It turns out that it’s a little more challenging to be a writer than I thought it’d be. Cue the world’s smallest violin as I cozy up on this couch to unload.

Don’t get me wrong, I never assumed that it would be easy. They say the best things in life rarely are. I think that holds a lot of water. Some of my favorite moments to date were preceded by extreme discomfort. One such moment is my first date with my partner.

She takes great pleasure in reminding me that I was shaking the first time we kissed. The instant we broached the subject of locking lips, it felt like my entire body had been dipped in the Arctic Ocean.

Now, I don’t want to pretend like I’m some suave, debonair character. I’m a dork, plain as day for anyone who’s paying attention. Though, I’m not usually as nervous as she made me when I’m on a date with someone, and especially not at the time.

Just before I met her, I had forsaken long-term romantic relationships entirely; I had concluded, stupidly, that they just weren’t for me. I had had one too many bad experiences and so I was ready to paint the town red, to live as frivolously as I could manage.

She woke me from a slumber. She disabused me of the notion that I didn’t care and reminded me that I actually cared a great deal; I just needed the right thing to care about. Or, in this instance, the right person to care about.

What she didn’t realize at the time was that I had a perfectly good reason for being so nervous: I was about to kiss someone that I was hoping to spend the rest of my life with. I suddenly had a lot to lose and the stakes became very high.

My body started to react to the dissonance between what I had already decided and what was right in front of me. Here before me was this person that was so clearly exactly what I was looking for.

And so I shook like a leaf in September. Extreme discomfort followed by finding my favorite person in the world. And she’ll never let me live it down.

I’m hoping that writing and I can arrive at a similar relationship at some point, minus the teasing.

A Jaded Old Man

Truth is, I’m exhausted. Perpetually. I always considered myself mature for my age, but it wasn’t until recently that my body started to catch up to my mind.

My joints creek every morning. I eat processed foods at my own peril. Naps have become a newfound hobby of mine.

I worry that years of battering my body, numbing my mind, and draining my soul with thousands of hours of menial work has made this new endeavor of mine much more challenging than it might otherwise have been.

I spent a long time avoiding the moniker of “artist,” partly due to an overwhelming insecurity that was instilled in me as a kid. I never assumed that I could do whatever I wanted to. Good for you if you thought about being president when you were a kid. My parents were a little more prudent than that.

And so, there was excitement recently in discovering that I even could be excited to work again. And then that excitement was promptly extinguished as I saw the road ahead of me. I started to wonder if I wasn’t too late to the party.

Might the pounds of baggage I’ve gathered over the years prove to be obstacles too great for me to carry? Are my feet too swollen to reach the summit?

It’s not the writing itself, per say, that I struggle with.

A blank page doesn’t scare me the way it might scare other writers. There’s no shortage of topics out there to tackle and, on most days, my mind struggles to stay quiet.

Deadlines aren’t that scary either. When you’ve been conditioned to sweat at the end of every month, scrambling to collect the rent from between your couch cushions, deadlines become constant companions.

No, it’s all the ancillary nonsense surrounding being a writer that’s been rubbing me the wrong way lately.

Here I thought I’d simply get to play with the English language, compose sentences that elicit emotion, and read the works of the greats to expand my repertoire. That’s not been my experience. On some days, I barely read or write anything at all.

Instead, I’m tinkering away on the format of a blog that I never intend to make any money on. I’m trying to sell myself to other sites without having any relevant, pre-existing experience. I’m trying to get off the ground a separate, unrelated business so that I can accrue SOME revenue while I figure out the rest…

Looking at my To Do list, I can’t help but feel geriatric. This is clearly a game meant for a player with way more energy than I could hope to muster. Just hook me up to my dialysis machine and let me sleep.

I harbor no illusions about what it means to be a writer, or an artist of any kind. It’s a lot of work. It often means that you’re also an entrepreneur, a go-getter. It means living and breathing the thing that you’re trying to do, sometimes toiling away for years on end.

Even when you do break your back trying to make it work, success is hardly guaranteed.

The fatal flaw – or the feature, depending on who you ask – of creating art is that it will always somehow be tied to capitalism. Fulfillment is nice and all, but does it really matter if I’m not sure where my next paycheck is coming from?

Uncle Sam and his well-dressed cronies in Washington don’t care all that much about fulfillment, I’ve found. They expect me to pay my bills on time. The absolute gall, I know.

I wear the moniker of artist, in essence if not in practice. It’s hard to know where to direct my creative energies. I don’t have the luxury of creating in a vacuum.

Problem is, there’s only so many hours in the day. I’m now doing what I love. Congratulations. The cake is on its way.

But, do I work on something that I’m passionate about that has seemingly no pre-existing audience, and risk talking into a void? Or do I work on something for someone else that I can sell but that pulls the soul straight out of my ass when I try and do it?

I attempted this past week to write as though I’m an employee at some major news outlet, to justify my existence in this space. The results were pretty astounding. Those poor, humorless, dispassionate pieces of writing will never see the light of day. They scream of someone writing at gunpoint and who’s still very much learning how to string two interesting sentences together.

And so, I’m wasting valuable time trying to figure out an industry that I never imagined I’d need to learn. Writing, the artform that used to be my solace, my buoy in the storm, is starting to feel like a tsunami that’s threatening to drown me.

I’m glad to be navigating these waters, if for no other reason than to live the life that I’ve robbed myself of for years now. Anxiety be damned. Treacherous though it’s been, it’s important to keep perspective.

It wasn’t too long ago that things were much worse than they are now.

