The biggest breakthrough I had this year as a writer was internal. For the first time ever, I finally found the confidence to say I’m a good writer. That’s something people have told me most of my life, and it was always nice to hear. Sometimes, I even believed those voices myself, but this year I was finally saying it to myself. It was a good feeling to have, and it was also very scary, which is why I say things were complicated this year.
For the first time ever, I started wondering if there was something else other than writing I could do.
I don’t know if the feeling I had was to give up on a writing career altogether (there is, other types of writing I could do, ones that are more profitable), but I have been more at peace than ever about that idea. For as good as I believe I am at this craft, I still struggle to make ends meet. Maybe that has more to do with my personal financial habits. Maybe I’m being too hard on the profession and not hard enough on myself, but I can’t help but feel like something is off between my abilities and my bank account. Sometimes I feel like if I was as good at anything else as I am at writing, I’d be living in a house right now instead of breaking my fingers over this keyboard in an effort to make rent on this one bedroom apartment. I could be totally wrong about that, but lately I’ve been curious to find out.