Surefootedness. This was the goal for some time, what everyone had advised me to do from the time I first started saying I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. It sounded like:
Get a day job.
I took this advice and found that some were great: working floral jobs for corporate accounts, daily orders, and working out in the crisp air on a Christmas tree farm. Others were awful, namely, working for a pet store that required you eat lunch in the company of sick, dying animals kept in the back of the store.
But even with this day job business, this sense of stability that was supposed to support me and my own writing still felt elusive. That is, until I landed what felt like the jackpot of day jobs: a content writer and editor position for an online university. It was the most money I had ever made, which is a sadder statement than it appears. I had health insurance, something that felt more like a luxury than necessity.It was remote work, which I realized is this introvert’s dream. And I worked with a team of other writers whom, despite never meeting in person, I loved working with and hearing from throughout the week.
The work was hard but rewarding.I got to spend my days researching subjects I’d never pursue on my own and distill the core ideas into a piece of writing, even using story to help explain complex ideas. I was sharpening my writing and researching skills which I hoped (and believed) would further benefit my own writing projects. I could arrange my days however worked best for me—something that would become vital when health issues took control of my calendar. This was it! I thought. I had found this surefootedness.
That made it all the more shocking when I received word that this online university would shut down much sooner than initially announced (in violation of the WARN Act) and all my coworkers and I would be laid off at the end of business. Not to mention that hundreds of students were suddenly left in the lurch without a degree or any certainty where their tuition money had gone. Suddenly that surefootedness I had just begun taking for granted had been yanked out fromunder my fellow writers and me.
I feel very conflicted about that job now. Losing it has been a strange kind of grief-guilt. There’s a sharp schism between my sentiment for a job that gave me ample experienceand room to really grow professionally as a writer, but that simultaneously duped students into shellingout their hard-earned money to have theireducation cut off at the knees. I haven’t reconciled that schism yet and I’m not sure how. In fact, it’s left me feeling as though I’m adrift.
When the news broke, frantic chatter among colleagues online became a din. We tried to pull our writing from the school’s platform, so we’d have something to add to our portfolios. There was the mad rush to understand what would become of our healthcare, our final paychecks,m our livelihoods.
Will there be a class action lawsuit?
When would unemployment kick in?
How long before they cut off our insurance?
How far will the money in the bank account get my family and me?
You could feel the panicked calculations being made in peoples’ minds, radiating like heat through our monitor screens. And what comes next?
We were all suddenly hungry. The hunt for a job was on.
Reframing the Job Hunt
As a worker, I can be understood as a commodity, something that needs marketing, shiny new packaging, perhaps even a warranty if I don’t perform as advertised. This is often how the job hunt feels when I imagine prospective employers scanning my resume. Not unlike online dating, there isn’t much room for dimensionality, for nuance, for chemistry. Bluntly, there’s not a lot of room for humanity.
But before I follow this cynical line of thinking too far, the fact that we often refer to this process as a job hunt can be a clue to how to approach it. Hunting is one of the many things I’m ignorant about, but I know one, simplistic thing about it: it is an act of pursuit. What do I pursue (read: desire)? What am I after? Will understanding this pursuit be enough to inform the decisions of the job hunt?
The term desire often carries connotations that feel plush and seductive, but I think of it as the literary device I learned in Narrative Design, a class I took in grad school. It might be one of the most impactful courses I’ve taken, in part, because it still follows me like a shadow. When faced with a challenge in my writing, I use the ideas discussed in the course as a guiding light to overcome that challenge. The core idea of desire or yearning, as author Robert Olen Butler puts it, has proven to be one of those guiding lights.
Buzzword or Philosophy
In an interview with Ryna G. Cleave of The Writer Magazine, Robert Olen Butler defines yearning as the “deepest level of desire,” which is at the center of writing fiction (2018). A well written character maynot, explicitly proclaim what it is that they yearn for, but a reader can easily intuit and watch as that yearning is “challenged and thwarted” through the story’s plot.
Butler goes on to boil down the universality of yearning (Cleave, 2018):
”I think that if you dig deeply enough, the yearning at the center of great literature is I yearn for the self. I yearn for an identity. I yearn for a place in the universe. That’s the great thing, the great “Who the hell am I?” which we ask ourselves every day. All the things we seem on the surface to be concerned about in this day and age especially—our race, our gender, our sexual preference, our politics, our religion, you name it—those things provide us with an answer to that question: WHO AM I?…And I think that’s from Anna Karenina to Madame Bovary to Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield, you name it. It’s ‘I yearn for a self.’”
Perhaps this literary device, that serves as a guide for constructing plot and character development, could also serve as a guide for constructing a career, a way of life. After all, the question of Who the hell am I? bounces off the walls of my skull. The sound of it rattles around in my head in hopes that A writer might echo back. OR better yet, A great writer.
Desire’s Connective Tissue
Understanding a character’s desire became a key tool in the writing toolkit. Naturally, it helped me to better understand my main character in my novel-in-progress. When I took the time to examine my character and what she was after, I learned her desire is as layered and complex as I imagine any perons’s desires being in real life. This knowledge became reassurance that I could create a layered and complex (and realistic) character.
Learning a character’s desire also reveals form. By pinning down desire, I suddenly saw the sketch of a story arc.
This was revelatory.
Not only would it give me a new sense of focus in my writing but other aspects of my life, too.
I saw it applied to floral design. Working years as a florist,pinpointing the desire behind an arrangement could be as simple as asking a customer what his wife’s favorite color is for an anniversary arrangement. It could be more complex or layered like understanding the vision of a bride or art director’s photoshoot.
Desire sets parameters, it blazes trails, it shines as the North Star. Whichever metaphor suits you, its purpose is to orient.
Desire’s Ability to Orient
WhenI look back on key plot point in my working life, my sense of orientation wasn’t so different from spinning a bline-folded child around and around, then telling them to go hit the pinata. Thisday job business, this life business, can feel dizzying, impossible, and absurd. Some days, even futile. I had been following surefootedness as though it had been my desire all along. I also thought I had found it with a salaried job that helped me with health insurance. Today, though, that kind of surefootedness feels about as attainable as enlightenment or perfection. I could spend the rest of my life chasing it and never get around to the actual writing part that makes me happy.
I don’t have any clear answers yet. I don’t know if this i clarity or my grasping at straws. And to simply follow my desire or yearning feels…too simplistic, too self-help or inspirational poster, and too good to be true, doesn’t it? The idea of pursuing your desire sounds like a less hackneyed, less catchyversion of follow your heart. Perhaps it’s better to say that I need to negotiate this desire, traverse it with an understanding of the stakes and the privilege tied to it. When ships used celestial navigation, they didn’t expect to physically reach a star as their destination.
Rather, it’s simply a guiding light. Maybe it doesn’t need to be any more than that: a point of reference. It’s this point of reference I offer to my former coworkers who may also be spinning. I offer it to anyone who feels they’re moving through things blindfolded and swinging wildly. May you slice through air and make that satisfying contact between bat and shattered pinata.
I hope that we can all look up and see the bright light at the horizon, our own tectonic shift under our feet. This it he surefootedness that I hope for all of us.
