I got paid today. I cannot tell you how nice it feels. I went grocery shopping. I bought everything I wanted, and there was no need to panic. There was no "you have twenty dollars to last you two weeks" nonsense. I did not hand my money over to the cashier and fight the urge to hyperventilate. I did not think: and now the great let's-not-spend-anything-ever game begins anew. Nay. I spent money, and--get this--I STILL HAVE MONEY.
It's a great feeling. But why put it on the blog, you ask? What on earth does a good grocery shop have to do with writing?
Here's the thing: I've spent the better part of the last decade, with a nice heavy emphasis on the latter half of that decade, being all kinds of broke. I was broke as a university student, which was okay because students are always broke. And I wasn't even as destitute then as I could have been -- I had student loans, and I had supportive parents, and I always found a way to go out for dinner if the occasion arose. Still -- I never had much money.
And then my time in Scotland arrived. I had a (very) small amount of savings with me when I flew overseas, and by the end of my year at the university my well of money was, ahem, well and truly dry. So I did what any graduate who needs to make it on her own (Lena Dunham and the ladies of Girls, I'm looking at you) must do: I found myself a job. I did this right about the time that the recession hit. (I like to do things in a big way, apparently.) So all of a sudden I found myself working not one, but several contract jobs, never quite sure if any of them would last, and then my repayment period for my student loans kicked in, and pretty soon I was working sixty hours a week and somehow never in possession of extra income at all. I worked. And I wrote. And I went for long walks on the beach. And that was pretty much it for two years.
Of course, when you parse that experience into the day-by-day grind, it wasn't actually as bleak as all that. I was living in Europe, and I had friends all over the place, which meant that I got to travel to fun and exciting places for relatively cheap. Sometimes even for nothing. I subsisted mostly on the generosity of friends and luck during my travels. Even broke as I was, there were opportunities galore and great times to be had. I have wonderful memories of my years in Scotland.
But there was also the very present reality of not having money. The constant anxiety over not having enough money to eat, over sliding deeper and deeper into debt, and all of the panic and the worry and the depression that that entailed. By the end of my time in the UK, the anxiety was so ingrained into my day-to-day that it barely registered anymore. But when I returned to Scotland for a visit, eight months or so after leaving in November of 2010, I rode from the Glasgow Airport to Edinburgh and almost had a panic attack on the bus. Touching back down in Scotland, riding their wonderful transpotation -- all of these things triggered that anxiety. And suddenly I remembered exactly how awful it had been to exist alongside the spectre of destitution.
Now, a year and a half after leaving, I suddenly find myself with a good job. A job that gives me time to write, and -- perhaps more importantly -- pays all the bills and then some. And so today, with my latest paycheque safe in my bank account, I find myself thinking about how we romanticize the garret. You know. "Every artist needs to find a little garret somewhere and smoke cigarettes and do lots of drugs and be poor." Etc. There are plenty of variations on the mantra--artists of the twenty-first century don't smoke as much, maybe, and I'd wager most artists can't afford garrets anymore, so basement apartments it is!--but at their core they all say the same thing. What's the artistic life without struggle?
On one level I have no problem with this. I think great things come out of struggle. (And let me be very clear: as hard as my time in Scotland was, I was always aware of the fact that it could have been much harder, and that the opportunity to be poor and depressed in Scotland was in its own way a luxury of a kind that few people get to enjoy. My struggle, in other words, could very well have been someone else's vacation.) What bothers me, though, about the mantra is the romanticizing that subsequently happens as a result of the whole idea.
Because the reality of the matter is this: Scotland was wonderful, and great, and being poor taught me a lot of great things about money management and yadda yadda. But it was also very, very boring. There were so many days when I just worked, and then came home, and ate dinner alone at my little table, and then went to bed because there was no money to do anything else. That was a large part of my life during those two years. Being poor is so very stressful, and so very monotonous in the anxiety that it causes. And you know, the whole time it was happening I thought, "But you're learning. This is valuable. This will make you into a better writer. This will make you a better person." And I was right -- it did.
But for all that it taught me, I wouldn't wish that kind of anxiety on anyone. It's good to struggle, but it's also good, obviously, to have times of calm that contrast the hardship. And I think we need to be cautious of the idea that great writing arises out of struggle in the first place -- while this is true in a great many cases, it doesn't necessarily follow from this that great writing ONLY comes out of struggle. It's like saying that great writing only comes out of depression and madness.
