N.K. Murray

“Why don’t you just go write? You’re not working. You have plenty of time.”

So I was told by multiple people in varying ways over the course of the past 4 months. You see, I was/am one of the (now) fortunate souls who were advised by their employer that their services were no longer needed. Through a series of unfortunate events, my employment was coming to an end, (through no fault of my own, just to be clear) and I was suddenly available during hours which had previously been set aside for the special kind of soul-sucking that comes with a toxic work environment. Despite being released from said soul-sucking, I was angry.

Scratch that.

I was seeing-red, vein throbbing visibly in my forehead, seethingly PISSED off. (note – apparently seethingly isn’t a word being recognized here as the red squiggle that keeps popping up indicates, but guess what, it is to me, and seethingly stays so says I.)

I was also upset. Which might seem like I am splitting hairs on the scale of emotions, but it was a different feeling for me than my anger was. I was hurt. I spent a lot of time working extremely hard through school (x3) and working in the same industry for nearly 19 years. After “bopping” around for the first 7, I spent the last 12 mitigating risk, in one way or another. (Oversimplification being my friend here, ’cause no one wants to hear about the various idiosyncrasies/challenges/opportunities of the field I work in.) I made friends – some of whom are some of my greatest confidants and allies. I fell into a rhythm of loving what I did, but hating the machine I worked for. Unfortunately, the machine, being what it was, decided it had chewed on me enough and spit me out with several hundred others. Those who know, get it. Those who’ve been impacted by reductions in force, get it. It sucks.

I spent the month from the time I was notified, until the time I was cut applying for anything I could. In that first day alone, I submitted between 80-100 online submissions for jobs across multiple industries/states/titles. I got several hits on my submissions, and I thought to myself, maybe this won’t be so bad.

Spoiler alert – I was wrong.

Over the course of the just shy of 4months I was off plus the month prior to my end date, I submitted north of 250 resumes/applications. Looking back in my emails, it was probably closer to 300.

I received positive (non-form letter, actual human) responses on more than 80 of those, including multiple where I was asked to fill out questionnaires, or submit my responses for scenarios they dreamed up to weed out the people who looked great on paper and weren’t as great in practice.

I had more than 50 HR/phone interviews.

I had 25 in-person or video calls as 2nd, 3rd, and sometimes 4th interviews. I was even flown to Texas for several interviews.

I was a final candidate 10 times.

10. Freaking. Times.

I received 3 offers in one week. 2 were legit, one was a ‘hey, we know we told you that you got this other role, but you can have this other lower-level role for less money if you really want it.’ Yeah, no thanks. So that brings me down to 2.

The job I accepted is close to everything I could want in a role – it allows me to work remotely (YAY! Jezebel has a stay-at-home mommy!), I get to stay in the segment of the industry that I personally love and most importantly, it allows me to have a voice. I didn’t have that in my previous role, or should I say, I wasn’t allowed to have that in my previous role.

I started my new role on February 25th, and I’m grateful for the opportunity and the experience that it will provide me. I like the job. I’m also pretty hopeful I’ll be able to make a difference, something that I haven’t been able to feel in a long time working in large, corporate entities.

I’m not telling you these numbers to get sympathy, to have you pity me, or anything like that. I’m telling you these numbers because for every single submission, there was hope that it would be THE one. For every single positive response, there was hope it would be THE one. For every single interview, phone/video/in-person or otherwise, there was hope it would be THE one. So, if you’re doing the math, that means I got rejected more than 99% of the time. In the cases where I was a final candidate and fully expected to be THE candidate, I wasn’t even informed that I was no longer in consideration until I had sent multiple follow-ups to the company contacts.

So, to level-set with you and get to the long, drawn out point of this whole thing, during my 4 months “off” of work, I didn’t write.

Not. One. Word.

And despite the extremely warm wishes from friends and loved ones telling me “Oh look, now you can write full-time!” and “Now you can become a professional author” and my personal favorite “Now you can make a living writing!” I’m going to say this – NO. Just no.

You heard me. NO.

You know why? Multiple reasons, all valid to me, but also something I’ve seen echoed in other forums. So here we go.

