Spoiler: It’s Not About Security

(This is the third and last part of a three-part series. Here are the first and second parts.)

As I mentioned in Part II, I have two reasons for currently chasing becoming a successful author. (Part I explained my zeroeth reason: why I’m not currently chasing the alternative — the almighty “secure” 9-5 day job. Hint: It’s the reason behind the quotation marks. XP I’m not saying I wouldn’t take it if one just happened to fall into my lap — because, oh, look, income! —, but I’m deliberately not chasing it at the moment.)

The first reason, to quickly reiterate, is that, considering how many times I’ve experienced the insecurity of corporate jobs in the past, I would rather just bet on myself at this point.

The second — and by far the more important — reason is that I’m scared.

Yes, you read that right. I’m scared.

I’m scared to chase what many others would call a pipe dream, especially now.

On the one hand, I’m scared for all the reasons we creatives are scared to put our work out there — because our work might not land with anyone. What we put out into the world might be universally panned — or, perhaps even worse, completely ignored. That is the inherent — and rational, mind you, because it’s a real possibility! — fear that comes with putting oneself out there, which is always part and parcel of doing any kind of work in the creative realm.

Alongside that is the inherent fear that comes with making the risky bet that what I have to offer the world will have enough economic value to be financially viable enough for me to continue to create full-time. Because, yes, 100%, I could absolutely fail at this attempt. It might not work. If I can’t make authorship work money-wise before I run out of financial runway, I might have to “go back to work”. (That is a terribly misleading phrase, by the way! >_< I am working full-time right now — working overtime, in fact, because my eyes are bigger than my stomach, as they say, and I may or may not have bitten off more than I can chew at the moment. ‘^^ I’m just not yet getting paid for my work >_<.) That is the completely justified fear of living a full-time creative life.

On the other hand, I’m extra scared nowadays because, well, because nowadays be scary! The United States government, amongst others, plus all those who support those holding the current reins of power, seems rather hell-bent on destroying its own democracy from within and setting up an authoritarian regime, and so it’s really, really scary to focus on creating things, rather than just keeping my head down and focusing on survival — by, say, trying to get a (non-offensive) full-time job. It’s difficult enough for many (perhaps even most?) independent creatives to scrape a living together in the best of times — and then to have people actively try to destroy democracy around you? Yeah . . . not great. =\

Oh, and, by the way, authoritarian regimes are notoriously unkind to independent creatives — because independent creatives have independent ideas. Worse, they have the gall to try to spread them. That tends to make independent creatives rather attractive targets for authoritarians and their supporters. Even more not great. >_<

So, in addition to struggling against the general precarity of financial insecurity, not to mention my own self-doubt as a creative, I may also be making things difficult for myself by daring to create things on my own. (And I’ve already said that I am doing all the writing here, so I don’t even have the handy-dandy fallback of plausible deniability in claiming that AI wrote my stuff, so don’t blame me! *backs away, hands up*) I’m not currently writing anything particularly incendiary† against any particular government, but that does not mean I won’t in the future — especially since I have my own platform and the means to use it.

But.

Let me not overstate the danger to myself here. I do not think I, personally, am in any real danger. I do not think we have come to that depth of political horror — not yet, anyway. (And I sincerely hope we never get there. >_<)

Also, every era feels like things are disastrous to at least some of the people living in it, so it’s not helpful to be too paranoid that these are the End Times. Furthermore, it’s probably insulting for someone who has, say, grown up under an ironclad authoritarian regime to hear someone else who has grown up in a cushy democracy moan about, well, anything. ‘^^ It’s not helpful to compare ourselves and compete on whose lives are worse (not to mention, who would want to win that prize??), of course, but it is helpful to keep some perspective. After all, one must be careful not to confuse one’s feelings with facts — especially when what one is feeling is fear‡, since fear can distort our perceptions of reality. Just ask any hypochondriac what their life is like, and one can get a sense of this distortation.

So, yes, I want to be judicious in what I consider to be real danger. It’s not World War III (again, not yet), and so there’s still time and space to write. (Though, to be fair, even if it were World War III, there would still be a place for writers. Check out When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II by Molly Guptill Manning for an interesting history on, well, what it says right there on the cover!)

