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.
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Trying To Break Free From Identity Defined In Opposition To The World I Live In
While I was mulling over my identity and coming to reflect on the decision I’d made years ago (largely out of self-defense, given how absolutely locked-in I was to my parents’ vision of who they wanted me to be), I was listening to a lot of Friends at the Table. A lot of stuff they said there informed the way I think about my place in contemporary society and the way my identity fits into the world I inhabt. Not because I was entirely unfamiliar with those ideas, but because the thinking they explored as a part of their science-fiction themed seasons (especially Twilight Mirage, their fourth season) helped build on what I’d learned in some of the classes I took in college, in the research I’d done on my own, and the helpful things I’d coincidentally read along the way. One the things that stuck with me the most was the GM, Austin Walker, talking about how he wanted to push the boundaries with their fourth season. I don’t remember the exact quote, but he said something along the lines of “we need to imagine the most radical thing we can and then take it one step further.” The idea being, he explained, that all of us are limited by the world we live in, by the society we’re used to, and that a civilization that had progressed to the very edges of what we could conceptualize would be able to imagine modes of being/ways of life/etc that we couldn’t even conceive of because we are so anchored by the world we know, and that the society he wanted the group to attempt to represent in this season should have progressed beyond even that.
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