It’s beginning to look a lot like the end of the year, which means that I have to take stock of the important things — like, for example, just how little money I actually made this year. To put things in perspective, the income I had this year didn’t even cover my share of rent over the past 12 months. (I will forever be particularly grateful for the good luck that saw me get money from the divorce when I did, otherwise this past year would have been very, very different indeed.)
I am nearing the point where I’ll have to make a decision about my future, insofar as work is concerned. I promised myself I could have 12 months to, basically, fuck around and find out if freelancing irregularly for outlets would work out financially, and the answer is a pretty definitive “no.” So, instead, the question becomes, “Well, what’s next?”
I have had no shortage of exciting opportunities come my way since the discovery that I wouldn’t be staying on with THR in the way I had been, way back in January; the kinds of things that would, at any other time, had been bucket list items instead of potential life rafts. Unfortunately, in almost every single case — there are a couple still out there, unresolved — every single opportunity vanished.
I was going to write, “vanished before I’d had the chance to accept it,” but that’s not even true; I had accepted more than one, only for it to disappear after the acceptance but before any of the benefits had kicked in. That experience, which has repeated pretty consistently across the year, has been genuinely dizzying, going from, well, that’s a strange and unfortunate coincidence to wait, am I cursed somehow to where I currently am, which is a vague cynical expectation that nothing positive is going to happen career-wise, because past experience has taught me that.
There are but weeks left before I have to decide if I’m going to continue to live off savings and try to make this thing work somehow, or if I have to go off and find something, anything, better to do. Despite everything, I still harbor a forlorn hope that something magical can happen, even if, really, I’ll believe it when I see it.