At the same time, hypochondriacs do get sick sometimes. (What is that expression? “It’s not paranoia if they’re right.” ‘>_<) While it’s not smart to fear every little thing, it is smart to take some precautions against, say, those little things known as germs, for germs can kill you.

In a similar vein, my fear about the current (geosocio)political climate exists for good reason.

So, yeah. I’m scared.

But.

That’s part of the point.

Being scared is part of the point for the simple reason that one cannot be brave without being scared.

Some think that courageous people are fearless. Nope. It’s a common misperception — and it’s just wrong. Courage is not fearlessness. Courage is action despite fear.

That bears repeating:

courage = action despite fear

That means fear is a requirement. Since I decided that my #1 value would be — and may forever be — courage, I have come to learn to pay close attention to whenever I feel afraid. To the extent that I am capable — a capability that I am working on improving by, you know, practising —, I want to do my best to decide, with full intention, how to act in response to any fear I feel. It is important to me to respond, not just react, when I’m scared. Otherwise, it’s not courage, but panic.

And my intentional, non-panicky response to these scary times right now is to create — further, to chase a creative life.

Moreover, at the risk of seeming like I’m virtue signalling here, I dare say that creating art in an uncertain time can, in and of itself, be an act of resistance. And to create independent art — and to dare to do it as a life choice, that is, as an exercise of one’s freedom to live as one chooses (with the caveat that one must do one’s best to prevent and minimise harm to others in the process) — under any kind of oppressive regime is definitely an act of resistance.

Resistance comes in many forms, and creating art is one of them — and one of the most effective, I would argue. Art, even (maybe especially) subtle, indirect art, can be very subversive all by itself. Morever, being art, it is all the more powerful, for it speaks to the heart. To move people — a mere step away from mobilising people — is to hold power, for good or for ill. (And as we all know — or should! —: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Thank you, Uncle Ben [maybe].)

Now, to be fair, the calculus for courage, especially political resistance, is different when what’s at stake is actually safety versus security. It can certainly be more courageous when the stakes are higher — when it’s about safety —, but it can also just be full-on stupidity. I acknowledge this. And, yes, if writers near me start getting disappeared, then I may very well have to consider a live-to-fight-another-day strategy, but, as I’ve said, I’m not there yet. My situation is not (yet) a question of safety, but merely of security. That is to say, I do not fear for my freedom or my life; I merely feel the anxiety that comes from uncertainty about what is to come, for my fellow citizens in general and for me personally. I cannot say that my courage will not fail me at some point in the future (after all, it has in the past >_<), but I know that, at this moment in time, I would feel like the worst kind of coward — the kind with no excuse, the pathetic kind — if I gave up now, when the stakes aren’t even all that high for me yet.

I started this blog to practise courage. I’m going after my dream of successful authorship now for essentially the same reason:

Not to live merely a creative life but a courageous life.

†Not that it is my intention to write incendiary things. There’s a difference between being brave and being reckless, after all. (Where the line between those two things is may change, but there is a line. And sometimes that line lies within the smart strategy of “live to fight another day”.) But even if I did do my best to be as milquetoast as possible in all of my writing — also not my intention (because milquetoast, ick) —, there’s the not insignificant fact that I have no idea what innocuous thing I write could end up being the spark that inadvertently sets off a conflagration. Just having the ability to speak out in the wild, as it were, regardless of whether I actually set off any wildfires, can be threatening to anyone whose entire mission is control over others. The only way for me to be “completely safe” — a complete illusion, by the way, but let us say, just for the sake of argument, that it’s possibly a real thing — is not to write at all. And that would not be brave at all.

‡This is not to say that one should always disregard one’s fear! There’s a reason we evolved to feel it: fear can and does save our lives in times of danger, and that’s, you know, generally a good thing. XD My point is that fear is a blunt indicator of possible danger — worse, not only can it be miscalibrated, it can also often just be entirely fooled —, and so I wish to respond intentionally, not just react thoughtlessly.