AL Kennedy wrote a wonderful article in The Guardian a while back about artists and depression. It is absurd and insulting, she said, to assume artists are assisted by despair or hunger in a way that, say, plumbers are not. I think this is spot on. Hardship, in the form of economic anxiety and/or depression and other things, can teach one a great many things. It can be valuable. But to assume that one must experience these things in order to produce worthwhile art at all is problematic. To assume this -- even a tiny little bit -- is to assume that those of us who've been lucky enough to get by with comparatively little difficulty are producing art that is somehow lesser, or not as important. It assumes that those who've had it "easy" don't have interesting things to say.
I've always been a bit skeptical of the claim that artists (and writers in particular, as this saying has been directed at me at various points over the years) must do all kinds of crazy things in order to learn about life. Two of my dearest friends in the world have said repeatedly, since I was about sixteen, that they want nothing more than to hear that I've gone on a drunken, drug-fuelled binge and had sex with all manner of people. I understand where they're coming from, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that they were right a great deal of the time. I was a tentative child. I grew into a tentative adult, and the stepping out of that cocoon -- even tame as it has been by many people's standards -- has made a huge difference in how I view the world. It's had a great impact on my writing. For sure.
But surely this isn't the only way to go about the business of writing. Getting drunk.high and subsisting on ramen noodles for a good long stretch of time? Climbing the stairs to your alternately hot/freezing attic apartment -- and I do live in an attic apartment right now, so let's take a moment and revel in the irony of the cliche -- and scribbling the Great Canadian Novel out during the wee hours? Working and slaving and being tired but that's okay because it's all in the service of art?
It gets old. I haven't even experienced destitution for all that long; most of the people in the world struggle to make ends meet their entire lives. But being poor gets old nonetheless.
Now I find myself in a slightly different situation. Make no mistake -- I'm hardly rolling in the dough here. But I'm comfortable in a way that I haven't been for years. And it's amazing what it's done for my peace of mind, and my writing. There's a wonderful kind of clarity that happens when you're broke and starving. Your life gets reduced to its barest essence, and that can be tremendously valuable. But there's also something to be said for the calm and the clarity that comes out of easier times. Time to refuel. Time to rest your soul and your heart and look elsewhere at the possibilities of inspiration.
Of course, it's all very likely that my nice little period of actually-making-a-decent-wage will come to an end soon enough. (In one year, in fact, when the contract is up.) And after that I'm back to the wild and crazy life of the freelancer. But for now it's nice to, well, smell the roses. Because I can actually buy roses now, if I have the urge. Such a small, insignificant thing. But such a lovely thing all the same.
I think I might as well enjoy it.
It's a great feeling. But why put it on the blog, you ask? What on earth does a good grocery shop have to do with writing?
Here's the thing: I've spent the better part of the last decade, with a nice heavy emphasis on the latter half of that decade, being all kinds of broke. I was broke as a university student, which was okay because students are always broke. And I wasn't even as destitute then as I could have been -- I had student loans, and I had supportive parents, and I always found a way to go out for dinner if the occasion arose. Still -- I never had much money.
And then my time in Scotland arrived. I had a (very) small amount of savings with me when I flew overseas, and by the end of my year at the university my well of money was, ahem, well and truly dry. So I did what any graduate who needs to make it on her own (Lena Dunham and the ladies of Girls, I'm looking at you) must do: I found myself a job. I did this right about the time that the recession hit. (I like to do things in a big way, apparently.) So all of a sudden I found myself working not one, but several contract jobs, never quite sure if any of them would last, and then my repayment period for my student loans kicked in, and pretty soon I was working sixty hours a week and somehow never in possession of extra income at all. I worked. And I wrote. And I went for long walks on the beach. And that was pretty much it for two years.
Of course, when you parse that experience into the day-by-day grind, it wasn't actually as bleak as all that. I was living in Europe, and I had friends all over the place, which meant that I got to travel to fun and exciting places for relatively cheap. Sometimes even for nothing. I subsisted mostly on the generosity of friends and luck during my travels. Even broke as I was, there were opportunities galore and great times to be had. I have wonderful memories of my years in Scotland.
But there was also the very present reality of not having money. The constant anxiety over not having enough money to eat, over sliding deeper and deeper into debt, and all of the panic and the worry and the depression that that entailed. By the end of my time in the UK, the anxiety was so ingrained into my day-to-day that it barely registered anymore. But when I returned to Scotland for a visit, eight months or so after leaving in November of 2010, I rode from the Glasgow Airport to Edinburgh and almost had a panic attack on the bus. Touching back down in Scotland, riding their wonderful transpotation -- all of these things triggered that anxiety. And suddenly I remembered exactly how awful it had been to exist alongside the spectre of destitution.
