Writing, Editing, Living: Your Irreplaceable Journey
Ruins of Convent of San Anton en route to Castrojeriz, Spain
When I packed my corporate existence into a storage unit and strapped on the backpack of freelance editing and copywriting, my desire was (and remains) to apply my ever-accumulating technical skills and life experience to things that really matter to me.
Foremost in my mind were two ambitions:
Empower people to resonate deeply and clearly when they communicate.
Encourage deeper insights into the self, to help people to more richly encounter themselves along with readers.
My third, unofficial goal, was to stop sacrificing my mind, body, passion, talents, and time on the altar of other people’s interests (especially megacorporate interests).
All of these ambitions, and every idea I’ve had concerning what editing services to offer and what sorts of clients to work with, are underwritten by three simple convictions:
Everyone’s life is uniquely precious
Sharing our unique stories is vital to personal and collective flourishing
Truly communicating is hard, but immensely rewarding when we do the work to do it well
Ironically, the biggest struggle I encounter as a freelancer is to keep believing in the convictions with which I hope to empower others.
As Radiohead might say, my ambitions are a nice dream. When I took my first steps into the wilderness of self-employment, I imagined, but didn’t properly grasp, how tough it would be to forge my path. I particularly failed to take into account the fact, regardless of how often “dreams” are trumpeted in lip service, that when the rubber soles hit the road, both the outer world and my inner one respond with crossed arms and an aggressive “why don’t you turn around and march on back to where you came from.”
Again, I should have expected this. For instance, Dan and Chip Heath wrote Switch to address how to overcome resistance when effecting change. Much self-improvement literature acknowledges profound inner obstacles to change. But most relevant to my own experience is a psychological study I read about many years ago, which observed that monumental stress comes with trying to alter one’s station in life. That study looked at class mobility, and the researchers observed so much stress that they questioned whether trying to change was a net benefit or a net loss.
So did I think it would be as simple as buying the proverbial pushcart and nailing to it the proverbial shingle, Ultreya Editorial: traveling editor for hire? No…I know what hard work is, and I’ve experienced plenty of setbacks and disappointments in life. I knew this wouldn’t be easy. But in a way, somehow, I was also sure it would be.
When I decided to start freelancing, I was seduced by the belief that this time would be different. I was really passionate about my project. I was determined. I was focused. My cause was so obviously meaningful. Above all, I had done a lot of inside work to gain a better grasp on how I self-sabotage, and I had years of practice communicating more compassionately and productively. I was sure that now, neither the universe nor my own dysfunction would waylay me. Getting to my destination was merely a matter of time.
The reality of the 10,000 foot version of the path I have been traversing comes down to this: as I navigate this difficult terrain, and as I greet other travelers at different stages in their own journeys, I am floored at times by how much inside work remains for me to do. I still have a long way to go when it comes to standing confidently in my abilities; asserting my convictions; building resilience in the face of adversity; not reacting with despair or bitterness in the face of indifference; asking for the help I need and accepting the encouragement I receive; choosing hope and inspiration instead of fear and doubt.
But awareness of the growth that still lies ahead of me is not all that my pilgrimage has taught me. In the past it would have been very easy for me to look at all of this and conclude, “I have so many problems and deficiencies; therefore, I’m not ready to be of any use to anyone else yet. I face all these challenges; therefore, it was absurd of me to think I could accomplish or contribute anything. I am not good enough to do what I hope to do or give what I hope to give. Therefore, I must go back to the drawing board…and stay there forever.” I would by lying if I said I don’t struggle with such doubts today, but I am thankful that they no longer have the final word.
Instead, I am beginning to understand that my journey to become an empowering fellow traveler for writers and professionals on their journeys of writing and connection has a lot to do with my coming to believe that I matter and I have something worth saying, contributing, experiencing. And embracing the idea that no one but me can be me; do what I do; provide what I provide.
I learned some bad lessons growing up.
A lot of people warned me—sometimes through words, sometimes through actions, and often through force of example—that it was dangerous, dumb, and presumptuous of me to step boldly into my own life. I was taught that the world is terrible; that hell is other people; that I can’t trust anyone, that God and anyone in power can barely stand me (and there are a million ways to compromise their fragile forbearance), and worst of all, I have been taught over and over that I can’t trust myself. I learned these lessons at home, at school, at church, at work, in friendships and romance. I’ve heard that I am cursed; that I am a non-quantity; that I am not needed, not wanted, not enough. I have experienced the repercussions and unbearable shame of falling short—and perhaps worse, endless self-recrimination as I try to perceive what I could have done differently—over and over.
