Dear Friend III
I’m going to just riff a bit on one line from your letter that stood out to me, “Why do those two things seem to be in opposition?”
I’m going to challenge your assumption that they are in opposition.
All work is real work. I had to get real about that a long time ago. Being a stay-at-home mom forces you to confront that reality. There are ways to contribute beyond financial ones. It’s important not to listen to the programming that was stuffed into our heads that mandates the importance of things based on a perceived value – i.e. “women’s work is not valuable” or “writing is not valuable.” For me the concept that there are “real jobs” out there represents just another long arm of the patriarchy. It’s patriarchal because it creates hierarchies. And unnecessary ones at that.
Whether one’s work is real or not depends on the attention and importance one brings to that job. Who here has worked with software engineers who got paid six figures to basically fart around all day (“Oooo! Oooo! Pick me! Pick me!”)? On the other end of the spectrum, how many times have you sat in a busy coffee shop and watched the waitresses and busboys works their friggin asses off, never stopping once? Your job is real if you decide it’s real. At literally every place I’ve worked, I’ve had side by side comparisons of people who do the exact same job where you could tell who had the ethical backbone to make it a real job and who was just fucking around. At all levels of pay I have seen this. Many people take a so-called “real” job and put no effort into it at all. They basically steal money from the company. So, the concept is utterly a false one.
The idea that there are “real” jobs comes from one of two places: Patriarchy or parents.
Patriarchy operates solely off the structure that there are those who are in power and those who are not. It functions as an oppressive system. By making sure there are only certain, randomly selected real jobs – which bring with them real money – the patriarchy reinforces its own power structure. Only a select few will have power and the “real” jobs and the rest can be oppressed with our food service or pink collar jobs. The money comes with power and stuff which in turn feeds the greed. The powerful then have a false (or sometimes not so false) sense of having a better than average rate of survival. They are patriarchy winners, and the rest of us are oppressed losers.
Our parents reinforce this idea because survival is the very thing that’s at stake for one’s children. No one can help buying into the patriarchy (we’re constantly marinating in it!) including parents. A parent knows what will give a child a better than average chance of survival, and that’s what they wish for their children. It feels like a risk to think otherwise. It’s just unfortunate that some parents push the “you need to go out there and not waste your education and get a real job” sentiment to the point where it just operates as another level of oppression in the patriarchy.
The reality is that humans are scrappy, adaptable and resourceful. We can survive on things other than what the patriarchy tells us we need to survive. What A LOT of people had to figure out the hard way during the economic downturn was that even the education from the “good” school and a resume full of “real” jobs was no guarantee. It takes more than a “real” job to do really, really well in this life. And for some of us, the “real” job actually risks our happiness and fulfillment.
At the end of the day, neither patriarchy or parenting takes into account who we are as individuals and what’s going to work for us in terms of how we are fulfilled and how we survive. Fulfillment turns out to be quite important to our survival because happier people do better than survive – THEY THRIVE!
Even in strict anthropological terms, surviving is good but thriving is better. Survival means you made it through today, but thrive means you stand a good chance of making it through tomorrow too.
Your current job may actually be unfulfilling, and that’s another matter. What feels stuck could come from a lack of fulfillment rather than the lack of realness. I think it would be important to check in with yourself about that. How do you feel at the end of a workshift? Do you feel like that was an utter waste of your precious time here on earth? Or was it kind of fun and interactive? All work is work. It all has things that suck and are boring. But what’s the overall feel?
You may also be framing the job of writing as not one of the “real” jobs. For sure challenge that. Anyone who’s had to put together a writing project of any length knows it’s nothing but blood, sweat and tears. It takes time. It takes angst. It takes sucking up having to make a major edit to something you felt really strongly about. It takes multiple revisions. It takes hussle.
Writing is not for wimps!
And you my dear are no wimp.
So, one of two things could be making you feel at odds:
1) The old tapes are playing in your head so loudly that only certain jobs are real that you cannot give yourself permission to make your writing important so it automatically falls way down on the hierarchy
2) Your current situation isn’t uncomfortable because you aren’t making enough money but because you’re not doing things you long to do
Best Regards,
Your Comrade In Patriarchy Subversion