And I could make my brokeness less conspicuous by telling people I’d made the conscious decision to “write for a living”—adding a shake of nobility and laudable self-determination to the reality that I’d only decided to write for a living because I got laid off and couldn’t do shit else and couldn’t get hired to do shit else and could use this stretch of unemployment benefits to temporarily subsidize my listicles about chicken wings and Kanye West.