It hasn’t always been personal or malicious. It hasn’t even been consistent, so to speak, for some of the same sorts of people and situations which harmed me have also done great good for me (like my family, some faith communities, enduring friends, and a few amazing professional peers and supervisors). Lately I’ve come to appreciate just how much of the pain we create is a side-effect of our shared shambling condition, as we each seek in our own imperfect way to survive and thrive through and beyond the circumstances of our lives. But accidental or not, wounds are wounds; scars are scars.
Still, I have arrived pretty confidently at the conclusion that the quiet, judging glare of the guardian at my internal gate is more effective and relentless in crushing my spirit than any misaimed arrow another person could fire at me. With a mere look of disapproval or doubt, this part of me can nail my feet to the floor.
This realization injects fresh conviction into the wild adventure I’ve embarked on to create a small business, because every day I confront my own audacity and doubt and I must make a choice. Will I continue to pursue an objective that did not arise from any outside command, but rather from my God-given passion, personality, and verve? Will I keep walking down a road that is not paved and lit by corporate command (or well-trampled by millions of other societal footprints)? Will I continue to earnestly and constructively grapple with how compromised I am by parts of myself, in order to become a better navigator of my own life? Or will I surrender and retreat to sit passively in an existential suburb, while I shrivel back down into a wishless, hopeless, anonymous creature simply marking time?
Something I take odd delight in these days is how my new awareness of my choices, and even the profound discomfort and distress I experience at times wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do next, only galvanize my determination to see my journey through to its end.
It proves to me that I am coming more fully into myself. It is also nice to think of how my struggles, to the extent that I approach them constructively, will have the added benefit of empowering me to more richly empower my clients; especially the ones not certain from the start that they will succeed. I will be a better partner for them because I will know thoroughly what it is like to be detoured into helpless spaces and how to navigate my way out of them and back onto my path.
Very little has come easily to me, and I choose these days to receive this as a form of strength.
Let me qualify that. Some things come easily to me—like editing, for instance, thanks in part to my freakish eye for detail, or math (I still feel a bit bad for my AP Calculus teacher that I chose English as my major all those years ago), or fleshing out and executing a project for which someone else provided the basic parameters. But when I am drawing up my own plans, my mind and body are often steered off course by an exhausting array of confusions and distractions. I routinely struggle not to interpret negative experiences and interpersonal interactions as full of direct implications about who I am. And with some regularity I find it hard to discern what is my next step on this road. Some of my most acute distress these days arrives when I run into roadblocks while writing. What does this mean for who I hope to be and the help I aspire to provide? I ask myself. How can I help other writers when I struggle so much with my own?
Just as an example, I have been writing this essay for a month, in between rage quits and internal creative strikes. I am now on the tenth draft and still have doubts about whether it says what it needs to say, omits what it needs to omit, and above all whether any of it carries value for a single other person on earth.
I started with an idea that I was sure would be a matter of a couple of hours to knock out and post, but over and over I couldn’t discern where it was going…and where I needed to go inside of it. What in me was trying to get somewhere, where did that thing need to travel, and what parts of the journey might matter to readers?
It feels important to mention that in earlier iterations, I was going to focus on my professional setbacks as a freelancer and the perceived indifference (hostility? exploitative opportunism?) of the publishing establishment toward those in my position. In short, I was going to vent my spleen about the outside things making this sojourn difficult for me.
I was going to mention the earnest letters of inquiry I labored over, personalized, and sent to publishers, and how only one of these publishers ever acknowledged me (I thank that publisher from the bottom of my heart). I wanted to express how rejected and ashamed I have felt as I stare at an ever-growing brick wall of silence, and the doubt that has taken over more and more territory as I question the sanity of my course.
I tried to explore in earlier versions of this essay how I believe our society and economy are poisoned by a philosophy of opportunity hoarding and strategic negligence, both of which are justified by the clichéd claim that there’s never enough time and resources to just be humane to people. As an example, I wanted to share the insulting experience I had of visiting a publisher’s webpage which eagerly solicited freelancers, responding to that invitation, and then receiving an autoreply which chastised me with the news that the pub had a closed pool and did not need or want to hear from anyone else (for the record, that happened months ago, I reported the discrepancy, and that webpage is still up).
In these drafts, I was not only searching for a way to make sense of my experiences, I was also trying to overcome the profound pressure I feel to never admit the problems I run into or the weakness I feel. I was trying to build up my courage to voice my frustration with myself and the world. I was looking for a way to do all of this that would not also make me look incompetent or whiny or generally undesirable, professionally and interpersonally.
I tried my best to sketch a map onto which my difficulties could be pinned. I wanted to make broader, objective sense of why in society and commerce people so often seem to treat one another with such eager disregard, as if we are just as forgettable and interchangeable as the manufactured scarcity in so many parts of life urges us to think that we are. I also wanted to show (myself as much as anyone else) that this was not entirely in my head.
