Hunger Crisis

Being poor and having expensive dreams.

My brain has switched up on me and she’s relentless. All the self discovery and bettering myself has been halted. We now only have the time for existential crises, bed rotting, and binge watching Nurse Jackie on Netflix. I’m ignoring texts like it’s my second job and in a constant state of what the hell am I doing … ever?

I am 23 years old and even though everyone at my job is convinced that that’s way too young to function properly — my brain has decided that I’m a senior citizen that waited way too long to have passions and interests, and if I died I’d have nothing to show for it except 6,000 Twitter followers and comprehensive Sims lore.

Lately, I’ve been wondering if I have the ability to become a dreamer late in life. I can’t think of anything right now that I’m yearning for. I just kind of do things sometimes, do them well, wonder if I can turn it into a job, look up the salary, and the required college degrees and move on (because the answer is no).

I’ve been poor my whole life. My family has worried about homelessness often and recently, and I think money anxiety has infiltrated every aspect of my life. I am guilty about wanting money and I am guilty about not having it. I buy lotion and regret it.

Everything is connected to how much money I don’t have. And now that I feel lost about my purpose, wondering if there’s anything in my life that sets my soul on fire, I’m realizing that I’m not as passionate about the things I used to be anymore because they are only lucrative in the one in a million chance that I am

• good at it

• better at it than the millions of people who want it too

• bringing something brand new to the table
  
  — and there’s no security in that.

I used to fill notebooks and journals and loose leaf papers with short stories and novels and script ideas. I would pass them around my group of friends and wait by the phone for their feedback* (*compliments). I’ve always loved to write, I’ve always loved books and I’ve always loved movies.

But someday somehow, I got a bug in my ear that any career that I wanted to pursue in writing or film wasn’t going to ever be enough money, and then I never even allowed myself to dream about writing professionally ever again.

Since then, I’ve chased so many different fields, waiting for my purpose to hit me like a truck. Something that was going to feed my soul but also help me free my family from poverty. But nothing ever came. I never went to college. I would never survive a desk job, even though every day I wish I could ( #neurodivergent ). I don’t care about all the mechanics of being a social media influencer. The job I have now I’m good at and I can do it well enough, but it’s not everything to me.

When I was younger, I was in ballet. I went every Monday and Wednesday, and when we had a production coming up, we would stay at the studio for so many hours on Saturday that I would have to bring a packed lunch and a frozen dinner.

Ballet teachers are historically mean. They make comments on your body, your weight, they yell at you for not pointing your feet, they compare you to naturally gifted white girls in front of the whole class. But I loved it. I went back every single week with a smile on my face. I never complained about having to go to class after a long day of homeschool. I lived for it. But then we moved away, and ballet classes were way more expensive in Jersey, and I haven’t danced for over 10 years.

I don’t think I realized how much money we didn’t have until I had to quit all the things I loved doing. The only option I ever had was teaching myself, and I didn’t have the attention span or resources to commit to that (#neurodivergent ). I can’t exactly pinpoint when I started pocket watching my future self, stifling my dreams because the salary wasn’t large enough, but the second I felt like I was always going to be poor — I decided that I couldn’t afford to dream.

And even though writing was always free, I couldn’t see the point of it if I was never going to become a writer. I was always going to be writing for the hell of it, and that wasn’t impressive enough for me. I’ve always wanted to be impressive.

I started writing on Substack because I got sick of the little circle turning red on Twitter. I needed to be allowed to rant and rave about things that I was passionate about with no character limit. Then, I realized I missed writing in general, and it became a fun hobby again. But secretly, I’ve been waiting for that one article to hit big so I could justify the time I spend writing instead of doing something that could make me some money. Wanting to be good enough to get visibility consumed me to the point where nothing I put together was good enough, and I stopped writing at all.

Sometimes inspiration hits, and I can throw something together. But the analytics discourage me, because it reminds me that in order for me to do something that I really love professionally, I would have to hit big in order for it to be worth it. Or else what would be the point?

To feed my soul? Pssssh. What about feeding me?

I want to let myself believe that my joy is more important than money — but then I get reminded of a bill that we’re behind on and it all comes crashing down.

I listen to people like Issa Rae, Quinta Brunson, and Shonda Rhimes talk, and they were hungry for it. They were willing to get to it by any means necessary. Sometimes I close my eyes and I can see myself getting to it too, and even working with them, but I wonder if I deserve to succeed if I haven’t always been that way. I wasn’t born determined. I wonder if I’ve destroyed the parts of me who even could’ve been capable of that kind of hunger.

Through all the doubt, now that I have uncovered the desires I hid from myself, it’s all I can think about. What can I do to get back to that 8 year old girl who wrote terribly constructed shitty novels about things she never experienced? How can I be the girl who wasn’t shaking at her core at the idea that her writing wasn’t good enough? When can I be the girl who saw herself in a director’s chair clearly? What time can I start over?

Is that the hunger I’ve been looking for? Or am I going to continue bed rotting, ignoring everyone and watching Nurse Jackie wishing I wrote it or that I could write something like it?

Which is scarier to me — becoming something or never becoming anything?

A decision has to be made.

P.S. Y’all need to watch Nurse Jackie.