It's Not Practical
I found another old wound today. What else is new right?
I generally share these with you in case they help somebody else who may have the same wound. So, let’s get into it.
The wound is simply that everything I do in life has to have some sort of practical purpose. I enjoy crochet for example, but I’ll only do it when I’m making something necessary. I won’t crochet a blanket just because I enjoy crochet. I will crochet a blanket if somebody needs one though. My interest in computers served a purpose as well. Yes, I love computers, but I use those skills to help myself and those around me. There is a practical application there. I don’t read romance novels because they serve no purpose, but I will read a self-help book or some kind of non-fiction book that teaches something or offers a skill. I don’t even make the bed because it serves no practical purpose. The only time the bed gets made by me is when I wash the sheets. Making the bed has no sanitary practical application. #sorrynotsorry
I can see this wound in the people around me too. My mother would never procrastinate on the cleaning by reading a book. She loves reading, but it was always relegated to the end of the day when everything else was done. If there was something practical to do, it was done first. The practical things always took priority. Reading was just an extra to do after everything else. She’s 83 now and reads all the time, but she’s retired and has nothing better to do. So now it has become a full time job. hahaha
When I was in high school I realized I loved to write. My writing at the time was all fiction. It was poems and short stories mostly. I wanted to figure out a way to write full-time instead of being a teacher. Why didn’t I? Because I couldn’t be a government, union worker who had full benefits as a fiction writer. My dream of being a writer didn’t match the expectation of what my career should look like, so I gave up being a writer entirely. Pretty much every choice I made came from a sense of powerlessness and lack of control over my own life and this was no exception.
Here we are 30-years later. The world of the internet has made it possible for pretty much anybody to be a full-time writer if they want to be. If you can find an audience for what you’re writing, you can make money online as a writer. That wasn’t true 30 years ago when I wanted to be a writer because the internet wasn’t really a thing yet, but it very much is true now.
My argument with my work lately has been that it isn’t practical because I don’t have a massive audience for my work. I felt as though I needed to make a choice to relegate this to a hobby so that I could find a job that was more practical. Every time I’ve tried to convince myself of that idea, I’ve heard my intuition telling me not to. I’ve essentially been having an internal battle with my intuition over the practicality of what I’ve been doing. There’s that wound again. Everything I do has to be practical and logical. I can’t have a full-time hobby. It makes no sense. I’m not allowed to do it this way. There is something wrong with it. People won’t like it. The story is thick, very, very thick.
Am I privileged to even be able to consider a full-time hobby? Yes. I recognize that not everybody has that luxury. For a long time, I didn’t think I had that luxury either. I’ve fought with the money stuff for years. The majority of it has now been resolved thanks to my old teacher retirement fund that I was able to access and use to pay off debt. My excuse has been that I need to be home with my teenage son. That is true. I do still need to be home with him and that is what is offering me the luxury of creating a full-time hobby for myself.
You can see what I did there. I made it practical because I won’t let myself do it otherwise. If he was my daughter’s age I’d have a really hard time convincing myself to be okay with a full-time hobby. I would probably shut down my intuition if that were the case.
You see my life was never about me. It was me making everybody around me comfortable all the time. Every choice I made had to make other people happy and if it didn’t, then I would change my choice. That’s why I stayed the course on becoming a teacher because becoming a writer made my parents uncomfortable. I do very little for myself, even to this day, because inevitably somebody will say I shouldn’t. The way I deal with that is by making everything I do practical or logical. If I do that people complain less, which means I get more freedom to do what I want. The people-pleaser in me is telling a good story, as you can see.
When I first started writing, I used it to heal myself. It had a practical application, even if it wasn’t making any money. I could justify that. It buried this old idea I had because I wasn’t ready to deal with it yet. But now it needs confronting. The goal has always been to free myself. This is one of the places I need to do that.
I have a bit of a passion project in the background. It’s going to take me a long time to complete, probably the remainder of this year and into next year. My argument with things needing to be practical and logical was going to stop me if I didn’t deal with it.
I dealt with the argument about things taking too long a while ago. That was tied to the money fears I held onto. I let that go. Over time, I’ve completely walked away from the idea of trying to make money doing this. But that offered me a different argument because then if I wasn’t using it to heal anymore, it no longer had a practical application. That was going to be a problem that I would have to deal with, and here we are.
I can’t have a passion project because that’s a hobby and it’s not practical. I’m not allowed to do that. Or at least that’s the story I tell myself.
I often look at musicians who play music all the time and post their music on social media hoping to breakthrough and get noticed. Every single one of them isn’t doing anything practical or logical. They are following their hearts hoping to make something out of it someday. Weirdly, I feel like that’s me too. But the difference between me and them is that I’m still arguing with that idea a few days away from turning 49. I’m not 20 anymore like most of them are. I’m supposed to have it figured out by now, or so society says.
The truth is, while I found my passion for writing as a teenager, finding a topic I was passionate about took me 30 years. Life offered me a subject to talk about. Now I’m getting the opportunity to fight with the idea that it’s okay to take on a passion project at my age, to the exclusion of all the practical things I’m supposed to be doing instead.
Is it practical to make yourself happy? Is it practical to try to create a life you actually enjoy? is there still room in the world for hobbies, interests, and passion projects that aren’t necessarily practical?
Some people would say that internal well-being and happiness is very practical. Others, like my mother, would say that internal well-being comes second to external or financial well-being. She believes in the idea of sacrificing oneself to earn a living until retirement. She put my happiness second behind finding a government, union job with benefits and I didn’t override her back then. Her priority was clear. Where do you fall on that spectrum?
When asked I believe fully in making the self happy first and foremost. That’s what I offer. That’s what I give to others. It’s not what I do for myself because of the old wound that says I’m not allowed. The only thing I need to do is give myself permission to be happy on my own terms. These are some of the last pieces of the people-pleasing habit I had. They seem to want to hang on for whatever reason.
So, I’m going to go nuke these ideas because they clearly don’t serve. They are stopping me from doing what I want to do. As I often say, it’s not about whether I’ll do it or not, it’s only a question of how long it takes me to get there!
Love to all.
Della
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