Did we give up before we even started?

I certainly did.

I’ve always been proud of my ‘down to earth’ mentality. Except for that one time I thought I was going to become a famous singer –  I must have been 10 years old, which explains a lot –, I consider myself someone capable of discerning the achievable from the impossible. When I decided I wanted to be a writer, also at a pretty young age, I knew I couldn’t just be a writer. The grown-ups around me agreed. Nobody lives just from writing.

Still, I went to university in Chile and got a degree in English Language and Literature because that was what I wanted to do. I applied to a Creative Writing master’s in Glasgow a few years later, because that was what I wanted to do. I was rusty by the time I started university again – I hadn’t written much in the last 6 years – but I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.

I have never enjoyed writing as much as I did during that time. Writing gave me purpose after I finished my bachelor’s; it kept me sane during lockdown and brought an excitement and a sense of belonging that not even the ever-so-terrifying blank page could destroy. I wrote a bunch of short stories, started a novel, and even dipped into poetry for a bit (with no-so-great results, I’m afraid). It was all I’d ever wanted to do with my life.

But I knew very well I was taking big risks – writing was not a realistic career, and I would have to find something else to do alongside it. Once I graduated, I would need to find a proper job. I also needed that job to stay in the UK.

I obsessed a little bit over this. I was constantly looking out for that thing that I would end up doing for the rest of my life. I wanted to reassure myself, and my parents – who had done nothing but support me when I told them I didn’t want to be an architect/engineer/lawyer – that I knew what I was doing.

So, I declared I was going to use my master’s degree to get a job working with books. Publishing was the path I wanted to follow. And if I really wanted to work with books, if I really wanted to write one myself one day, I needed to stay.

I did a lot of writing in this room and on this desk during my postgraduate year. I wish I had more pictures of the desk itself where it actually looks like a writing desk and not like an absolute mess.

I started working hard to get that dream job in publishing – only that nobody told me it’s next to impossible, and your chances are even lower when you’re a foreigner on a temporary working visa. I eventually got a job in academic publishing, which didn’t involve any books, but it was a job in publishing nonetheless. ‘Get your foot in the door’ and whatnot.

I was set on becoming the best at my job, on learning as much as I could from it so they would sponsor my new work visa. Then, in a few years, I’d finally get to work with books. Going up the ladder was the only way I thought I could succeed.

But in the process of trying to succeed, my writing got lost and forgotten. I didn’t touch my novel or make any attempts to go back to it for two years. I didn’t write a single short story either. My one and only focus was to get a job so I could stay and start building up a life. The writing was still somewhere underneath all of that, but so buried that it was hard to find.

None of that happened. Life, being as it is, quickly showed me that my plans mattered very little in the grand scheme of things. A year down the line I found myself unemployed, away from home, without a visa and without a plan. I had failed spectacularly; I had spent years going after a dream that was now completely out of reach.

I realised I was lost in a way I had never been before. I had no career prospects to hold on to, nothing to aim for anymore. And my core set of beliefs – that if I was sensible and realistic and smart I was guaranteed success – were a lie.

The funny thing about my modern-day tragedy is this: during those months of hopelessness, I started writing again. I held on to the writing for dear life. Not only because it felt like I had nothing else worth holding on to (being unemployed and without a visa I didn’t really have much else to do either), but also because writing had never made more sense.

It was hard as well as liberating, maddening yet necessary. If the only thing I could do at the moment was to write, then so be it. Write, I thought, until something makes sense again. Until the knots untangle, until the path becomes clear. Write until this shitstorm is over. 

It slowly became clear to me that writing wasn’t just something to do and to hold on to while waiting for life to rearrange itself – writing was the thing rearranging life. It dictated my mornings and my nights; it gave my days a structure I desperately needed. It slowly started becoming the one thing I did every day from Monday to Friday no matter what. My days revolved around the writing, around ideas and dialogue and awfully badly written descriptions. It became strangely easy to face that not-so-blank page every day. My job, even if it didn’t pay a single penny, was to write.

Something started happening to my brain then. What had once seemed painful and impossible suddenly felt like the only thing my mind and body were capable of doing. After so much defeat and disappointment – disappointment in life, but also myself –, I was starting to see a path that I didn’t want to ignore any longer. Yes, I had tried and failed at getting a proper job. I didn’t have a home anymore, technically speaking (I actually still don’t, at least not in the bureaucratic terms of visas and residencies). But the writing, the writing had been sidelined way before any of my big failures happened; it had been deemed impossible from the very beginning.

I hadn’t really failed at writing – I had never actually tried to make anything out of it.

I believed for years that writing wasn’t a real, serious possibility; it was the thing you did as a side job, or as a hobby in your free time, but never the thing. If something came out of it, wonderful! But if it didn’t, then you had your real job to rely on. And I thought that that real job was supposed to make you happy as well, fulfil you, give you purpose and enjoyment.

I’m not saying I don’t think that’s true – I simply don’t want that for myself anymore. I don’t want to spend my energy on finding something new I could like, a new career path to go down to, a new skill to learn that I can monetise and live off.

I already tried that way. I was smart and rational and worked hard to get a normal job to make money to live abroad and succeed in life. And it didn’t work out! It did not work out. It just didn’t. I’ve known what I wanted to do since I was fourteen, so why not try that out? What have I got to lose at this point, anyway?

I’m not saying I’ll quit my awful day job and become a full-time writer, even though I wish I could. The reality is: we have to work and find a job that pays the bills and feeds us well enough. But, personally, that’s all I want that job to be. I don’t want to think about it more than I need to, I don’t want my brain to be drained by it every day. Right now, my brain’s priority is my writing.

And so here we are. Gathering the strength to start all over and give writing a real chance. I believe this means different things to different people, and I’m not sure what exactly it means for me yet. Here is what I do know, though: writing is my job. When people ask that awful “And what do you do?” question they always ask at parties, I will say I’m a writer. What I do for money, what I do to be able to survive another day so I can continue writing is absolutely irrelevant to me and not even worth a thought or a sentence in these conversations anymore.

I might not live from writing, but I want to live for it. And for the first time ever, I don’t think that’s an unhinged statement.

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