ISO: security

I graduated college in 2020. It took too long for me to get that degree, but I got it. There were so many times that I was told to set aside my dreams of being a writer and focus on creating a base that would give me the security to do that whenever I wanted. And lord did I not give a fuck. I got a degree in something that I was interested in, with a hairpin dream of moving forward with it, and I worked all the part time jobs I could trying to see where I would be able to land when I graduated. 

Here’s what no one is really saying in the “college is a scam” discourse online: there are are so many of us that were told to simply get a degree and that jobs would magically appear wherever we wanted them to. Because for the most part companies did not care about what your degree was in, so long as you had one. I have a bachelor of arts from the university of arizona in religious studies and I am here to tell you that those business bitches only want other business bitches on their payroll. They don’t care that almost every time you wanted to drop out some well-meaning adult convinced you that having a four year degree was better than having nothing at all so you suffered, not knowing what you were going to do with all this information you were accruing. 

College is a scam – if you have no idea what you want. It’s a scam that we have literal children convinced that they have to have their life picked out the moment they are legally considered an adult. What people need are skill sets, and sometimes those are activated and honed in college. Sometimes they’re activated on a job you didn’t think you would like or doing something you’ve never done before and then you discover that you can hone your skill set in an academic setting that will give you the step up you need to prosper. 

Let people take time off after high school! Go to your friends’ shows! Create art! Or fuck around miserably for a few years! Who cares! Figure out which cigarettes you like drunk! Have some chaos! As a treat! 

It took me many years, one degree, fifteen different jobs, three major moves, and two well timed panic attacks to realize how I want to create security in my life. That I put my writing endeavors on hold in my twenties for a degree I didn’t know what to do with and still spent more time trying to keep unfulfilling, trash corporate jobs so that I could spend my days off wishing I could be more creative. 

So like quite a few lost, undiagnosed people I’m going into nursing. I’m currently in a holding pattern in my life so where I will be doing this is TBD, but I’m going to do it. I currently work as a nursing assistant in a hospital on a med surg floor, and it’s aggravating, backbreaking, emotional work. I come home drained every single shift. My coworkers and caffeine are fully the reasons I don’t lose my sanity on a daily basis. 

And I love it. I can’t picture myself having any other type of long term career outside of writing other than this. I know what my days will look like, I know mostly what the expectations are, and moreover I know how I can utilize my days off to write. 

One of my favorite writers on substack posted something the other day about finally committing to working towards making money off her writing and I felt so inspired. I quit a really taxing job about a year ago that was eating up my time and energy in a way that I fear only cults do. I wanted to write more, have more time to be creative in general and when I quit that job and started working at my hospital I remembered how work – life balance was supposed to be. 

I can hear all of you healthcare workers laughing at me – but those who have held down management jobs in food + retail know that you’re more on call as an assistant manager at a store than you are as a regular floor nurse. Healthcare follows you home, but it’s easier to create full separation between your work life and the part of you that lives outside of your job. Or, maybe that’s just what I’ve found in my (single, childless) life. 

There is so much insecurity in chasing your art as a money maker. So many ways things can go wrong, so much of the process is you actually creating. Which, frankly, I love but no one is going to pay me money to be clicking around JSTOR like a crackhead trying to figure out what kind of pens a cowboy would have used in 1869 to sign a document in the dakotas. 

If I could make liveable money purely off posting these little vibe checks and some short stories whenever I wanted I absolutely would. I think that people that make the jump from doing whatever it was they were doing to writing as full time as they can had some secure base they had created for themselves, whether that looks like some money saved from some well paying corporate job or what, but what I’ve discovered about myself is that I deeply have to give a fuck about my work outside of writing. If I don’t deeply give a fuck I will get bored and attempt to move on, which means I spend insane amounts of time finding a job and learning a job and NOT writing. 

Two of the people in my life who know me better than anyone else both said some version of “about fucking time” when I told them I was going to go to nursing school. I’ve been dancing around the idea for years and now that I’ve decided that’s the path I’m going down, at least one of them has also reminded me that there is no shame in chasing security in the name of creating the life that I want.

While I’m still in this holding pattern though, I’m dedicating more time to writing projects I want to work on. If the universe saves me from a nursing career then I am absolutely game, but I also have to keep reminding myself that there is no shame in also chasing some security for my future. 

So if you’re looking for a sign to move forward with the more boring, secure bits of your life so you can create whatever you want to on your days off, this is it. You can chase whatever you want, whether that’s being a starving artist your whole life or finding some security for yourself.