Ian here—Martha Engber is a writer and personal trainer whose books include Winter Light from Vine Leaves Press (2021 IPPY Gold Medal Winner in Young Adult Fiction), The Wind Thief, and Growing Great Characters From the Ground Up. Martha and I met during the 2021 Vine Leaves Press online reading for the SMOL Small Press fair, and here she explains how her revelations during the COVID pandemic helped her balance her paid work with her largely unpaid creative work.
In December 2019 I was helping my sister babysit her new granddaughter in Houston, Texas when I received an email acceptance to publish my novel, Winter Light.
I allowed myself a full day of inner quiet to fully enjoy the achievement. At the same time, I’d already had two books published and understood that the moment I signed a contract, I’d spend the next eight months working hard to set up marketing for the book.
Once I signed the contract, the panic set in. I say panic because at the time I was working 45 high-energy hours a week as a fitness instructor and personal trainer at a corporation in Silicon Valley.
How the Pandemic Set Me Straight
A decade previous, I’d had a kinder, gentler part-time work week that allowed me to spend time with my then-little kids and write on a regular basis, albeit for only an hour a day. But as they grew older, I not only had more time to work, but felt a financial obligation to add to our family’s coffer. Training paid very well, which motivated me to increase my hours, whereas writing paid almost nothing.
I’d been reared with the definition that a job pays the bills, and is therefore a legitimate use of time, whereas a hobby that doesn’t earn money should be relegated into whatever time is left after chores and family obligations. As I took on more clients, my writing time decreased to two mornings a week and a few hours here and there when clients canceled.
After I signed my book contract, even that little time got snapped up by the tasks of revamping my website, re-establishing a monthly newsletter, and planning for the book launch, all of which meant learning a slew of new technology.
Then the pandemic hit. The corporation where I worked told everyone to go home and not to return for the indefinite future.
Suddenly I was out of a very lucrative job.
Before I tell you my response to this situation, I’d like to say that I’m very sorry to those who suffered during the pandemic. We all know too well the many terrible aspects of the pandemic: the skyrocketing daily body count; those out of work who can’t afford to be; stressed healthcare workers; stressed parents with school-age kids forced to learn online; loneliness, fear, and the initially confusing and demotivating experience of working from home.
My situation was different, however. Because my kids were grown and I was financially stable, losing my job felt like…
Heaven.
The pandemic gave me back what I’d been starving for: the time to write, an activity socially categorized as a hobby, but that to me has always been a full-blown passion and necessity.
Balancing Paid Work and Creative Work
As I lined up online readings and advance reviewers and increased my social media posting, the old feeling of I write to please myself, along with the lie of I don’t care much if I get published fell by the wayside. The discipline I’d exercised to find even a little writing time during the lean writing time years had sustained me to the moment I could once again spend the time necessary to delve deeply into storytelling. I fell back into my long-established process of researching, writing, and rewriting, and moved with confidence not just toward the next project, but the one after that.
As the months passed, I slowly picked up fitness clients who wanted to train virtually or meet at outdoor locations. Slowly I began to feel more cramped and realized my writing time had shrunk to an unhappy level that compelled me to hurry from one task to the next. Wondering if I was imagining things, I finally tallied my paid hours to find they’d climbed higher than I expected. The old habit of accommodating paid work over unpaid creative work had once again reared its head.
The experience has forced me to understand certain truths about a creative life:
- We all need to support ourselves financially, so prioritizing paid work over unpaid work is sometimes necessary. Making sure to carve out a small amount of time for our creative endeavors on a consistent basis can be a lifeline until we reach more financially stable years.
- Paid work, and creative unpaid work, can equal one another in terms of importance. While the first allows us to live comfortably, the second feeds our hearts and minds and helps maintain good mental health. So there’s no reason to relegate our creative life to that of activity that’s less important.
My new outlook will be regularly tested as life opens up and gyms reopen, especially since I have long-term relationships with clients, both present and past, and understand the importance of people reaching out to re-establish fitness habits that have gotten sidelined during the pandemic. At the same time, I know I need to write and deserve to do so. To resist overbooking myself, I made a three-step process for handling new training requests.
I understand that I have more of a say in how much work I take on, given I’m in charge of my own training business, but I highly encourage other creative people to work on methods that will help you negotiate the time necessary to feed your soul, both in the workplace and at home.
You can find more about Martha Engber on her website, or on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.