money matters, and happy mother's day!
a short note on one thing that truly matters to me and another thing that had me all twisted up inside for a long time ...
It's 9:30 in the evening, way past when I shut down the laptop for the night, unless I'm binging something on Netflix, of course! 🙄
I was almost tempted to not post anything this week, but an unexpected thought had popped into my head last evening and I remember wanting to record it. So, here we are!
Firstly, happy Mother's Day to all those celebrating! As Dr. Shefali says, you don't need to have children to be a mother. The act of mothering is that of showering love and affection on the people around us. So I look at today as a day to celebrate this act of nurturing.
Motherhood has changed my life in ways I couldn't even have imagined. Little D has constantly inspired me to be a better version of myself. He's the reason I started writing long-form fiction in the first place.
Thank you, D, for coming into my life! ❤️
Coming back to that unexpected thought, I was telling KrA yesterday, "What if I just stopped trying to make money from my books?"
I don't know what put the idea in my head, but I do know how sick I've been feeling about this entire hustle culture that has sprung up around writing and the creative life in general.
Over the past few years I had completely bought into some kind of strange belief that unless my books were selling and making any money, there was no point writing. Which is such a sad approach, really. A very myopic, capitalist approach.
The instant I thought of decoupling creativity from finances, I felt a load lift off of my chest. I felt as if I could breathe a whole lot easier!
I'll write more on this later and I'm keeping this short as I'm ready to fall asleep right now, so I'll leave you with this thoroughly apt quote from Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic.
To yell at your creativity, saying "You must earn money for me!" is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you're talking about, and all you're doing is scaring it away, because you're making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic