New Levels, New Devils

I’m more successful than I’ve ever been. I’m also struggling to keep up with it.

September is ending and I am finishing up the busiest, most lucrative month of business I have ever had.

Between twelve gigs, 108 online orders, nine busking days, a photoshoot featuring six of my typewriters, and one day filming a small documentary, I feel like I have not really stopped moving. I have a deep blister on my right thumb from turning my typewriter’s platen knob probably thousands of times. I get home at the end of each day and collapse on my couch, in a kind of daze.

I am grateful. I have an unprecedented amount of abundance. I am also bone-deep exhausted.

A few weeks ago, I had a long video call with my friend Olivia — another successful typewriter poet who lives and works in London. She and I have had a lot of parallels in the last year or so of our lives — growing on social media, becoming increasingly busy, going through a dramatic and stressful dissolution of the same business relationship. We are both getting more than enough work; we’re collaborating with big brands and earning good money just from our poetry alone.

By all means, we are living our dreams.

But when the Facetime camera opened up onto both of our faces, I recognized in her eyes what I myself have been feeling: a kind of overwhelm that is in some ways familiar to me — high-achieving student and worker as I always have been — and in other ways is new. I know I’m stepping into a new season of my life and am operating at a different level than I have in the past. It’s exciting, and also, I am wondering when I might stop for a moment to catch my breath.

There’s a lever to be pulled, I know, that might give me some rest. I don’t totally trust myself to pull it.

What I mean is: I have spent so long hustling, reaching, wanting, hoping, and chasing after a dream that I don’t really know how to not be in that mode. How to say no to opportunities that come my way so that I might be able to, well, have a day where I’m not doing anything. How to slow down. As a fully self-employed person who is making enough money, I have full control over what I do and do not do: I can say no or tap out whenever I want to. But I’ve never really done that before. The idea of doing so instills a great deal of discomfort in me.

There’s another discomfort at play. It has to do with all the other work that I’ve promised myself I’d be doing: my first poetry collection, a play, a novel. All my projects that don’t pay any bills but might feed the creative spirit. If I write a thousand poems in a month for other people, is there any space left at the end to write a poem I might want to publish? One I’d submit to a favorite literary magazine; one I’d spend the time to come back to and edit?

The answer, of course, is no. There is no space for doing much else besides laying kind of half-asleep on my couch, scrolling until I hit my time limit, and vaguely wondering when I’ll muster up the energy to make it to the grocery store.

On the outside, for the onlooker, a dream often looks like a beautiful and lucky thing. And it is. In so many ways. I watch other writers live what I suppose is a version of my dream: writing and writing throughout the day at a beautiful mahogany desk, churning out book after book, touring the country to promote them, living comfortably off royalties and working for a dedicated and loyal fanbase who love the worlds they create.

Or at least, I see glimpses of this in others, and my brain fills in the rest. They must have it so easy! It all sounds so fun! The words flow and the rest is a big kick-up of the feet, glass of champagne in hand! Cheers! We’ve made it!

I’m currently living a different version of the writer’s dream: one that is much less obvious, and did not appear to me in my visions of my future when I was a child, but one that is pretty fucking awesome nonetheless. With nothing other than the ideas in my mind and ink on paper, I can move people; I can see people; I can make a damn good living while doing it. 10-year-old me would cry with delight if she saw what I was doing now. Every morning in my journal, I list the wonders of this current reality so as never to lose sight of them.

On our call, Olivia put her finger on something I’ve been hazily feeling throughout this month as all my hard work seems to be really, finally, oh my god pinch me paying off. We spend so much time chasing after what we dream of, she said, but we have no idea what to do once we actually get it.

How to sustain it, she means. As in: getting the dream often means working even harder.

I think what I’m discovering is that I had a false notion, perhaps, of what it would mean to “make it.” As artists, we often spend so much time with our eye on the horizon, working toward something, wishing for something. And what happens when you get it? Well, you usually have a moment of pride, relief, you raise a glass, then you turn around and start the whole thing over again. Blank page. New project. Never-ending cycle of making.

In my imagination of other writers’ lives, I know I’ve glorified their day-to-day, the way they feel; I’ve mapped onto them enormous senses of accomplishment and self-satisfaction, then wondered why I struggle to feel the same. Their truth is more likely closer to how I currently feel: like I’ve gotten somewhere, and that’s all fine and good, but oh my god is there farther still to go.

