In 2009, I nearly had a nervous breakdown working at what would be my last full-time job. I have extreme anxiety; I’ve had it since the day my mother signed me up for kindergarten. Working with the public has always made me physically ill from nerves. So of course, I’ve always worked in either retail or banking, which are the worst of the worst for someone like me.
My last full-time job was working as a customer service supervisor at a bank call center. If the customer service agents had a customer they didn’t like, they would transfer the caller to me. If the customer had a complaint, the agent would transfer the caller to me. If someone was angry, irrational, or unreasonable, someone would transfer the caller to me.
As someone with extreme anxiety, this job was a complete and utter nightmare, but it paid the bills and provided me with health insurance. So I spent five years suffering through argumentative customers and even more argumentative customer service agents.
Everyone had an ax to grind, and it seemed they wanted to grind it right in my head.
My hands were constantly shaking. Every time the phone on my desk rang, I had an anxiety attack.
I hated my coworkers and customers so much that I worked extra hard to make sure they didn’t get what they wanted. I bent over backward to leave customers unsatisfied, and I always said, “No,” even when I had the power to say, “Yes.”
Eventually, the job got the best of me, and I quit.
My next job was scrubbing toilets at a hotel, which was a great job for a germophobe like me. Obviously, I didn’t just scrub toilets. I also stripped dirty sheets off disgusting mattresses, cleaned soap scum from nasty bathtubs, etc., etc.
Every afternoon, I went home from work with my hands swollen nearly double their size. My fingers looked like sausages at the end of my workday. I couldn’t close my fingers enough to make a fist, not even close. And my hands hurt.
Nonetheless, every day after work, five or six days a week, I sat with my laptop on a pillow set on my thighs and I wrote.
I wrote for Associated Content, which became Yahoo! Voices. I wrote for AOL Seed. I wrote for HubPages, Squidoo, and WiseGeek. I wrote advertising content for Textbroker and iWriter.
Then I took on ghostwriting projects on oDesk, Fiverr, and Elance, which is now Upwork. I started writing erotica for clients, and then I realized I could write erotica under a pen name myself and skip the clients with their lowball flat-fee bullshit.
Eventually, I started writing for two websites that were in the top 100 most visited sites in the world. One of them even hit the top ten before Google Panda killed it forever. The other still exists, but it’s a shell of its former glory, once again, a victim of Google Panda.
Where am I going with all this?
If you want a writing career, you really ought to treat it like a day job.
If you can spend forty hours per week handling customer complaints or scrubbing toilets, then you can spend those same forty hours writing instead, and it’s nearly guaranteed to be more lucrative. I mean, I’m not guaranteeing your success personally because I don’t want that kind of liability.
But I can guarantee that I will make far more money in a self-employed, self-directed forty-hour workweek than ever I made working in retail, or banking, or the hospitality industry (i.e. scrubbing toilets).
Wishing won’t work. Complaining won’t do it. Backstabbing other writers won’t do it, although you’d think it was the holy grail the way some people go about it.
The only thing that will work for you if you want a writing career is writing. Write as if you have bills to pay. Write as if your life depends on it. Write as if you’d rather be a writer than a scrubber of toilets.
That’s what I do, and I haven’t had a “real” job in more than a decade.
You can do it, too, if you want to.
What one person can do, another can do.
Tracey Folly
Great perspective. And thank you for sharing your experience as a customer rep. It confirmed my suspicion that some just say no on purpose. :)
I'm about to find out if I have the chops to do it. After several layoffs during covid I was finally terminated 2 weeks ago and writing is my only income now. I can't fathom going to look for a job at my age during a pandemic lol