Starve, Artist (talis qualis)

I am unemployed. I am writing.

Simple declaratives that feel like a sucker punch and taste like blood.

I am writing: action-focused. I am a writer: actor-focused.

I can’t bring myself to claim the identity, only the activity.

I am a middle-aged woman (i.e. old). A mother (i.e. exemplar). A native West Virginian (i.e. settled). For these reasons, leaving a good job for a lousy job and leaving the lousy job to sit in a cold, dark ‘baseden’ so I can engage in a solitary and unsalaried activity because it’s the only activity that keeps aflame the schoolgirl passion long-burning from my toes through my temporal lobe…seems, well, schoolgirlish.

In a January article in The New Yorker titled “Looking for the meaning of work,” Jill Lepore traces the notion that we “should expect to discover life’s purpose in work” back to the 1970’s…so in ‘conceptual’ years the love what you do never work a day in your life trope is still in its infancy…whereas I, also tracing back to the 70’s, am not (see above).

She points to the “gig-economy” and a resurgence of interest in a “barter-economy” as, among other things, signs that post-industrial Americans are ‘woke’ to the trap of sacrificing passion and purpose for paychecks and PF Chang’s.

Still, with a son who will be heading off to college in the fall while, still, I continue paying my own student loans (some good things have come out of this pandemic) and the cost of tuition at public colleges increasing 31% between 2008 and 2018…I’m like Atlas with a celestial sphere of guilt on my suburban shoulders.

Politically we’re entitled to “life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness”…and if we learned nothing else about history from Hamilton, we learned we should be scrappy, hungry, and not throw away our shot…(yes, yes, I’ve omitted young)…our forefathers, with their unparalleled forethought, blazed our brief mortal journey along a ‘happy’ trail…

Simple enough…

Though many of our fathersfore understood poor, there is much to discern with regard to happiness and its relationship to the current state of our economic “great divide”…just how many times a day do “the 290 million or so unlucky souls who make up the so-called bottom 90 percent” of our economy, smile?

These city streets getting colder, I hand over my SNAP card. I have learned to live without Netflix and calls from my landlord I disregard. I walk these streets when my Hyundai won’t turnover

And we haven’t even touched the more philosophical questions ‘happiness’ and ‘purpose’ engender…given the struggle…and I gotta’ say it – the struggle is REAL…how do I justify a quest for top of the triangle props when there are bills to pay and mouths to feed?

Who do I think I am? she asked

I am unemployed.

I am a writer writing.

#LiveampLearn #Poetry #Writing