I listened this month to Britney Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, and was struck by the sections she talks about her work ethic: the meticulous recording process, the intensity of touring, the constant dance classes ‘til everything was perfect: the daily grind of all of it. Oh, I thought. This might just be part of what it is to be successful. And I think it probably is. Most of us never see the behind-the-scenes realities of our favorite artists, but they are probably not lives most people would envy. We project onto them glamour but a lot of them are probably worn out in a way we cannot begin to imagine.

I think I am feeling the very outer edges of this experience; it puts into perspective for me why so many well-known artists have struggled so much. To create and create and create in the public eye, for heart and for money, is humbling; it’s intense; it’s vulnerable and hopeful and hard. It’s not a cake walk.

And the goal post always is moving. Five years ago, I would have died to live the life I now have. And grateful as I am for it, the success I’ve accrued thus far still pales in comparison to what I want to accomplish. I’ve made a living exclusively from writing for seven years and still: I do not have a book published. And once I do, it will be onto the next idea. A screenplay. A mini-series. A novel. A solo show. Poems. Essays. I’d love to be singing.

There’s no point at which one “makes it” and then gets to go ahead and kick up their feet forevermore, work done, eyes closed.

And to be honest, that’s probably not what I would want. I’m an artist at heart: I’m happiest when creating something, toiling away, hands in the proverbial mud. The problem lies less in the creation and more in the pressure to keep up the pace, consistently, against the body’s better instincts. This is probably because “success” in this modern world means that the creative process has been inextricably tied to capitalism. I make art for the spirit and also: I make art for the money. Hence the hustle. Hence the exhaustion. Hence the soul is not just wandering free beneath the sun and making whatever it wants.

I’ve made more money this month than I ever could have imagined making as a writer in such a short period, so I know that I’ve definitely earned a good amount of wandering free. Still, this feels difficult to do, in part because I spent so long building up to this momentum. When it was so hard to get something going, it feels like a betrayal almost to slow it back down somehow.

Right after I moved to New York, I remember a conversation I had with my friend and former editor, Shelby. I was talking to her about how discouraged I felt: I’d been working so hard, doing so much, and still the idea that my poem business could really take off and be as successful as I wanted it to be felt like a pie in the sky. I remember her face on my phone’s screen, thinking for a moment, searching for the right thing to say. And then she said it.

People usually only want to get on a train right before it’s about to leave the station, she said. Your train’s not leaving still for a little bit, so only the people who believe in you the most are already on.

It just wasn’t time yet, she meant. The work I was doing was related maybe to the inner mechanics of the train, but the train was not equipped to really get moving. So, on board were some friends, my parents, and a few kind-hearted strangers who came upon me at the Tacoma Night Market in 2019. I wasn’t quite ready.

A year later, I remember having the thought, as I started really busking in earnest, got scouted by an agency, and had my first few videos go viral: The train! It’s moving! And Shelby was right. At the very last second, a lot of people got on board. And every time I look now, it seems like even more have squeezed in.

Five years ago, my biggest problem was figuring out how to get the train started. Now it feels like the issue is that it’s moving too fast.

Momentum is an interesting thing, kind of like success. The more you have, the more you have. It can take years to get something moving, and you’re so overjoyed when it goes, that it might take a while to figure out that you didn’t put enough time into thinking about the brakes. Why would you? You wanted so badly to move. You couldn’t imagine that a day would come when you might want to slow down, or — god forbid — stop.

On Facetime with Olivia, though, I could tell we both needed to pull some kind of brake. Being overbooked is not good for the artist’s heart. We need time to do nothing; to keep dreaming; to drift off and think and read and rest. The problem with art under capitalism is it’s very hard to figure out how to do this. It’s a big deal: to be in demand. And it’s a hard thing: to say no to an opportunity — especially if the reason for doing so is to make space to sit around and look at the clouds. It’s not how we’ve been trained. It’s not what we thought we would want.

But maybe it’s the only way to sustain the ladder climb without totally losing our minds. Or at least, while keeping our heartbeats. I mean: the reason for why it is we do what we do. Which was never, of course, just about money.

We are artists because we have to be. Because we are compelled by want and by love. And the dream keeps on going. It’s an expansive and elusive little bastard. I got everything I wanted and then I wanted more. Reaching hands. Horizon eyes. Hopeful.

I’ll be looking to pull the brakes, then, ‘til I’m moving slow enough to enjoy the process of it all: bit by delicious bit. To revel in it. To work hard and kick back the feet, too, to roll around in the absurdity of all of it.

After all: isn’t that the whole point?