One idea was key to every iteration of what I was writing. As I sketched, all these experiences and observations kept finding their homes in a psychogeographical kingdom of scarcity. Under the rules of this land, I mused, opportunity is weaponized. Most excuses we give for not extending chances to one another are fueled by the assumption that there is not enough to go around. Scarcity dictates that every opportunity is just another form of property. Only one person or entity can own a given piece of such property, and whoever does possess it gains sovereign jurisdiction not only over how to dispense it but also over how difficult (even demeaning) they may make the process of earning that chance.
Among my less successful efforts, which I will nevertheless record here, was an attempt to articulate a sort of economic fall of the Roman Empire, in which I tried to compare our modern business landscape to the multitude of nation-states who gobbled up the dust left in the vacuum that was Rome. I’m not quite sure how I thought this would fit onto current circumstances, since we are living through a long period of ascendancy for imperial power in business and politics. Perhaps we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift, but for now I simply get the sense that a lot of contemporary startups and so-called disruptors do not aspire to make anything truly new; rather, they seem determined to scavenge what they can from the perimeters of power and set themselves up to be the inheritors of the prior system, once that fails. The sorts of things swept up in these opportunistic raids are scarcity and stinginess.
What you’re reading now demonstrates that many of my older ideas petered out. Throughout the month of April my frustration kept mounting, until I finally realized that what I needed to write about was not how hard the world around me is (whether or not I have diagnosed its challenges correctly). Instead, the invitation before me was to explore whether I trust myself, given the internal conditions I mentioned before, and also whether I trust the journey that I’m on, even if I’m not sure what sort of progress I’m making.
Are my inner state and whatever process it is undergoing workable conditions? Are they valuable conditions, somehow? Time will tell, but my challenge is to stick with myself in the world and keep putting one foot in front of the other, trusting that the very aspects of me which right now seem to impede my progress are in fact destined to be parts of my strength as a human, friend, partner, and professional on my unique life journey.
To recap, I find that it’s about the world inside me, and how the geography of that landscape informs how I respond to the outer one.
All of this brings to mind a different comparison: life in Europe in the 14th century. For the historically inclined, there is an interesting book about this period by Barbara W. Tuchman, called A Distant Mirror.
What I remember most vividly about that book is all the opportunity and growth Tuchman describes as having risen from the 14th century’s ashes. I wonder how many people at the time had the hope and tenacity to peer through the clouds for a glimpse of what might be good about the 1300s. I’m sure it was hard. Today, it’s stunning to think how much transformation—social mobility, for one—occurred as a direct result of all that historic adversity.
What it comes down to for me is, will I make an excuse for myself out of the perceived stinginess of the world, and therefore live by and for scarcity, grabbing for whatever I can possess and control and scuttling away to my hole to defend it, or will I choose the risky, transgressive, and life-giving path of staying out in the open and striding with imperfection and vulnerability into abundance?
I’ve heard it said that we find what we are looking for. There’s power in how we receive and respond to life.
Today, therefore, I choose to search for community, generosity, curiosity, and hope. I choose to receive my difficulties as a freelance editor (and otherwise) as opportunities and not impediments. I choose to believe that abundance is a choice I can make, not an opportunity that must be given to me by any of the self-styled power brokers of our world.
This partly explains why I spent so much of this essay describing all of the nominal “failures” I encountered on the way to what you see today in print. I am trying to demonstrate for all our sakes how much writing and editing is about experimentation, faith, and persistence, and how important it is to keep seeking, asking, and telling, even when there are so many scarcity-mongers telling us “stop doing that.”
I know there are others on this road who also embrace abundance. Hell, quite a few of them are my fellow freelance editors. Roaming the countryside with them has already been an abundantly enriching experience. It is amazing to see how generous people are out here.
And there are all of the writers who earnestly seek to tell stories and connect, who will need companionship, technical counsel, and emotional encouragement while they make their own way through the wilds of self-expression, and whom I am eager to encounter.
And there are the many good-hearted publishers whom I know I will run into. Just like the one I’ve already partnered with, I look forward to working with others who are carrying out their own missions to empower new and diverse storytellers.
If I were ever to quit this pilgrim’s progress, I know where I would wind up. But if I keep going, I can’t even imagine where the road will take me. What a wonderful gift for a reforming pessimist: not to have any idea what might happen next.
Your presence matters. Your participation matters. Your story matters. Take A step into abundance. I promise I will, too. I hope one day we meet and walk together for a spell.
Ultreia et suseia, querido peregrino – Onward and upward, dear pilgrim.