worked stiff

a personal essay from an unemployed person

First, I would like you to consider my story here may not be true, then believe it anyway.

For as long as I have been back on the Internet in the form of a Substack persona donning the mustachioed cowl of Clancy Steadwell, I’ve been of the mindset we should cast doubt on the veracity of what’s presented to us on the Internet. Too often we take what see see on screens to be representative of an approximate and nearby truth, only to resort to pessimism once it’s proven otherwise. Rather, imbibe this post as I would recommend you do all Internet content—with a healthy cynicism, to enjoy for enjoyment’s sake, and presenting only an optimistic curiosity in the case it’s proven unverifiable.

Posting about the travails and markers of my ‘real’ life is not something I do lightly, and when I do it, I do it lightly via a stray Note. As I’ve said many times, I prefer to present who I am through fiction, an inexact portrait of my station in life via the margins of my stories.

What happened is, in the grand scheme of things, one of the lighter life events (at least, in comparison to health and morbidity), more of a fork in the road than anything else:

I lost my job.

Neither of my parents went to college, and when I was born my mom worked part time as a baker at a grocery store and my dad was the assistant meat manager at the same grocery store. You could say this makes me ‘working class’, but I hate the ephemeral nature of this tag. I’ve described my dad as ‘white collar’—which perhaps he eventually was after he got promoted many times—but he still had to work nights and weekends, which I suppose by definition is not white collar. We didn’t golf. I never flew in an airplane. We didn’t ski. I was brought into the meat cooler the day I was born.

My parents’ work dominated my life, creating a spiritual gravity I’ve always struggled to escape. Because they both worked at the same place and because they had little else to talk about, their jobs were frequent dinner conversation: the dramas of the day at the store, who was a good worker, who was lazy, who called out, the politics involved. We moved several times to accommodate my father’s promotions. When we got a new home, it was invariably chosen for its proximity to the store they’d be working in. Work was modeled to me as the all-consumer, the identity. We were a grocery family. It was what we did.

My first day of work was on my fifteenth birthday and my first ever panic attack was shortly afterward on the floor of a grocery store break room. Perhaps this is why I am so nostalgic for youth. High school classes and college seemed like a fun joke when the alternative was going in to change the register tills in the morning or melting the seafood ice blocks before close. I couldn’t believe my friends were stressed out by grades and classes. Didn’t they know school was the fun and easy part? And it only lasted a short while! Work lasts the rest of your life! Meanwhile I was at the store on Saturday nights while they were hanging out getting drunk and high.

I ended up deducing the creative act was the only escape from the drudgery of work, and the only truly happy way to live was to parlay such creativity into a job. There’s a lot of discourse on ‘why’ a writer writes, and I write for all those same cliched reasons: because I have to, because it stirs my soul, etc.

But mainly I write because I want it to be my job.

As I’ve posted about many times on Substack, like everyone else here, in my youth I was a precocious reader and writer, and aspired to being an author very early on. The only reason I didn’t go to school for Creative Writing was a heavy sense of shame in taking out a huge loan on such a speculative venture, perhaps a compulsion of my working-class-ness. I went to a state school instead, where I smoked weed before my Music In Film class and was in a uniquely awful rock band.

I received encouragement from a high school teacher (didn’t we all!) and then a creative writing professor in college who took an interest in me even when I didn’t take their class anymore. I posted some stories online and my friends didn’t seem totally embarrassed by them. Mostly, though, I was young, and dumb enough to believe in myself.

Even though after school I kept right on going at the grocery store, all the while I pursued the impossible dream, a tether to sanity, a light at the top of the hole. I’d come home after my 4 a.m. shift and read contemporary fiction in an attempt to understand and break down what was being published and how to write it. From 2014-2018, I must have read over a hundred modern books from the new releases section of my local library. How few have stuck in my brain since then probably says a lot about the quality of literature in that time. I was also somewhat successful on Twitter, hoping to parlay that attention into something. I tried writing blogs that all landed in the void.

And I submitted. Oh, I submitted. And queried. A lot.

Nothing ever materialized.

Why? Well, my writing was ass, that was probably why. Also, after being on Substack and seeing the enormous amount of advice on submitting and querying so readily available, I didn’t even come close to doing what you need to do to be successful, even if you are a decent writer.

So I gave up. I started reading non-fiction and stopped writing. I worked my ass off at two jobs and went back to school at the same time, often leaving my apartment at 4 a.m. and not returning until 11 p.m., then doing it again, six days a week. It all paid off with a lucrative job in tech. And for a while, it felt good. Other men treated me differently. I could see on their faces when I told them what I did for a living: ‘you must be rich—and smart!’ I finally found a woman who didn’t hate me.

I had conquered work. It was good, for a while.

Until it wasn’t. When you let something define you, it has a way of becoming all consuming, and your definition of self becomes so narrow and so precarious, the threat of it toppling becomes an unshakeable and constant anxiety. I knew I had to return to writing in some capacity or else go insane and lose all I had gained. I needed to define myself, once again—at least partly—by being a writer. I needed something to put myself into, to apply myself towards that wasn’t strictly a job; a hobby, sure, but I had many of those. I needed something tangible, something with outcomes, however slim and meaningless, something out in the world, invested in by others.

Thus Persona Non Propria, which has become far more successful than I could ever imagine. For a while, this established a safe balance of self—if I lost my job, I’d at least have my Substack!

Then my wife was pregnant.

I won’t get poetic here about how becoming a parent changes someone, but safe to say both work and Substack suddenly felt very far away and very unimportant. At the same time, the A.I. boom meant the industry had become more volatile than ever, demanding more of me as I had less to give. The anxiety that drove me to the mountaintop was gone, with another mountain yet unclimbed. But it was too late—finally, I had relinquished the grasp work had on me, and once I did, it set me free.

Now, I am forced to confront: who am I when my work is gone?

Unlike many Americans, I am not a couple missed paychecks away from living in a van. Nor am I able to immediately become a stay-at-home-dad. I haven’t always been the primary breadwinner in my relationship, and we could reverse our roles once again, but it’s not so simple. I can get New York State unemployment insurance for six months, but once that’s gone, our savings will only carry us a few months. This optimism is only possible because we live a lifestyle well below our previous means—I drive a 2016 Chevy Trax with half the paint peeled off—and are careful with our money.

Maybe, in the end, this won’t be a big deal. I could find another job in tech; a bit of luck I created for myself a couple years ago has materialized in an interview already.

Or is this the start of a long descent into alcoholism/stonerism, resentment from my wife turning into divorce, writing politic clickbait to score subscribers? A lonely man in a motel who sees his kid once a week?

I don’t know. I don’t expect my Substack to become my job, but it could become my work.

Or perhaps it already is.

if there’s ever been a time to subscribe, it’s now.