February Blues

To write or not to write...that is the question.

For the majority of the last year, I have been so in love with botanics and herbs and making my own lotions, potions and meds that finishing my book took a rather large of amount of will-power (and the not-so-gentle urging from my mother to finish the damn thing before allowing my butterfly brain to flit to something new). But I did, and proud of myself I am indeed. Perhaps not as much as my mother, bless her heart, but enough that I do feel I have finally accomplished something.

This is new for me, this feeling of accomplishment. Because even though I have produced three very healthy and, dare I say it, good-looking children, who each have such spirit as to drive their mother up the very walls, it's not exactly something that most women do not achieve. In my pursuits of various crafts, all with the view in mind to earn some money from the joy I get in their creation, I have always succeeded to fail very well. I didn't finish school and have, for as long as I remember, had a list of the things I want to be when I grow up that extends well below my knees. Whenever I have tried to figure out, definitively, what I want to be, what career I am going to pursue, I have never been able to pin-point any one thing that will tick all my boxes, namely: creative, flexible, challenging, work from home mostly, beneficial to the public, rewarding etc. least of all tick them continuously until retirement.

So what did I do? I flitted from one thing to the next, dreaming up schemes and creating plans to make my current hobby into a career. It started with beads and progressed through silk flower arranging, polymer clay sculpting, sewing, drawing, web design, make-up artistry and writing and eventually a combination of most of those things at any given time. I did do quite a few craft fairs with a dear friend who also makes jewellery from beads, polymer clay and even silver clay, but the market was always too saturated. As it was with make-up. In fact it wasn't long after getting into make-up and realising that yet again, it wasn't going to go anywhere, that I fell very much out of love with the whole industry for realising how well we, as consumers of cosmetics, are conned out of tons of money to cause terrible damage to our largest organ. It led me on the path to herbalism as I sought out natural alternatives to products whose ingredients labels might as well have been written in Greek. In herbalism I discovered a passion that rivalled my love of writing; a driving need to discover everything the natural world has to offer in these times of synthetic living.

And through all of this there was the book, in the back of my mind, on a forgotten disk in the drawer, on a forgotten file on the computer, occasionally hinting at being let out into the light, being completed and brought to life. So, true to form, when I did grab it by horns and made up my mind to see it through, it was with the usual grandiose dreams of money coming in and a comfortable life. But a little part of me kept doubting I would see it through, would get it out there, would get the submissions to agents sent off. After all, I never had gone from start to finish with anything else. But I did it, and it feels great.

Except...I don't know what to do now. The agents were all very kind, but each one came back with a a starting line of "We regret..." and though I am still waiting on one return (which indeed, I may not even get) I still have a few more I can try. But for all that I am a dreamer, I work very hard to pretend to be a realist, and force myself to consider the realistic outcome of any endeavour. I know that I am about 600% more likely to end up with cancer than a book deal, and I know that even if I did eventually get noticed by the right person at the right time, I would need to be earning some money, somehow, until then. So I began looking to herbalism as the one thing, other than writing, that would, hopefully, tick all my boxes, and for a long while to come. It's a subject in which one will always be learning and I want that. But it's going to take time and money (which are not exactly in abundance in our house) to become a herbalist and set up a practice, not to mention a lot of hard work and studying. But the idea of the hard work and studying aren't so daunting now that I know I am capable of achieving what I set out to do. It's the doubt of being able to make it work, of being able to see it through in the long run, after investing all that time and effort and money into it, that worries me. What if I lose interest five years down the line?

And what about the writing? Sitting here now, typing away, makes me long for the nights sitting up late and weaving the threads of my story into an attractive piece of work. I want to write, but I know this is probably never going to put food on the table, no matter how hard I may work to make my luck. And so I am at odds within myself; neither wanting to waste time writing when I could be studying for a very wholesome and worthwhile career, nor feeling confident enough to throw everything I have at a dream when I could take the path of least resistance and continue writing in the comfort of this chair and resign my financial fate to the gods. Or perhaps, just maybe, there's a way to combine the two?