Work in Progress

7 minute read

Recently, I saw a post on Instagram that asked: What would your occupation be if you had followed your childhood dream? It was a Monday morning and tellingly, no one had posted any answers to this question - not one person - but I suspect I wasn’t the only one who thought about it later.

As a child, the question of what I wanted to be when I grew up seemed mostly to be asked by adults I didn’t know well. It was handy to have an answer and for quite a while - influenced as I was first by Nancy Drew and later, Cagney and Lacey - “a detective” was mine. Later still, I traded that answer in for other things - a cartoonist (something I was briefly paid to do in my mid-teens), a teacher (that one I admitted shyly, given the grief I was giving my actual teachers at the time) and, even shyer still, a writer. I am skipping over a brief period where I really wanted a job on stage, specifically as the back of a pantomime donkey. That ambition was strong enough for me to write to Jim’ll Fix It but for many reasons, I’m glad Jim never fixed that for me.

Like a lot of people, a confluence of events - luck, aptitude, interest - brought me into my first career, which was marketing. The experience I gained in London sparkled more when I returned to Dublin and by the time I approached my thirtieth birthday, I had a senior job at one of Ireland’s leading brands. With the job came all the trappings of success - the salary, the team, one of the biggest marketing budgets in the country - and what also came with it was chronic, unrelenting, stress.

Everyone experiences stress differently, I suppose, like Tolstoy’s quote about unhappy families. For me, there’s an emptiness about it, a feeling that my mind isn’t quite my own anymore - like I’ve handed over the best part of it - the best part of myself - to someone else. Nothing, it seemed had the power to make me feel truly happy: the free tickets to the sold-out concert, the invite to the corporate box to watch the rugby, all of it was something to be ticked off, to get through, to get to the next thing.

Looking back, life’s colours had dulled, everything washed out.

The one splash of colour in my week was a small window of time where I felt differently, where I felt myself, two hours that I wouldn’t hand over to anyone else: my evening class in creative writing. Getting there on time usually involved scoffing a sandwich in the car because I’d missed lunch and I knew I’d be on my Blackberry later, but for those 120 minutes, I was fully there, all of me in that class. I gave my undivided attention to my teacher, but, more importantly - much more importantly than that - I gave my undivided attention to myself.

Birthdays ending in zeroes make us think - sometimes make us change - and for me by the time I hit 30 I realised that being a writer wasn’t just something I wanted to be, it was someone who I already was inside. As long as I kept that part of me squashed down, starved of air, I wouldn’t be happy in other parts of my life. It was simple, in the end, to understand but with a mortgage on a Celtic Tiger bought house, making that happen was more complicated.

For my thirtieth birthday - with the support of a wonderful manager - I gave myself the gift of time, a career break. For three months I worked diligently on my first novel, producing what I learned years later, Anne Lamott calls a “shitty first draft.” After my time off I knew I couldn’t stay in that job so I left and set up my own consulting business and kept writing. Eventually, this all led to a publishing deal and a whole chain of events that have brought me to where I am today: writing in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with a mask on.

I’d love to stop here, to say that’s the end of the story - Happy Ever After - but the truth is; it isn’t. As Irish people, we’re about as comfortable talking about money as we are about sex, but the truth is that 17 years and four published novels since that career break, I haven’t been able to make my living from writing, I haven’t even come close.

The good news is, that I am not alone. In a city like New York where everyone is one thing and also another thing, having more than one job is so unremarkable people give their jobs labels.

Your “B” job is the job that pays the extortionate rent and keeps the lights on in your apartment. Your “A” job is the one that keeps the light on in your eyes.

Writing will always be my “A” job - that’s a given - but I’m happy to have “B” jobs that not only give me time to pursue my writing, but that fulfil me as well. Three and a half days a week I work for a charity whose women’s empowerment mission I feel passionately about and one night a week I teach creative writing to students where I see a light in their eyes that reflects the light in my own.

The rest of the week is my writing time but sometimes - and more during the last year and a half - I find myself wondering if that’s enough? Late at night, or early in the morning, I am back on that familiar hamster wheel wondering how I can tip the balance in favour of my writing without compromising the life I love. I look to my 30-year-old self who took the plunge into the unknown and ask what if I let the “B” jobs go and just focused all my attention on my writing - where would that bring me?

If I’m honest - and why write this if I’m not being honest? - I’m still figuring out the answer to this question, it’s not all worked out yet and maybe it never will be. There are realities to consider: leaving a well-paid job without a safety net is not the same at 47 as it was at 30 and I can’t ignore the fact that I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world in a country where not having health insurance is simply not an option.

And then I remember the other reality too, that looking back at the change I made at 30, it wasn’t just about one big shift, one big decision. In the telling of the story, I’ve forgotten the series of little shifts, little decisions, tiny steps that happened along the way.

So for now, this year, I am focused on small steps. I’ve been better with boundaries around work to protect the writing time I already have and found new, small pockets of time in my week. While I love writing in Brooklyn (45 minutes from where I live) the pandemic showed me that I can be just as productive closer to home, making my trips to Brooklyn a treat now, not a necessity. When my teaching term ends, I ring-fence those two hours for my own writing, rather than letting it blur back into the rest of the week. Twice a year - off season - I book myself a long weekend at a seaside town to fully immerse myself in whatever project I’m working on at the time.

A friend of mine says that when you take a step forward to pursue your vision, the universe takes two steps forward to meet you and I’ve found that to be true as well. One of my goals this year was to write more personal essay pieces and in a synchronistic turn of events, the first one I wrote became my first piece here, on Heyday. That first piece has, in turn, led to monthly contributions which somehow I’ve managed to find the time for without infringing on my other writing projects.

Are things perfect? No. Is the balance exactly as I’d like it to be? Probably not, but it feels like it’s getting closer. And without any dramatic changes in my life - no new jobs, no career breaks - I’ve spent more time writing this year and produced more work than I can remember for a long time. Which means, that in the end, I am just happier, lighter, and probably nicer to be around as well. And that I can see an Instagram post that asks me on Monday morning what childhood me wanted to be, and I can smile and scroll past it, grateful that we’re both happy and knowing I will never forget again.

Yvonne Cassidy, October 2021