What Would Daisy Do
I want to be happy. And I am more often than I'm not these days, something that would have been unfathomable to me just a couple of years ago. I want to live a life I feel good about, a life I don't constantly want to escape from. I want to be someone who does things, takes leaps, makes moves, etc. Someone who doesn't spend every second immersed in fiction because at least there I can pretend I'm the person I wish I was.
I'm getting closer and closer to that life and that version of myself every day. I think often about the person who said to me on Mastodon once, when I was agonizing about changing my name, that they changed theirs to make them feel more like the main character of their own story. That's the ultimate goal. Feeling like the main character of my story is an experience I'm not familiar with because for so long I was content to sit back and allow my life to happen to me. Or, maybe not content, but too tired and too traumatized and too unwell to do anything else. I was always seeking the path of least resistance to offset an existence that felt like wading through quicksand, uphill, during a storm, after running a marathon, on the verge of death.
What I'm trying to say is that now that I don't feel like I'm always one step from giving up on everything, I have more space to examine the path I'm on and where I want it to lead me, and one of the ways I'm doing that is by asking myself a very corny question. That question is, what would Daisy do? Which is another way of asking, what would the best version of me do? What do I deserve? What will get me closer to my ideal life? How can I help myself to feel like the main character of my story? What does hoping machine require in order to keep running?
The answer to that last one is money, unfortunately. There's never enough of it, and whether I like it or not (I don't), capitalism demands more and more of it to feed the beast and keep the beast from devouring me. The obvious solution to the problem is to get a normal job, a job with a steady paycheck and regular hours and interaction with people I may or may not like, a job that requires waking up at unholy hours of the morning and sacrificing the majority of my time to something I don't actually care about. And look, I know that's life. That's what people do, whether because they have no other choice or because they believe they have no other choice. That's the world we live in.
But, in addition to having a disability and living in a place that isn't overflowing with opportunities for disabled people to get hired, I also have a slightly broken brain. I don't say this to be self-deprecating, merely to state a fact. I'm so, so much healthier now than I ever could have dreamed of being, thanks to my therapist and medication and my own determination, such as it is, but I'm still me, and that means not being in a place where traditional employment feels possible. Not yet, maybe not ever. I don't know. I've spent many years feeling excessive amounts of shame about this and I'm tired.
So, what would Daisy do? I think she would take this newsletter project a step further, from the beginning of the year when I decided to invest in my own work and ask people to pay what I believed it was worth to now, when I'm taking the deepest breath, throwing my shoulders back and holding my head high, and saying maybe it's worth a little more than I initially thought. Maybe it's not unreasonable or greedy for me to ask people to pay double for it. It takes energy and motivation and vulnerability to write one of these every single week, and sometimes I don't feel like I have it in me, and part of that is, as I've said before, the gnawing anxiety of needing more money. I've come to a point where I feel like I either have to find a way to make this more profitable or I have to redirect my effort to something that is.
I know we're almost all struggling to some degree. There's too much need and not enough to meet it. I don't begrudge anyone who isn't able or simply doesn't want to pay more than they already are. If $10 a month doesn't feel doable for you for whatever reason, that's absolutely fine. I'm unbelievably grateful for everything I've already been given. But if you do want to continue to pay and you have the $10 a month, I would love it if you would go here and resubscribe. I'm sorry there isn't a less clunky and inconvenient method, but this was the best way I could think of to do it without automatically charging everyone and making them cancel if they didn't want to pay anymore. My initial goal was to provide a pay what you want option, but I wasn't able to do that and make it a recurring monthly payment, so instead I've canceled everyone's $5 a month payments and you can either create a new one or remain subscribed only to the free monthly version.
If you choose the latter option but you still want to throw something my way, you can do that on Ko-fi. It's a one-off payment of $3 or more and even that little bit helps. Thank you, truly, for every single dollar. And thank you for subscribing at all, for wanting to read my words at all, even if it's once a month for free. I'm never not amazed that so many people care what I have to say, as personal and specific to me as it often is. I love writing and it's the only thing I feel like I'm actually good at, and to have other people think so too, to a degree that they would have my words sent directly to their inboxes week in and week out, is the dream. Even if this doesn't end up being financially viable for me on a long term basis, I'm still going to keep writing and trying to connect in the ways I know how, and I'm very proud of the things I've written here so far.
I am, as I've mentioned before, bad at follow-through. My digital history is a graveyard of projects I've begun and abandoned, because generating ideas is much easier for me than sticking with them. But I've done this newsletter every week for eight months, and that's tremendous and it's been so fun and fulfilling. If I could find a wealthy patron of the arts who wanted to finance my writing so I could focus on it and also live in the style to which I would like to become accustomed, that would solve all my problems. If you know one, send them my way. In the meantime, we'll try this for a while. $10 a month for four posts, one free and three paid. It sounds like a lot to me, but I'm not good at accurately judging the value of my own work, so you decide.
I promise we're almost done with these housekeeping posts. Working out the kinks is taking some time, but my hope is that once it's done, I'll be able to go back to focusing on the fun things. Playlists and recommendations and feelings and poetry and everything else that makes life worth living. I just have to make sure that I can afford to live it.