\u201cSo, what do you do?\u201d a neighbour asks me during a lull in conversation. This is a classic question. A colloquial fail-safe that keeps things moving forward for the sake of keeping things moving. Uncomplicated and straightforward, it is the easiest question for them to ask, but as I fumble through something between a life history and a philosophical meltdown, it is clearly the hardest for me to answer.<\/p>\n
My housemate eventually jumps in on my behalf: \u201cShe\u2019s a writer.\u201d I reel at the suggestion. A writer. Starting out, you do not so much \u201cdo\u201d writing as you \u201cdo\u201d a lot of other things to be able to write every now and again.<\/p>\n
Until recently, I had a full-time job<\/a> that kept my mind and schedule occupied and, quite importantly, covered my rent and bills. I now have the time and space to \u201cdo\u201d writing, but I spend a lot of it paranoiacally keeping tabs on part-time jobs in Dublin<\/a>. It is an infamously expensive city to live in at the best of times and it does little to incentivise young creatives to stay in it.<\/p>\n Since going freelance, the \u201cso, what do you do?\u201d question has a more accusatory ring to it that chimes: \u201cWhat on Earth are you doing?\u201d It is there in the furrowed brows of worried relatives and the side-eyes of suspicious friends. It has led me back to Sarah Jaffe\u2019s 2021 book Work Won\u2019t Love You Back<\/a>, the kind of thing that I have time to read nowadays. In it, she unravels the notion of \u201cloving what you do\u201d and asks how noble an aspiration it really is. How gratifying is it in the end? And who even gets the chance to try to love what they do?<\/p>\n \u201cLoving what you do\u201d is a modern ideal, one that I grew up with as a Noughties kid. It seemed virtuous \u2013 an obvious win-win. Never work a day in your life, you say? Sign me up. But now, as I budget my every cent and keep a feverish eye on job listings, I wonder if I should have paid more heed to my grandparents\u2019 and parents\u2019<\/a> no-nonsense conception of work.<\/p>\n Creative careers require a perfect blend of opportunity, self-motivation and delusion that would be considered fraudulent by any other industry\u2019s standards<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The reality of \u201cdoing\u201d writing, or any creative career that one might \u201clove\u201d, can be brutal. Making ends meet is its own battle, but even after that the work itself is not all fun and games. The notion of \u201cloving what you do\u201d diminishes the fact that there are inevitably elements of it that you don\u2019t even like.<\/p>\n I would be lying if I said that packing in the day job has meant that I now spend every waking moment scribbling away, monocle in eye and quill in hand. That is only a mirage I dreamt of when I did not have the time to write that much. Turns out, I love cooking elaborate dinners and cleaning my room, and I actually hate trying to crunch an ambient thought out of my head and into my fingers and on to a page (I also do not own a monocle or a quill). Dorothy Parker<\/a> perhaps put it best when she said: \u201cI hate writing, but I love having written.\u201d<\/p>\n The procrastination methods by which I avoided writing this very article would suggest that I actively did not want to write it: going to the library (for \u201cresearch\u201d purposes \u2013 I ended up working on a crossword); going to a cafe for a change of scenery (where I eavesdropped on two girls discussing whether it was fair to be both nice and good-looking and which they would choose if they could only be one); booking a doctor\u2019s appointment that I had been avoiding for weeks (instead of using my time in the waiting room wisely, I offered an open smile to the elderly man beside me who then, of course, launched into an unwieldy lecture on the genealogy research he has taken up in his retirement).<\/p>\n\n