A Longing Adult

On my more unproductive days, I’m reminded of my time as a dog trainer.

I love training dogs. Seeing a concept click in their minds, watching their boundless enthusiasm when they’re properly motivated, there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s uniquely rewarding and, for a while, I thought that I had finally found my calling.

There’s an artistry to it. Ask any two trainers how they would tackle an issue and you’re likely to get two different answers. Is it because it’s a largely unregulated industry and any Joe Shmoe or Ignorant Ingrid can walk off the street and call themselves a trainer, sans credentials? Sure, that’s part of it.

It’s also because, when it comes to the craft of psychology, to things like operant conditioning and reactivity, you’re at the mercy of your subject. You don’t always get to just plug a dog into an existing, well-established training system and hope for the best. You need to be responsive, fluid to their needs. Every dog is unique, as is every human.

Consider a personal trainer: they’re going to tailor the regimen to the person that’s right in front of them and not just apply a wholesale method to every person that’s trying to achieve a unique and specific goal. It’s a lot like that.

The solutions you might come up with for grandma’s dog are not likely to be the same ones you’d come up with for the dog of an active couple. They’ve each got different needs – think about it. Grandma’s got a bad hip. She would quite literally be hospitalized if you forced her to give her dog more exercise. And so, you improvise. Grandma gets a new toy that shoots tennis balls across her backyard so that Fido stops chewing up her furniture. Fido’s content and grandma gets to live another day.

There’s a lot of creativity to dog training, which is probably part of why I gravitated to it; I wasn’t letting myself be creative in any other part of my life.

At the time though, dog training was, generously, 25% of what I actually found myself doing. For the other 75%, I: wrote copy, created advertisements, wrangled clients and their schedules, engineered curriculums, picked up refuse, organized classes, berated bad parents, encouraged good parents, consumed pounds of literature to keep myself sharp.

Mostly, I worried myself to an early grave over all the things that I had to do. Being a professional dog trainer for 9 years has probably taken 9 dog years off of my life. Ruff.

But it paid well. Well enough, anyway, for a man who barely graduated high school and who could never afford to spend valuable hours getting a degree.

So I persevered. And I tried my best to find the creativity in it. I attempted to instill artistry – through my curriculum, my solutions to behavioral issues, my techniques – in a field that didn’t exactly cater to artists.

I’ll be the first to admit: You’ll have a better time being a successful dog trainer if you spend less time on training dogs and more time on being a salesperson or an administrative assistant.

The thing that I loved to do, the thing that I fully intended to spend the rest of my life doing, wasn’t what I thought it was.

And so, I added dog training to the graveyard of abandoned professions.

I’m constantly being presented with a lesson that doesn’t seem to ever stick: these jobs don’t require or celebrate creativity.

Before dog training, I was a manager for a retail chain, playing puppeteer. I took pride in making sure that everyone was cared for, their veneers polished and their emotional strings untangled. And then I found that, in caring about how people were treated, I was holding up productivity. Puppets were replaceable, I was told, so I need not have worried. We could just buy new ones.

Before that, as a salesperson, I tried my hand at acting as I pretended not to be the anxious, introspective hermit that I was. I was so convincing that I fooled even myself. Turns out, it’s not actually important to be a well-informed, friendly expert that members of a community come to rely on. If I could just hang out with the customers for half the time and encourage them to buy twice the number of products, that’d be plenty.

And even before that, I was barely on track to graduate high school. I could just sense that all my creativity would have to be laid down, like a bouquet of roses before a tombstone, to pick up the mantle of productivity for pay.

I craved the high, the satisfaction, that I once felt when I was a (mostly) carefree kid with a pencil and a piece of paper in front of me.

A Promising Child

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, asserts that we are every one of us artists.

She claims that we’re gifted with innate creativity and, somewhere along the way, we lose that creativity. Life finds a way to diminish us, if we let it, and we’re left worse for wear because of it.

Cameron compares that creativity that everyone innately has within them to a child. That Inner Child needs taking care of, pampering, and attention. That resonates with me.

I can’t help but feel some jealousy any time I see a child creating an entire universe from scratch, uninhibited by the creative blocks that we all experience on a daily basis. They’re able to tap into something that eludes most adults. They lack self-consciousness, and so they allow themselves to create unimpeached.

I used to make trading cards with my best friend back in middle school. They were modeled after the popular trading card games that we were enjoying at the time. We wanted more of them, so rather than lament about not having the money to buy them, we just made our own. We drew them all out on flimsy printer paper and created entire rulesets from scratch.

I have a hard time imagining myself ever having spent any time at all doing something like that. It’s been so long that it feels like I’m watching a clip from a movie about someone else’s life when I try and remember those days.

Deep within the recesses of my mind, I see a child spending days doing nothing but illustrating, like someone possessed. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been ignoring that child for years now.

He’ll be happy to know that I intend to take him out of the basement that I’ve been keeping him in. He’s deserving of sunlight.

That’s partly what this blog is about. A creative outlet to allow my Inner Child to exist in a universe of his own making.

I have no way of knowing what will come to pass. Smarter, harder working, more passionate people than I have failed on the artist’s journey.

I’m hoping that all this discomfort will be followed by that professional fulfillment that we’re all seemingly hungry for. And, even if that doesn’t ever happen, then that’d be ok too.

I’ll always have writing, even if it turns out to be a mistress rather than the life partner that I’m looking for.

That’s at least one thing I don’t see myself ever giving up again. I’ve tried the whole “not an artist” thing. Turns out, life isn’t any easier when you’re keeping yourself in the dark.