When you’re self-employed and your livelihood depends on your ability to self-motivate, sometimes free time arrives and you think: What the hell am I doing? Or at least, that’s where I’ve found myself recently. I shouldn’t be writing in the second person when I have no idea what you’re dealing with—my apologies. Maybe you never ask yourself that. If so, I’m jealous.

I started this year by writing about ambition. In the intervening months, and especially since On Eating came out, I’ve been wondering how sustainable my career actually is and then remembering that nothing is stable anymore. They’re writing about the weirdness of being a full-ass grown-up in this deranged marketplace at The Cut and The Purse, so it’s certainly not just me. Most writers I know are struggling with being ghosted by editors, even those they’ve worked with in the past, and this has been ongoing and getting worse for a couple of years.

It had even become a meme on social media to say, “The economy is so bad I might as well pursue my dreams.” Well, I’d already been doing that. I’ve lived these last nearly 20 years since I graduated college with the goal in mind of being exactly who I now am, more or less. In this, there is beauty and terror: trapped in an unstable dream job of my own making. Hoisted by my own petard!

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My first print byline was in Paste in December 2009, which was the same month that I started as a full-time copy editor at New York. I’d just turned 24, and it was a time when it all felt like it was coming together. (“It” being “my life.”) And then there was a day in 2011 that I think about often, when New Directions sent the Roberto Bolaño nonfiction collection Between Parentheses to my house just because, at the time, I was writing about books. For me, this was like when influencers today get sent their first box of PR: a big occasion. I ripped it open at the mailbox and jumped in the air when I saw it. I’ve made it, it felt like. 

I didn’t know that in the intervening 15-plus years, I’d have these feelings about a million more seemingly tiny moments: it’s all coming together; I’ve made it— over and over. Same as it ever was. I’d learn eventually that this is just how life is if you have any luck (and grit) at all, and I better find some satisfaction in the day to day. Thankfully, I have, because I have a job that is mostly edged “forward” by surprise emails: want to contribute? need a literary agent? the book is being translated. this essay is being anthologized. want to teach a class?

I have no control over these things. If writing and reading weren’t the things that matter to me most, how would I survive it? Upon neither of my book publications have I had the thought, I’ve made it. I’ve simply had the thought, I did it. And then I immediately have had the unhealthy but necessary thought, What do I do next?