I’m enough.
October is almost over, and I’m still feeling the effects my anxiety caused in me in September. For that entire month, I was sure as hell I would never be enough. I thought I’d never be a good enough writer. I thought I’d never be a good enough daughter. I thought I’d never be a good enough teacher. Never enough.
They asked me if it wasn’t time I started thinking about my future.
It was all caused by one tiny question someone asked me. Someone important to me. Someone who was just worried about me. Someone who thought they’d be doing me a favor. They asked me if it wasn’t time I started thinking about my future.
I froze, at the moment. I said I had it all figured it out. I told them not to worry about it. Then I went back home and started doubting every single decision I’ve ever made in my life.
I’m consistently inconsistent.
I’m not known to be a particularly consistent person. I dropped two majors — which, in Brazil, implies dropping completely out of college and having to reapply all over again — before I graduated with an English degree.
And then, after focusing all my efforts in college towards fiction writing, I decided to try screenwriting for my capstone and moved to LA instead of NY upon graduation. I’m consistently inconsistent.
After failing to secure a job that would provide me a permanent visa, I came back to Brazil. And decided to study Marketing. I got a new degree after three years in school and three years working as a marketing assistant. But, because I’m me, and my most consistent trait in being constantly changing, I quit my marketing career even before I had my diploma in hands.
On this day, last year, I left the company to become a full-time writer. I decided to go back to what I had always wanted but never had the guts to do.
Something inside of me never believed I’d actually finish a novel one day.
It’s been a year. An entire year has passed, and sometimes a tiny, seemingly unthreatening question is enough to make me wonder if I made the right call. I haven’t made any relevant money from my writing yet. If I depended on it, I’d have already starved to death.
But I’ve been writing. I’ve been writing like I never did before. These last six months alone were enough for me to write two short stories and an entire novel. I queried my novel to an agency! That’s something I’d always wanted to do but never thought I’d be able to. Something inside of me never believed I’d actually finish a novel one day.
And yet, I did. I wrote about two hundred thousand words these last six months. It’s like doing NaNoWriMo four times! Isn’t this what I planned on doing when I quit my full-time job? Didn’t I want to write? I’m writing!
Thinking about your future opens a wildly terrifying door. On the other side? You see nothing but failure.
The thing with a fiction-writing career is that the results are painfully slow. Once you finish a novel, if it’s one you feel good about, it kind of gets out of your hands. You start querying, but other than that there’s nothing you can do to see it in the world. You’ve done your part. If it’ll be published or not, you can’t quite control — unless you go indie, which I only did with my short stories.
Waiting is a difficult process. It’s also a tricky one. Waiting gives you time to think, to wonder, to create theories, and suddenly you’re sure that your novel is garbage and there’s no way anyone will want to represent you, let alone publish you. While you wait to hear back from the people who can potentially change your career, you have enough time to realize that maybe… maybe you haven’t done enough.
If, in the meantime, someone asks you to think about the future, is there really a possible reaction if not freaking out? When you are waiting for an answer, and you make yourself believe that it will be a no because your writing sucks, thinking about your future opens a wildly terrifying door. On the other side? You see nothing but failure.
But this article is about being enough, and I haven’t talked quite enough about it. After spending an entire therapy session crying, worried about my uncertain future, I finally realized something.
This is my future. I’m not waiting for a full-time job.
When that person asked me if it wasn’t time to start thinking about the future, what they failed to realize was that their idea of the future radically diverges from mine. I spent the entire month of September anxious because their question made me feel like I was stuck; like I wasn’t moving forward.
Then I looked around. I’m a teacher, and this is how I make money — not a lot of money, but… enough. Being a teacher allows me to pay my bills at the end of the month and to have a lot of time to do what I’m going to do for the rest of my life: being a writer.
I may not ever make a living out of writing. It’s hard anywhere, but especially in Brazil. I might never earn enough money from my stories to make ends meet. I can, though, keep living the way I am. Having a job that pays me and that I enjoy, and being a writer at the same time.
The future they asked me if I shouldn’t be thinking about is what’s wrong in the equation. It’s a future they envisioned for me. It’s not the future I want for myself. It’s not the future I’m working towards.
That person who asked me about my future never realized that this — what I’m doing right now is exactly what I signed up for; this is my future. I’m not waiting for a full-time job. I don’t need one. That’s not part of the life I want to live. I’m not striving for stability. I don’t need to be the richest. I just need to be able to write. I just need to be a writer.
And that will be enough.
