that question can’t be contained by any one genre or medium. The truth is, I write whatever makes me happy. There’s genuinely no other through-line to every single thing I’ve written on my many days off, in all my past afternoons of free time. Sometimes it’s a high fantasy novel. Sometimes it’s a screenplay. Sometimes it’s chick lit. And usually, it is a blog, which I’ve come to accept is a bizarrely public way for my adolescent journaling habit to have manifested in adulthood.

But blogging really does make me happy! It brings me joy to write these little snippets about my own little life, and to be able to look back on them no matter where I am (internet connection notwithstanding). Rather than the huge plastic box I have been lugging around for many, many moves in the past decade and a half, this form of journaling makes these memories accessible, and infinitely easier to flip through. And because the past decade and a half has taken me a whole lot of places, that accessibility and ease are invaluable qualities for me.  

All of that to say, here I am, at it again. I’m writing from the comfort of our backyard patio on a blue-skied PNW summer afternoon, listening to a playlist based on the version of David Bowie’s Changes that features Butterly Boucher (a tune, as SHOCKINGLY were many songs from the soundtracks of the Shrek movies). And as I was bopping along to Cass Elliot’s deeply joyous Make Your Own Kind of Music, enjoying this gorgeous eighty-degree June day, I found myself wondering: what the fuck am I doing with my life?? 

Which sounds like a VERY extra thought for a person who is actually super happy to be wondering. Especially a super happy person that just got married and bought a house!  

Believe me when I say I am so happy in my relationship and the amazing home we have created and share with our amazing, perfect cat. But, please also believe me when I say that no matter how happy you otherwise are, shedding your career as the primary thing you have in one way or another spent your entire adulthood deriving your identity from AND divorcing yourself from a capitalist definition of success is, well, a total bitch of a process.  

I wrote a post years ago about how I found the concept of producing compelling content to be terrifying, because the very idea of that starts to inextricably link something that brings me joy with a quantifiable, judge-able value. It’s one of the reasons I’ve never seriously tried to make writing a career – those are dangerous waters that I don’t know I’ll ever be brave enough to face. But for whatever reason (read: capitalism), it felt totally natural and even correct to inextricably link my career and the money I made with my self-worth, and everything that steep judgement curve brought with it (read: high highs, and low af lows).  

In the past two years, I’ve found myself in a situational first: as one half of a partnership, no longer having to be the only person in my financial corner, no longer having to be my own safety net. Sure, for the majority of those two years, I didn’t have to lean on that partnership in that way because I had a pretty great job that rescued me from my last career crisis. But I always knew that if something happened, that if I had to accept support from my partner, I could. And let me tell you, that surety gave me a real false sense of progress in the vulnerability/self-worth department.  

I started job hunting here in Washington as soon as our offer on the house was accepted, and though it was in a new industry – outside sales in the field of higher education – I pretty quickly found a job that paid real well. And in doing so, I thought I had avoided having to test out that whole accepting support from my partner bit.  

Spoilers: that job ended up being the weirdest dumpster fire and I left after two weeks, and since the end of April I’ve been making twenty dollars an hour working Tuesday through Saturday in an architectural salvage shop as a retail associate. 

There are a ton of pros to this job: it keeps me busy, I get to see some really cool stuff almost every single day, and the crew is awesome. But at twenty dollars an hour, I suddenly find myself…you guessed it: actually having to accept support from my partner. And it is some hard shit. Not because of anything he is doing – he is wonderful and happy to support me! But fuck if it is still one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do.  

All of this, I am quite sure, is connected. That’s why it’s so hard. It’s not as simple as being back at the pay rate I was on when I was twenty-three or as simple as being back in retail (albeit the coolest possible version of it). It’s not as simple as feeling like a failure because on my own I am fiscally “failing”, or as simple as not having a remote clue as to what better job I should even be looking for. All of those things together are wrapped up in this complicated relationship I have with what I am worth in relation to my job and money. And it doesn’t matter that I am surrounded by people that know and tell me on the regular how valuable I am. This is something in my head, obnoxiously and firmly stationed in my bones, and I’ve got to start working through it. 

I am not less valuable because I’m making significantly less money (that is capitalist rhetoric, Kathy, get out of here with that nonsense!). I am not less valuable because I have help. I am not less valuable because I don’t have a career that makes “sense”. It is okay to not know what I want to do and to be unsure of how to go about finding it. Even though I am thirty-four.  

So, my current plan is to focus on the many, many good and true things that are easier to believe at this particular moment in my life. That I have a beautiful home with an amazing human and a (let’s be honest) even more amazing cat. That they both love and support me in their own way. That I have the best friends and the best family, far away though they may be. That this playlist really is full of jams and that I now have at least ten new songs to add to my Summer Jams 2023 playlist.  

That even though all of this is a struggle, and hard, even just writing about it makes it feel a little less so. And that I am almost certain that will always be the case.