Writing=Happiness?

I used to enjoy my day job, to a degree. Meaning I was satisfied with it. Somewhere during the past couple of years, that changed.

It took me a while to put my finger on it. It was a little over 2 years ago I was promoted to a Manager-level position as an editor. I was bright-eyed and enthusiastic, ready to throw myself into the position and learn everything I possibly could to be a great manager.

This winter, I resigned. I just didn't care anymore. I was tired of looking for errors in other people's writing, tired of always seeing the negative. I wanted to create. So they convinced me to stay by offering me a copywriting position. Perfect! I thought. I already write creatively, so now I can get paid to do it 45 hours/week.

Yeah, not so much. There was still something missing. And then I figured it out. This decline in job satisfaction began right around the same time I started to seriously pursue my creative writing and publication. If you were plotting my happiness on a graph, you would see 2 inverse lines veering away from each other: as my progress with my creative writing grows, my satisfaction with my current career plummets.

Yesterday I had one of those awful moments of self-doubt when I was talking to a friend who was going back to school to change careers. Do something she actually wanted to do. And then I was seized by a moment of panic. There isn't anything I actually want to do, except write novels. And be paid for them. Paid well. I don't have another back-up plan. My current job IS my back-up plan, and every day I grow more and more unhappy with it. And it's writing's fault. Because it makes me so happy that it makes every other option seem miserable in comparison.

So that leaves just one solution. I have to become published. It can't just be a dream or a goal anymore. It is a future reality that I just have to find a way to make happen.

I remember a while back I read about the drummer of Blink 182 saying he covered himself in tattoos b/c he wanted to make it impossible to get a normal job. That way he was ensuring that he had to find a way to be successful with his music.

I think he was onto something...