When you are accustomed to seeing who you are as a problem, it can be pretty challenging to make choices that make you happy. Happiness seems suspect, as though corrupted.
We call this emotion shame.
Consequently, if you do what you are called to do, you do it without joy, or mostly so, except for those occasional times when the voices stop and you dissolve into the work itself. On those days the words come like surfing the terrain on a powder day, where it's less like you are going down the mountain than that the mountain is coming up to meet you, and you are at the center of everything.
Those times are beautiful, but they tend to slip through our fingers like the finest sand, because somewhere we learned that we have to suffer to make art. We are called to make art, so goddamn it we are going to make art. And so we suffer.
There comes a time, though, when struggle just gets boring.
So we decide, Fuck it, I'm just going to be happy. I'm going to make the choices I need to make to make me happy. And if my life blows up: okay. Okay. I'm willing. I've been through worse. I have been to the darkest places.
I carry a refuge within me: I can always escape into the present. I will dive as deeply as necessary into it. I will slow down time to feel each exquisite moment of anguish if necessary, to examine what feels like flatline and discover that slow vibrations, barely perceptible, remain. Look close enough and you discover that the oscillations always continue. What that says to us: This too shall pass, just like this moment, and this one, and this one.
And now after years of practice, I know that I have another refuge available: I have the work itself. No one can take that away from me. Even in the darkest days, even when all went wrong, the work was always there. And when I came back to it from off the bottom and learned to show up despite that I couldn't allow it to make me happy-- because happiness is suspect, remember--well, seriously, there's no way I'm going to stop doing it now. This is who I am. I did it: there's no question anymore. I need no external validation.
That said, I do this daily dance with words as a means to connect with people.
And earning a nice, regular paycheck from this work would feel really good.