1. I self-published Sister March 17, 2017. The first year I made $750 from the sales of the ebook and paperback copy. No tax was taken from that. I donated $250 (as promised) to Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, leaving me with approximately $500. Of that, $150 went towards the website, copyright and software used to make my life easier. That left me with $350. Once state and federal taxes took their pound of flesh, I was left with about $250. 1/3 of what I had originally made. This number is in line with other traditionally published authors, as demonstrated by this incredible series of tweets I pinned on twitter. I encourage you to read this, and let it roll around your brain for a minute when you comprehend what this author is saying regarding standard book deals. Clearly, I am not in this for the money. . . because I self-promoted the shit out of the book (I did a book club lunch, I discounted it twice, gave it away for free once, and literally put it on my social media accounts on a weekly basis for the remainder of 2017 and I walked away with $250. In 2018? I made $75. Could I get a book contract? Sure. Did I have it in me to go through a whole other set of rejection experiences? No.
   https://twitter.com/PoorRobin/status/1034817309221810176
2. A 99% rejection rate for my job search meant that I rode the roller coaster of emotions so often, it’s a wonder I didn’t get a Guinness plaque for most attempts. Even for the most positive souls, of which I am not, that’s a rough go of it. I spent 5 months hearing about how incredible my experience was, and how well I interviewed and how well-suited I was to roles that I simply did not get. I was anxious – well, more anxious than normal. I was depressed. Like, sitting at home on the couch binge-watching all the seasons of Grey’s Anatomy, Bones, Game of Thrones and the First 48 depressed. I am so incredibly fortunate that I have some pretty awesome people in my corner who not only tolerated my rides on the mood coaster, but sent me jobs to apply to, and allowed me to vent when things didn’t go my way. (You awesome people know who you are, I hope, because I tried to make sure I let you know, but if I didn’t, heyyyyyy thank you! Love you!) Special shout out to my husband who did everything in his power to keep my spirits up in those hours when the rest of my squad was busy living their own lives, and to my sister and her husband for allowing me to burst into tears at my brother-in-law’s birthday lunch upon finding out the role I had done 4 interviews for and was kind of pinning my hopes on, told me rather flippantly a month after my last interview with the boss’s boss’s boss that I didn’t get the role. (I am pretty sure my sister wanted to curse, and if you know my sister, she doesn’t have my predilection for the f-word, shall we say.) My point is, I was not okay. I knew I was not okay. But I was really, really not okay. This had rocked my confidence in myself, my confidence in my abilities, and in many respects, made me even more jaded that I already was about the state of humanity and the lack of what I consider to be simply decency. Telling someone no, honestly and promptly is not a bad thing, because it allows them to move forward rather than waiting on tenterhooks for you to make up your damn mind.

   

3. Hope is a double-edged sword. I had hope through this process, and got declines that I was not surprised by, as well as the ones that were soul-crushing. I was not able to write in the midst of the emotions of these 4 months – both good and bad, because I could not guarantee my mental state wouldn’t alter the story as I had envisioned it. It’s honestly no secret that my writing already delves into the darker, sadder side of life. I did not want to write during these 4 months, to then get beyond them and realized everything I wrote was shit. Because, hey depression and anxiety is already a rough ride, and now that I’m “better” (aka employed) I really didn’t want to edit out what eked/oozed out of me during the time I was feeling all of the feelings.
4. Which brings me to my last point. It is incredibly easy for me to tell my husband an idea I have for our home and say, good, you make that for me, thanks bye. It’s entirely another for him to take that idea, fully process what it entails, buy the needed materials, build it, and then put it into existence – all from an idea in my head that was likely some relatively fantastical thought and an amalgamation of 15 pinterest posts and half a dozen Instagrams I saw throughout the past year and more often than not, probably not even something remotely possible for him to create. Sounds easy coming out of the mouth, not so easy in real life. Writing is the same way. Did you know I cried writing Sister? Like, I sobbed, which again, those who know me, know that’s an anomaly. I felt what I wrote so deeply, so painfully that I imagined myself in Merry’s shoes, and I cried writing it. I bled on that goddamned page so much, when I was done, I was equal parts drained and elated. She was a part of me, and I was a part of her, and bringing her to life on those pages took a lot out of me. So much so, that it took me 5 years to start writing her story, a year to write it down onto paper, another 2 to edit it and publish it. Much like what my husband builds, it’s a process. I can’t just vomit the picture in my head onto the page, even though I am holding out hope for those typewriters in Tommyknockers every single day. It takes a combination of time, energy – both mental and physical, and honestly, a bit of magic to get the picture onto the page. And I didn’t have the magic in me these past 4 months. I simply couldn’t make the picture in my head manifest into words on the page. There was no blood left in me to bleed out.

