I Will Never Be A (Paid) Writer

This is a sad realization for me. Actually, it's a downright heart-shattering, soul-crushing revelation, but I guess it's time to face facts. I won't cry forever, I promise, just for the next ten years.

And the facts are, I will probably never get paid for anything I write. And no one will ever read it, apart from you few, dear, darling readers. (I love you. Don't ever leave me. No really: DON'T. Please.)

See, generally short-form publishing falls into two broad categories these days. Ponderous and heavily-researched tracts, and essays of emotional vulnerability humored up with liberal doses flippancy.

I don't have the discipline for research. Honestly. I just don't. I had a good run in college, and I'm sure that if you managed to find a professor that remembered me at all, they'd remember my stellar research papers because I always had interesting theses and I can actually construct a proper sentence and every once in a while I was able to make dry, dull, academia not make you want to slit your wrists through the judicious use of peppy adjectives and anecdotes.

(I am still pretty proud of some of the papers I wrote in college. "America shouldn't seek global hegemony because it is MORALLY INCONSISTENT WITH AMERICA'S VALUES" is one of my best works EVER.)

But, my papers would never be described as well-researched or well-annotated. I did the bare minimum in that regard, because I just don't like research.

Also, I never graduated college, so the idea that anyone would pay me to write academia is pretty funny.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is perhaps more promise! I mean, I do personal essays like no one's business. I can write about my life forever because I am just that narcissistic, and also because I have fully bought into the maxim that you must "write what you know" and really the only thing I know is my life. Everything else is mere theoretical knowledge, and that's not really knowledge so much as conjecture, since theory is grounded in naught but conjecture.

But then there's that "funny" requirement that is increasingly being satisfied by a display of flippancy that I just don't have. I'm not flippant. I am not ironic. I am intensely, terribly, vulnerably EARNEST. I'm like a puppy that just wants to be loved. (But I don't pee on the floor. I have a toddler that refuses to get potty-trained to handle that for me.)

I'm not funny. And I'm especially not funny when I'm displaying vulnerability because the last thing I want is for people to LAUGH at my EXISTENTIAL PAIN. Seriously. Who wants to have someone laugh in their face when they're crying? (On the inside, guys. I don't cry in front of people. I'm British that way.)

SO... that's that. No more dreams of a daily byline on Thought Catalog or hellogiggles. No more wistful longings that Salon would hire me to take over Broadsheet since Tracy Clark-Flory went back to being a full-time sex writer. (Added bonus of the Salon daydream: the idea that Alex Pareene would become my bestie. That man is ACTUALLY FUNNY, and about politics no less. Also, he smokes. It would be so great to have a bestie that smokes so I didn't feel so guilty about my still-occasional habit.)

I mean, I can keep plugging away on this collection of short stories that's clogging up my hard drive (and I WILL) and sketching out the outline of a novel, but no one's going to publish it unless my name already means something and my name will never mean anything because I'm a bad researcher and I'm not funny.

Life's a bitch.

(xo!)