Today–a random day because I fell behind in blog post writing–I read a post on bluesky by Taco Bell Quarterly, (self-described as “The World’s Most Prestigious Literary Magazine. Unaffiliated with Daddy Taco. We publish the boundaries of cease and desist.”) that plainly stated the truth that most writers face: “You’re not going to make any money doing this and no one is going to read it, so you must hope for a secret third thing to happen“. This, no matter how many people might wish to deny it or refuse to except it, is the truth of being a writer in this day and age. Whatever that third thing is, though, is up to you, and the replies to this post were full of people giving voice, in varying degrees of sincerity, to what that third thing is for them. Most (ignoring all the people who missed the point by trying to get around thing two by saying “someone reading it and enjoying it”) of them fall into pretty standard categories such as “spite,” “to have done the thing,” or “because I need to,” but the one that I keep thinking about is someone quoting the post and asking the respondants “At what point does ‘artist dies penniless’ stop feeling like the artist in question just wasn’t sufficiently zen?” Because that’s the side of this that doesn’t get considered enough, you know? We’re all so ready to find reasons to write other than getting paid or making a living or being able to support ourselves, and it’s a good thing that we do that since finding our own purpose is more likely to play out positively than trying to make a living at it, but it’s still worth thinking about the fact that we’re essentially papering over a massive, systemic issue with acceptance and inner strength.

I spent a long period of my life actively practicing acceptance. I had a pretty shitty childhood, to put it mildly, and the only way I could cope with the inequities of existence in my twenties and early thirties was by accepting life as it was. It was a pretty radical approach, to have more or less sublimated desire in order to experience a life without expectation in order to avoid pain, but it wasn’t until I stopped accepting things that I started to live the kind of life that I wanted. Acceptance went hand-in-hand with thoughts like “Your feelings don’t matter. You don’t matter. Stop thinking it will ever matter how you feel about yourself and your identity” that kept me locked in the heteronormative roles I’d been assigned by my parents and that society reinforced. It encouraged suffering in silence and never trying to address the problematic and often exploitative relationships I was in. It meant not rocking the boat any time my friends did something I was uncomfortable with and never speaking up at work when someone did something I thought was wrong or bad. It isn’t tied to those things, but sometimes practicing acceptance feels the same as capitulating so you can’t really tell when one becomes the other and vice-versa unless you’re paying very close attention. It’s an unhealthy loop to be caught in.

Writing is an unhealthy industry to be in, quite frankly. All creative industries are, these days. They’re exploitative, they are being stripped of what limited protections they ever had, they’re being eaten from inside out as artists turn on each other for any number of reasons (though mostly about what constitutes “art,” whether or not to adopt “AI Tools,” and whether or not porn and related materials should be protected under the same umbrella as all art (it should)), and they’re being mined for every scrap of creativity they’ve ever produced. Despite the enormous cultural shadows cast by creative works and art in its various forms, all of them being billion-dollar industries at the very least, the people actually making all of that stuff are being paid less and less. It is less and less viable to be a creative person in this day and age, and not just because of the financial side of things. Even if, say, you just write personal blog posts five days a week, the demands of life make it more and more difficult to give energy to things like that because you need to spend so much time and effort on just the work of being alive and reaching even the tiniest degree of comfort or stability. Why, then, are we always asked to accept that? Why are we supposed to be content with that state of affairs? Why are we supposed to find peace with the way the world is and still somehow have the drive, passion, determination, or discipline to continue creating? After all, isn’t so much of storytelling, and creativity in general, born out of the conflict between how we see things and the way things are? We’re always filling a gap, making something that doesn’t already exist, in the shared act of creation, so why are we told to set aside that way of living the instant we get past the moment of creating something and have to deal with the unending moment that is living?

A lot of the conflict comes from the fact that people have difficult holding seemingly contradictory beliefs in their head. After all, it is difficult to square “I can’t accept that this is the way my life is” with “I can’t expect to get the results I want.” You have to be able to hold both those true ideas in your head and find the will to keep acting, to keep creating and striving for a better world. I used to be able to manage it easily enough, but I’m struggling more and more these days as my own future looks either more uncertain than I’d be comfortable with or more painful than I should allow myself to accept. I can’t find the path forward through the seemingly endless (they aren’t endless, but they sure feel like it most days) problems of my life, so how am I supposed to still have the energy to make things or create stuff unless it is somehow linked back to those problems? If I can’t make money with this, or at the very least try to actively process what is going on in my life, then I’d probably be better off spending my time and energy on the problems of my continued existence. They’re not going to solve themselves, after all. Which feels like a shitty place to be, you know? “It fulfills me” is no longer a good enough reason to do something. Now it has to help me survive, make progress, or rest. Really hitting the “desperate survival” modes of living these days, and I do not forsee them ending any time soon, no matter how much I wish I had a nice little idea or saying to wrap this all up neatly with a bow.