I appreciate how many people know me either well enough to make the comment, or loved my book so much that they saw this as an opportunity for me to take my passion and make it my career.  I think there has to be more than desire and hard work to make it as an author, something demonstrated in a Buffalo News article that I read today.  It’s a lot of perseverance. It’s a lot of rejection. It’s a lot of doubt. It’s a lot of sleeplessness.

https://buffalonews.com/2019/03/15/min-jin-lee-a-literary-success-but-not-overnight/

Lee says this in the article, and I can’t agree more –
“Ninety-nine point nine percent of authors will not get what they think they will get, and I think it’s good to start out knowing that. It can give you a kind of freedom to pursue what you want to do.”

And that’s my point. I have no expectations about my writing, other than the self-expectation not to make it suck. I wrote the book inside my head, as I envisioned it. I didn’t do it for the money. I got the sad story on paper, even though it made me cry, not sleep, and bleed. That was so insanely freeing to me. I love writing. I love the process of taking what’s swirling around in the miasma in my skull and making it into something more than I envisioned. Would I love to do that full-time? Part of me does. But, there are pressures that come along with that, including the expectations of the reading public, the economic climate both personally and out there in the publishing world, and most importantly, not bowing to the demands of writing because I have to but instead, still, and always because I want to. I also have little to no desire to give up creative control of what I write simply to sell a product.

You don’t like what I write? Read something else.

Easy as that is to say for me now as a self-published author, but
not so easy to justify out there in the marketplace, especially if you want all of the things that come along with a contract. (Someone to edit your work, someone to publish your work, someone to market your work, YOUR NAME IN LIGHTS, so to speak.)

Right now, I still want to write. I still love to write. There will always be a dream inside of me where I can flit off to a coffee shop and bang out a cool 100,000 words and submit it to my editor and publisher and go back home and crochet while sitting on my swing listening to jazz and having THAT be my life. But honestly. . . right now, that’s not possible, nor is it likely, nor is it wanted. I like the challenge of what I do for a career, and I like being the person people come to for my knowledge. I like having a voice. Maybe one day, I’ll write full-time. Maybe one day, that will be enough for me, and I won’t succumb to the pressures of what that means.  It’s still my up-here goal when I grow up to be a published author, and in some respects, I’ve achieved that goal. My inability to write over these past 4 months, and my lack of desire to try to make that my full-time gig right now for all of the reasons I listed and so many more, doesn’t take that achievement away. It also won’t take away the accomplishment I’ll feel when I do get done with this next book, knowing it’s exactly what I wanted it to be without any compromises or alterations to the story or massive editing needed due to my mental health.

In the meantime, thank you all for sticking with me. I wasn’t forthcoming with my late fall/winter circumstances, quite simply because I didn’t feel they defined me, as much as they impacted me. In today’s society, too many people are judged for those things that impact them, rather than the those things which define them. My unemployment is one of those things that I wasn’t willing to discuss outside of a small circle of people. And honestly, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, this was fortunate. Sometimes when you’re in a prison (of your own making, in this case) you don’t realize how freeing it would be to be released because you’re so used to drinking the Kool-Aid and breathing the smog in there, until you are let go. I might still harbor some anger and resentment due to the timing and circumstances, but having those 4 months off gave me a lot of time to think, a lot of time to formulate, and honestly, time to think about the things I want and that are important to me. So, I’ll take them for what they were, and move forward feeling much lighter than I was in October, and much happier.