Image from the National Library of Wales used under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
Time brings great changes.
When I started keeping this blog nearly a decade ago, I was at a very different point in my life—I was just out of grad school, trying to get my first novel published, and struggling with the very real conflict of how to both live a creative life and bring in enough money to live on.
At the time, starting the Day Job blog felt like the perfect course of action for many reasons. Not only would it help me develop a web presence, but I needed to mentally sort out some very real conflicts about where my life was going, how writing fit into it, and how to define my identity as an adult on some sort of career path—all topics I went on to write about on this blog. I’d also been working my own Day Jobs for over a year (first as a greenhouse assistant, then as an online test-grader) while writing MFA Thesis Novel on the side, so I felt ready to share this new route my life was taking.
Once upon a time, I was imagining (and even planning for) writing a nonfiction book (naturally titled But I Also Have a Day Job) about how creative people balance their creative work with keeping the bills paid. A project like that was almost certainly more than I could handle since I was also trying to write novels at the same time, but it’s one I think about coming back to in some form, since I think so many creative people struggle with the questions of income, time, and identity.
Writing about these issues was helpful for me in many ways. Having the Day Job philosophy served as a conversation starter with people I was meeting, and was easy to explain—after all, everyone knows what a Day Job is, and even most non-creative people, I think, embrace the Day Job philosophy to some extent. When I was in my twenties, I often struggled with how to define myself as a writer, in terms of my career, or even as a fully-functioning adult, and understanding my passion in terms of a creative endeavor supported by Day Jobs really helped me develop confidence in how I presented myself.
Since starting this blog, though, things have changed: not only have I published two novels and a chapbook, but I’ve moved away from Day Jobs and into my own self-employed editing work and teaching. This doesn’t feel like Day Job work, exactly, because it’s related to my writing work—I think of it more like paid work, where I work at something I’m good at and can put actual effort behind, and that complements my creative work instead of taking away from it. (Complementary Work is probably a better name for this than Day Job work.)
Not having a Day Job anymore also means I don’t see the world (or my working identity) in a Day Job way. As such, these days, the Day Job philosophy feels like more of a stepping stone I needed at a key point in my life than a way I actively look at the world now.
This doesn’t mean the values of a Day Job life aren’t important to me anymore—far from it. When it comes to prioritizing my time, setting goals, and putting the creative part of my identity first, the Day Job life taught me a lot about living a Writer’s Life, or a life of Complementary Work, or however I want to define it.
Moving Forward
As many of you reading this know, I have an author website now where I blog about author things, life updates, and other reflections, some of which have to do with work. (The first few posts also appear on this blog.) I also send out more insights via my email mailing list, which I encourage you to sign up for if you haven’t already.
This will probably be the last unique post on this blog unless something changes, or I have some Day Job-specific insights to share. Who knows—maybe there’s still a But I Also Have a Day Job nonfiction book in me in somewhere.
One thing’s for sure, though—the creative life still lives strong in me, and it’s not going away anytime soon.