“So, what do you do?” 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.
My housemate eventually jumps in on my behalf: “She’s a writer.” I reel at the suggestion. A writer. Starting out, you do not so much “do” writing as you “do” a lot of other things to be able to write every now and again.
Until recently, I had a full-time job that kept my mind and schedule occupied and, quite importantly, covered my rent and bills. I now have the time and space to “do” writing, but I spend a lot of it paranoiacally keeping tabs on part-time jobs in Dublin. 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.
Since going freelance, the “so, what do you do?” question has a more accusatory ring to it that chimes: “What on Earth are you doing?” 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’s 2021 book Work Won’t Love You Back, the kind of thing that I have time to read nowadays. In it, she unravels the notion of “loving what you do” 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?
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“Loving what you do” is a modern ideal, one that I grew up with as a Noughties kid. It seemed virtuous – 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’ and parents’ no-nonsense conception of work.
Creative careers require a perfect blend of opportunity, self-motivation and delusion that would be considered fraudulent by any other industry’s standards
The reality of “doing” writing, or any creative career that one might “love”, 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 “loving what you do” diminishes the fact that there are inevitably elements of it that you don’t even like.
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 perhaps put it best when she said: “I hate writing, but I love having written.”
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 “research” purposes – 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’s 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).
“What do you do?” the kindly neighbour asks. By the look of my own time stamps, not all that much writing. I try to write? I look for other jobs? I do something that I love? Something that I hate?
Creative careers require a perfect blend of opportunity, self-motivation and delusion that would be considered fraudulent by any other industry’s standards (with good reason, no one is telling aspiring pilots to “fake it ’til you make it”). A lot of becoming a writer – or any kind of creative – is insisting that you are one until people believe you. And it is convincing yourself that it is an economically viable career even as your home city becomes too expensive for you. It is buying into the fantasy that you will make it happen even when you are procrastinating with suddenly urgent chores and administrative tasks. It is tricking yourself into thinking you love it even when you definitely do not.
[ Writer’s block: how to be creative even in crisisOpens in new window ]
It can be embarrassing to make-believe like this, but only in the way that pretending to be asleep in order to go to sleep is – just when you really think about it. Just when you’re asked “so, what do you do?” by unassuming strangers.
The worst part of it all? Now that I’m finishing writing this, I am already fondly remembering my time writing it. “What fun it all was,” I am already thinking to myself. I can feel the slow creep of the rose-tinted lens coming over my memory of those few days spent procrastinating, and know that it will make me do it all again the next time. The writing, the avoiding, the budgeting, the loving, the hating, the forgetting.
