For the past couple of years I've been living in survival mode, which means I've done whatever I've had to do to make money. And that translated to giving up my copywriting work and mostly focusing on website administration and project management, with the occasional repetitive writing project thrown in.
I've been miserable Monday through Friday for a long time (2 1/2 years?). But then my entire life has been miserable since August 2015 so it didn't really stand out all that much. At least not until recently.
As I've started to pull out of the worst of my health lows, I've started to see the unhappiness more clearly and also find motivation to make changes to my work life. And with the hopes that the medical bills start decreasing next year and that somehow everything will be ok if I walk away, that's what I've recently taken a leap of faith to do.
As soon as I made that decision, random people started popping up out of nowhere - almost as if they were summoned. One of those was an ad agency I used to write for a couple of years ago before I got sick. They suddenly had a new project for me after years of copywriting and content drought.
I've also done a successful trial project for a second ad agency that works with nonprofits, I'm in the freelance pool for a third ad agency in Austin that focuses on IT, and I'm in talks to do ongoing work for a digestive health physician group in 2018.
Thank you, universe.
I sat down yesterday morning to write some copy for one of those agencies. It was only a few hours of work but it was like sipping an antidote. It brightened my world. It gave me meaning. It made me happy and I felt useful.
Now this didn't make my day perfect but it sure made it better than some of the days I've had recently. It also acted as a catalyst, because then I went and wrote another article on LinkedIn, which I published yesterday afternoon.
I'm back to the drudgery today but I am keenly aware that the timeline is finite. I've got less than two months left working with this client and then I'm free to be me again. Free to be a writer again. Free to be happier in my days and to have my talents utilized.
I am extraordinarily grateful that enough people have expressed interest in my work that I can continue to make my living as a writer. To be a working writer in any fashion is sort of like acting or singing professionally - so many want to do it, but very few can.
For many years I believed that my writing was not really writing at all. When I spent week after week drafting 1000 page manuals for computer software, I didn't think it counted. When I moved on to marketing communications and wrote white papers and website copy, I classified it as business. When I designed training manuals and created onboarding programs with written materials, I considered it just another job to do.
But it's all writing. The fact is, I'm a writer and I have been since I was 23 years old. Since that first job out of college redoing a PeopleSoft manual, which has sprouted into a long career that I hope will culminate in some books (under this pen name) and a lot more copywriting success (under my real one).
Writing is medicine for me, sometimes. It is my only talent aside from being an animal whisperer and an empath, and when I get to use my skills I think I feel like I matter in the world. I need more days of feeling like I matter, and I think they are coming soon.
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