First, if you’re reading this, I want to say thank you for being a subscriber. This newsletter was first launched on TinyLetter when I was active on Tumblr. After Substack grew in popularity, I moved them here.
This newsletter focuses on literature and the art of writing, including how my favorite writers continued to write in the midst of unfavorable conditions, which have always existed for writers.
I see potential in using this space as a way to grow in my writing practice, and in doing so, offer myself (and others) something special. Thank you again and I hope you stick around.
on living & what defines work
I finished Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life earlier this week and the afterword has me thinking about what platforms exist for today’s writers and how much we (and other artists) have to sacrifice to work on our art.
John Holt visited schools across the country so that he could write. Clarice Lispector wrote for several newspapers so that she could finish her novels.
Maybe that’s a topic for my next letter—what about other writers? How did they commit to writing so ardently that it became a daily practice, especially when writing has never been something that pays but nonetheless takes an immense amount of energy to produce?
I think about the era we’re living in now with rampant unemployment and an overwhelming sense of societal malaise—in a time like this, I can’t help but feel that I must come back to writing to avoid total spiritual collapse. With increased layoffs and scarce employment, I can’t help but wonder how it affects us all emotionally, physically, and spiritually. How do we find the courage to preserve our energy for life?
My unemployment has me thinking about work constantly. Applying to x amount of jobs per week, reaching out to this and that recruiter, editing my resume relentlessly, and the future security of my chosen vocation—technical writing.
There are other moments where my anxiety grows quiet, giving me an opportunity to contemplate on how I want to spend my time. I think about what gives me hope and purpose, or as John Holt described it, what makes my life worth living. It’s so easy to doom scroll, to retreat into oneself and find solace in cynicism—but when I think about John Holt’s letters, I remember that what stuck with me most was his ability of finding hope after he found it suddenly diminished—through writing. Remembering this, I feel an immense desire to retreat immediately into the things that preserve my energy for life in the same way it did his—reading, writing, and baking. To put it simply: learning and creating.
That is precisely what I want. To throw myself into my work and produce something that serves me and potentially, ideally—someone else who may need it.
Writers like Mark Fisher and John Holt felt the same way, reporting the same sentiments on work and writing:
[M]any members of my family have never encouraged me to write, and continue to regard it as a “hobby”, doing everything they can to put pressure on me to get “proper work”…
—Mark Fisher, The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher: “no i’ve never had a job...”
My question: do I have the right to define my work, or does someone else have the right to define it for me? If so, who, how, and why? What gives someone else the right to tell me that of the things I feel are worth doing and need to be done, some are “work” and some are not. What gives someone else the right to decide what I do, to use your words, contributes to the quality of life of others, or does not? Why is my judgment on this question not as good as another person’s?
Most of the work I do in this office, including writing this letter to you, and including answering letters from thousands of people a year, I do not get paid for. I am able to do it only because my books happen to make money. But this work, for which I do not get paid, seems to me at least as useful and valuable, if not a great deal more so, than much or most of the “work” for which many people do get paid.
—John Holt, A Life Worth Living: Selected Letters of John Holt
It seems too coincidental to have found the above passage in my book as I was thinking about this very topic—of what defines “work” and “non-work” and how much “non-work” is made of the things that are infinitely more valuable than the things I have been paid for and where my contribution was too minuscule to make any real difference. Admitting this is no confession of insecurity on my part, either—it’s the truth. It’s reality.
My joblessness has me answering a lot of questions, all of which sound more or less accusatory and hostile. In conversations with friends and family who know I’m on the job hunt, their how are you’s always circle back to my unemployment for reasons beyond my control. I can’t be upset with them, really, so I’ve learned to shove it off and let it go. I’m not interested in disclosing the details of my life as if to reassure them that I’m doing everything possible to get out my situation, because frankly that’s my business and my business only, but these encounters have led me to the discovery that the idea of unstructured time as the result of unemployment is highly uncomfortable for people to think about. We are so used to the routines set for us by our jobs that it seems like life can only follow the rhythm of working, not working. Or working and at home. This being the rhythm, what do the unemployed do? Is free time really free for both employed and unemployed people? And what does free mean in this context, in this life?
Free time, in the truest sense of the phrase, is a lack of worry as regards to surviving, or at least forgetting about one’s circumstance temporarily, though that negates the meaning of free.
In other words, I don’t think of my unemployment as having free time or taking a break. To survive, I work every day on things that range on a spectrum from meaningful to non-meaningful, creative to monotonous, with making money and surviving and future financial security taking up precious space in my mind, for an indefinite amount of time.
The job hunt is pure monotony: I apply to jobs. I respond to emails from recruiters. I send messages to hiring managers on LinkedIn. I stay online. I keep my phone by my side. I answer when it rings, answering the same questions over and over again, from one company to the next—I check my emails. I throw in a load of laundry. I sweep the floor and tidy my room. I pick up groceries, making sure that I have just enough in my account to pay for it all—every little task reminding me of all that needs to be done to relieve myself of financial insecurity.
These tasks, which are as repetitive and mundane as any real job out there, bring me to the question of what makes this work any less real, and why writing this letter or spending hours on a baking project are supposedly not real.
Real to whom, and for what purpose?
The fact of the matter is: Job hunting is work, but that’s not the point. It will give me the opportunity to do what’s real—the kind of work that pays but makes no real difference in my life, the town I live in, the immediate experience that is my life, my life right now—except that it will pay my rent, my bills—each and every little cost it takes to survive. It will pay for my life. My life is paid.
I don’t mean to end this letter on a hopeless note. I don’t feel hopeless at all, at least not right now—and if I do, I feel better at handling it than I ever have before. I think that by writing about hopelessness, I’ve come to feel hopeful about other things that I do have control over, one of them being writing. I know that many of you subscribed because you’re also writers and so I want to end this letter with a reminder to please continue writing. Your creative work is as important as any other; possibly even more so. Thank you for reading mine.
Ah Julie, I was so excited to see this pop up in my inbox! I share many of these sentiments, especially that push and pull between "real" work and the actual life-giving work that sustains us on a spiritual level. And then of course the reactions of people who don't wrestle as intensely with this, and how alienating that can feel. But reading this is a reminder that we're not alone in it.
This resonated a lot with me, thank you for writing and sharing!