Wednesday, January 2, 2008 | by nathan

Daddy Went To The Bad Place For Awhile, But He’s Back Now

I’ve spent this entire two weeks off work really, really dreading going back to work. An abnormal amount of my break has gone by with me feeling alternately sad, panicked, and generally depressed, and not entirely sure why. Then, the other night on the way to New Year’s Eve dinner, I started spilling all my guts out to Brian in the car.

The deal is, my job is pretty awesome financially. I make more money than I’ve ever made anywhere, and than most people with my credentials and experience can hope to make. The problem is that I’m not happy with my job because my job? Not so much what I want to do with my life.

I want to write books for a living. That’s what I want to do, and nothing else. A great deal of my time off has been spent at home, writing in the morning, then doing stuff around the house for awhile, then getting back to writing again. It was perfect. The house was clean, the laundry done, the dog paid attention to, and I finally feel like I’m back in the groove with this novel I’m trying to write. And as soon as I’d start to enjoy it too much, BOOM! Down came this dark cloud of fear and loathing; fear that once work started back up that I’d lose my streak, and loathing for a job that pays too well to quit and yet leaves me feeling vaguely spiritually bereft.

The real wrench in the gear is that if I stay at this job I can be financially solvent for the first time in YEARS very, very soon, and I want that. But also, I want to be happy in what I’m doing. At the moment I feel stuck, which is making me resent my job even more. If I could afford it, I’d get a part-time job at a coffee shop to pay my bills and quit the one I have now. Then I could write a lot and work enough so that I’d be forced to change out of my pajama pants every once in awhile.

But I’m not there yet. The biggest item on this year’s Uberlist is to make more money off writing than any year previous, and I believe I can do it, but there’s still this dread at the back of my mind about going back to work.

I’ve spent a big part of today thinking and praying about this, and now I’m at a place where I feel pretty okay about going back to work tomorrow, but not completely. I’ve decided to redeem this sense of disappointment in my current career by turning it into motivation to get my writing done every night. Last night this spurred me to finish over 1,000 words of this book; it’s working for tonight so far as well, though it’ll have to wait until at least the 3rd quarter of the Fiesta Bowl.

I mean - priorities.