On Having a Real Job

I have a homeless Uncle. He also, as it so happens, is a writer; of sorts. It makes being a writer a difficult thing for one to embrace, this having of the crazed-homeless-writer-Uncle. (Please, no, ‘I’m so sorry about your Uncle’ business. He’s been homeless as long as I can remember, will continue to be as long as I can see into the future and has chosen this path for himself numerous times. Coherently so, I might add.)

As a matter of fact, it makes the embracing of any creative calling difficult. Which is unfortunate, because I’m creative. And I write. A lot.

You may recall that my mom was recently nice to me. It was a once in a lifetime occurrence and it left me a little skerred that perhaps her body had been inhabited by aliens in a grand scheme to overtake rural Mid-Michigan, I mean America, but… wait, where were we? Right. My Mom was nice to me, but I didn’t really reveal exactly what she was nice to me about. Brace yourself.

I’m perfectly happy just being creative.

That and in control, but you get the idea. The problem, you see, is that for the past twenty-some years I have believed with all of my icy little heart that creative jobs were not jobs at all. Not real jobs.

Writing was done by crazy people. Or, at the very least, people who couldn’t do anything else. I never, despite the many awards I won in my wayward youth for the act, thought that my writing or my art was worthy of being a real job. And thus I have spent far too many years of my adulthood “just writing for fun” and “just, you know, it’s a hobby”-ing with my photography and painting.

So, I finally told my mother that it wasn’t a hobby. That it was my job and that I would appreciate it if she would try to take it seriously. And she insisted that she’s been trying to get me to take it seriously for quite some time.

And you know the part about me being a little scared of her being nice to me? I’m a little more scared that perhaps, just this once, she was right. I don’t remember this supposed encouragement of my creative gifts, but I don’t necessarily remember, aside from the crazed-homeless-writer-Uncle, any discouragement either.

Here’s to at least one therapy session that my mom just might not be responsible for. Maybe, just maybe, I screwed myself up on this one.

Tagged as: Art, Cultivate: Writing, photoblog, The Crazy