Now, a year and a half after leaving, I suddenly find myself with a good job. A job that gives me time to write, and -- perhaps more importantly -- pays all the bills and then some. And so today, with my latest paycheque safe in my bank account, I find myself thinking about how we romanticize the garret. You know. "Every artist needs to find a little garret somewhere and smoke cigarettes and do lots of drugs and be poor." Etc. There are plenty of variations on the mantra--artists of the twenty-first century don't smoke as much, maybe, and I'd wager most artists can't afford garrets anymore, so basement apartments it is!--but at their core they all say the same thing. What's the artistic life without struggle?
On one level I have no problem with this. I think great things come out of struggle. (And let me be very clear: as hard as my time in Scotland was, I was always aware of the fact that it could have been much harder, and that the opportunity to be poor and depressed in Scotland was in its own way a luxury of a kind that few people get to enjoy. My struggle, in other words, could very well have been someone else's vacation.) What bothers me, though, about the mantra is the romanticizing that subsequently happens as a result of the whole idea.
Because the reality of the matter is this: Scotland was wonderful, and great, and being poor taught me a lot of great things about money management and yadda yadda. But it was also very, very boring. There were so many days when I just worked, and then came home, and ate dinner alone at my little table, and then went to bed because there was no money to do anything else. That was a large part of my life during those two years. Being poor is so very stressful, and so very monotonous in the anxiety that it causes. And you know, the whole time it was happening I thought, "But you're learning. This is valuable. This will make you into a better writer. This will make you a better person." And I was right -- it did.
But for all that it taught me, I wouldn't wish that kind of anxiety on anyone. It's good to struggle, but it's also good, obviously, to have times of calm that contrast the hardship. And I think we need to be cautious of the idea that great writing arises out of struggle in the first place -- while this is true in a great many cases, it doesn't necessarily follow from this that great writing ONLY comes out of struggle. It's like saying that great writing only comes out of depression and madness.
AL Kennedy wrote a wonderful article in The Guardian a while back about artists and depression. It is absurd and insulting, she said, to assume artists are assisted by despair or hunger in a way that, say, plumbers are not. I think this is spot on. Hardship, in the form of economic anxiety and/or depression and other things, can teach one a great many things. It can be valuable. But to assume that one must experience these things in order to produce worthwhile art at all is problematic. To assume this -- even a tiny little bit -- is to assume that those of us who've been lucky enough to get by with comparatively little difficulty are producing art that is somehow lesser, or not as important. It assumes that those who've had it "easy" don't have interesting things to say.
I've always been a bit skeptical of the claim that artists (and writers in particular, as this saying has been directed at me at various points over the years) must do all kinds of crazy things in order to learn about life. Two of my dearest friends in the world have said repeatedly, since I was about sixteen, that they want nothing more than to hear that I've gone on a drunken, drug-fuelled binge and had sex with all manner of people. I understand where they're coming from, and I'd be lying if I didn't admit that they were right a great deal of the time. I was a tentative child. I grew into a tentative adult, and the stepping out of that cocoon -- even tame as it has been by many people's standards -- has made a huge difference in how I view the world. It's had a great impact on my writing. For sure.
But surely this isn't the only way to go about the business of writing. Getting drunk.high and subsisting on ramen noodles for a good long stretch of time? Climbing the stairs to your alternately hot/freezing attic apartment -- and I do live in an attic apartment right now, so let's take a moment and revel in the irony of the cliche -- and scribbling the Great Canadian Novel out during the wee hours? Working and slaving and being tired but that's okay because it's all in the service of art?
It gets old. I haven't even experienced destitution for all that long; most of the people in the world struggle to make ends meet their entire lives. But being poor gets old nonetheless.
Now I find myself in a slightly different situation. Make no mistake -- I'm hardly rolling in the dough here. But I'm comfortable in a way that I haven't been for years. And it's amazing what it's done for my peace of mind, and my writing. There's a wonderful kind of clarity that happens when you're broke and starving. Your life gets reduced to its barest essence, and that can be tremendously valuable. But there's also something to be said for the calm and the clarity that comes out of easier times. Time to refuel. Time to rest your soul and your heart and look elsewhere at the possibilities of inspiration.
Of course, it's all very likely that my nice little period of actually-making-a-decent-wage will come to an end soon enough. (In one year, in fact, when the contract is up.) And after that I'm back to the wild and crazy life of the freelancer. But for now it's nice to, well, smell the roses. Because I can actually buy roses now, if I have the urge. Such a small, insignificant thing. But such a lovely thing all the same.
I think I might as well enjoy it.
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