Like Most Things in Life

[image error]

Apple eating carrots

For more than 20 years, I have made the bulk of my income as a writer. I’ve done other things, too: Banged nails, given presentations, cut down trees, guest lectured classes, operated machinery, sold meat and milk, worked for a non-profit, undercoated cars, and co-hosted online workshops. And I still do a bunch of this stuff. But by-and-large, I’ve earned my keep with the written word. It actually kind of blows my mind to think about, but I guess that’s just the way life is: The years sneak up on you, and pretty soon they’re piled up like so much cordwood.

For a period during the late 90’s and early ’00’s, I actually made a pretty decent middle class income with my writing work. I wasn’t picky, I produced halfway decent content, and perhaps most importantly, I hit my deadlines and generally made my editor’s lives easier. It helps a lot that I’ve always been a fast writer, and skilled enough that my first drafts were acceptable, or close enough to acceptable to not require major reworking.

In recent years, I have chosen to be more particular about the work I take, and the more particular I’ve become, the further my income has dipped. This is fine, because we have made other choices that have allowed us to absorb this dip, though I would be remiss not to acknowledge the many privileges we enjoy that have in large part enabled us to make these choices: To be white, english-speaking, land-owning, and so on. Even to be heterosexual. I try not to forget that everything we have was (and to a certain extent, still is) built on the exploitation of others, be it through slavery, genocide, or other less obvious means. This is not something most oppressing people want to think or talk about, maybe because we can’t figure out what the hell to do about it. Less charitably, maybe it’s because the only conceivable way we could possibly begin to atone for these crimes would require such a massive shift in our understanding of ourselves and in a redistribution of accumulated stolen wealth and opportunity that we just can’t face it. But just because we don’t want to face it doesn’t make it untrue.

I still like writing (and I particularly like writing in this space), but the older I get, the more lonely it feels, and the more desire I have to be out and about, connecting with others. I like people, and generally even people I disagree with. I’m curious about others, too; how they view the world, what set of experiences and circumstances has brought them to this place in their life. I think curiosity is a good thing, though I suppose some would call it nosiness, or remark that many of the things I’m curious about really aren’t my business. And maybe they’d be right. On the other hand, in my experience most people seem to enjoy having someone take an interest in them, and not in a facile way, but in a way that suggests maybe you actually care about what it’s like to be them. I’m not saying I do this all the time, or even very well when I do. But I try, and I’d like to think that counts.

I’m distraught by the current political climate in this country, which in many ways is being mirrored by the cultural climate. I’m not naive enough to think that if we’d just elected someone else president, it’d be all better. Nor I am naive enough to believe it doesn’t matter that we did elect a president who has bragged about grabbing women by their vaginas, and who is clearly racist, as well as being supportive of a racist agenda. I’ve heard it said that just because someone voted for Trump doesn’t make them a sexual predator or a racist, and this is true, but it DOES make them someone who is ok with having a sexual predator and a racist represent this country. I’m not sure how to come to terms with the fact that enough voting Americans (albeit not a majority of voting Americans) were ok with this to make it a reality. I really wish I could understand it; it just doesn’t make sense to me. Yet I can’t ignore that it happened, and that it must make sense to a significant number of people. What are the experiences that can make something like this add up? I think that’s a question more of us could be asking, and I wonder if maybe our aversion to it is in some ways similar to our aversion the question of privilege: Maybe we don’t really want to know the answers, because maybe the answers would force us to look more closely at ourselves, at our own assumptions and prejudices. That’s a tough pill to swallow, my friends. A person can choke on that one.

Shit. I’ve totally lost the thread of this one… started out talking about writing, moved onto privilege, then into curiosity and politics. Funny how that happens. Except, now that I think about it, the thread’s pretty obvious. Like most things in life, you just got a slow down and pay attention.