A Week and a Half into the New Year

One drawback of increasing visibility, for a writer, is the feeling that professional and personal considerations make venting and emotive self-expression unwise. In other words, success can whelm the very aspects of the craft that motivate some people to write in the first place. And limited success does nothing to mitigate the need that those aspects arose to alleviate. Well, I think I've behaved myself, in this respect, these past few months.

But spending the opening week of the year that I'll turn 30 — with a new house and a young family — semi-employed and staring down another month with no idea where sufficient income might lie has left me needing at least this one slip-up of a post. I've been carrying a vicious, ponderous creature around on my back day in and day out, his sandpaper chin abrading the back of my neck, and for one brief moment, I have to drop the prudent fiction that he's having no effect.

Carrying this sort of iniquitous burden for too long, you find that your breathing begins to come hard and muscles to ache, and there's a voice at the ear blending the worst aspects of a whine and a snarl, weaving falsehoods with half-truths to convince you that you're an inadequate loser who actually can't do things you thought you'd mastered years ago. Somewhere between that third batch of résumés that yields no interest and that online job search that ends with doubts about your competence to wash dishes, the bastard begins to become persuasive.

Oh sure, you can try to turn your mind to all of the people who know people who might have a lead. You can speak out loud of the nights-and-weekends pursuits that are just beginning to bear fruit. But the fleet-lipped fatso turns it all around: even if that success doesn't dissipate just like your full employment did, it won't amount to enough quickly enough to make a difference. You only have enough hope, he says, to feel it when it's dashed.

You can remind yourself that you're of passable intelligence and able-bodied. He'll scoff at the first, and for the second, he'll point out your hard breathing and aching muscles. You can plea the power of prayer, of faith, but that, too, takes on the opposite of its intended significance: "Well then, since you've a source of strength, God needn't help you. In fact, your deteriorating circumstances could merely be a way of drawing you toward Him." Of course, the voice concludes with the possibility that a soul's approaching God is like a curve's infinitely approaching an absolute line — ever closer, feeling ever more heat, with no culmination. Ever.

The ascetic life has its place, and freely entered, it has its admirability. But a man who is responsible for others can't help but find it discouraging how rapidly we are able to define "sufficient" down; how thrilled I'd be, now, to return to barely scraping by with a sixty-hour workweek.