The internet is a harsh mistress. If you are to be successful earning a living here as a “content creator” you’re going to have to devote your entire life to this endeavor. It’s great to have work you enjoy, it’s no so great when that work becomes your entire life and that’s where I am at right now.
My golden project – my travel blog – has become increasingly something I realize that will never be financially successful. I had hopes in the beginning that if I got enough followers and had AdSense up that somehow it’d all come together for me but what I found is that in order for this to work I have to be on the clock near 24/7 in order to vomit up enough content to keep people interested and search engine algorithms continuing to favor my site. Usually I’d be more than happy to oblige as I love traveling, taking photos, and writing about it. I really do! My body on the other hand… not so much.
Over the past year my health has been in rapid decline. I know the house I am living in is probably causing the majority of my issues but without a stable income I am unable to escape it to live an independent life. The whole thing is super frustrating because I know time out of the house is good for my health but over the past year I have been unable to exert myself too much without having a bad crash afterwards. Basically for every day I spend out having fun I spend up to three days “down” in a haze of pain and fatigue which means I’m in the house more which means I continue to decline. The whole situation threw me into a fit of depression because I feel like the knight at the bottom of the glass hill forever charging forward only to slide back down to the bottom.
All this time I thought spending my energy on getting out of here was what I should be doing but in this manner I just lost more and more hope because it seemed like the more I did the less the positive return on it there was. So what am I to do? I still need to find way out of here. I still need an income. I still need to keep myself going.
And that’s when I just took a moment to sit aside, take a deep breathe and say fuck it. I’m just going to do something I enjoy doing for no reason other than I enjoy it. No more trying to make my hobbies profitable. It’s too damn exhausting. So I treated myself to a luxury I’d been thinking of for a few months. I bought myself a drawing tablet so that I could return to drawing comics like I did when I was a teenager and early twenty-something back in the days I was at my most despairing. The comics gave great relief to me then maybe they could do the same now…
I was excited the day the Wacom drawing tablet arrived. It didn’t really look like anything. I wondered how it worked and set about immediately figuring it out. I was relieved and overjoyed by how easy it was to use. I could not only draw like I was playing with a piece of paper but I could also do all sorts of fancy computer stuff too. I took to it like a duck to water and before I knew it there was Glen the hookah-smoking caterpillar as if he’d never been gone. I couldn’t stop smiling. My best friend in my teenage years used to accuse me almost daily of “trying to convince everyone you’re on drugs.” She was a cop’s daughter and didn’t understand nuance. Glen smoked a hookah because that was the joke. He’s the great grand son of the Alice in Wonderland caterpillar. I was a good kid. I didn’t get into any trouble – except for having a warped sense of humor.
It didn’t take long before I shared Glen with a few choice individuals. They were so happy to see I was drawing him again I was once again told he should have a website. OKaaaaay. And then I figured since I have gotten so good at making websites and doing things on a schedule that I should actually make a go of this. A weekly comic. More to remind myself to keep joy and whimsy in my life than anything else but then something weird happened…
The comic has been up for four days. Today is the first day I went really public with it. Already it’s getting more traffic than my travel blog which has about 250 or so entries and thousands of photos and man hours in making it a thing. All this time I have been trying to make a living by being the smart one and the most successful thing I’ve done hasn’t been writing a book, being a road scholar, or becoming an expert in multiple fields. It was drawing a comic. A comic that has no deeper meaning than just my brain mixing random things together. It’s not political. It’s not deep. It’s not complex. It’s a little rubbery caterpillar in ridiculous situations… nothing more, nothing less.
As of now I am not going to get my hopes too high as it’s been less than a week buuut if traffic continues to rise and Glen gets genuine fans I will be adding a T-shirt shop and hoping to at least pay for the website. That’d be awesome. And cheaper than therapy! And should he be a big earner I’ll be more than happy to spend a little more time on him but that’s not to say I’ll stop doing all of the other things I enjoy.
So here I am again learning something new and readjusting my life. I’m still going to travel and blog about it when I can because I still enjoy doing so. I’m still going to write books and hopefully publish them. I’m still going to sculpt masterpieces and occasionally pitch them to galleries. But I’m also going to relax, let myself just enjoy these things, put less emphasis on having to make everything profitable. I am doing everything I can do to be a productive member of society – I deserves some down time too.
**All photos and illustrations in this blog entry have been taken or created by the author**