Fear of the Unknown

In three weeks, I’m going to be out of work.  The thought fills me with panic.  I don’t do out of work very well.  Since I landed my first job at seventeen as a cashier in the A&P, the longest period I’ve been out of a job was during my freshman year of college.  Even then, I worked at Macy’s during my holiday breaks. 

                I’ve always harbored an idyllic fantasy of living a life of leisure on unemployment, arising well-rested from a refreshing night’s sleep instead of awakening, heart pounding, to the blare of an alarm clock, eating a healthy breakfast, going for a run, spending my days in pursuit of my various hobbies, hiking, cycling, reading, and writing.  I paint myself a pretty picture and then when it happens, I’m a wreck.  When I was laid off in late 2015, I couldn’t sleep at night.  Having grown up poor, the prospect of not having any money is panic inducing.  I have this irrational fear that I’m going to end up living out of my car, which would never happen.  Because even if I was unlucky enough to have no money and lose everything, I have friends willing to offer me a place on their couch.  But the thought of having to rely on the charity of friends isn’t a soothing one.

                When out of work, I am unable to relax.  Whatever I’m doing, I always feel like I should be doing something more productive and I’m just not working hard enough.  To be fair, I feel like that all the time, ever since I started publishing.  But it’s gotten worse.

                I’m looking over the prospect of becoming a freelance writer.  I got this idea through the author’s group I belong to on Facebook.  A woman casually mentioned on a thread that she lost her job last year and began freelance writing and was able to make enough to stay home and write.  Of course, that’s always been my dream.  And when I googled it, I found tons of boards that post freelance writing jobs.  You apply to do the jobs and if they hire you, they pay you a certain amount per every hundred words. 

                Okay, something I enjoy and that I probably would be good at…I think.  But of course, as is always the case with me, doubt is creeping in.  For instance, I read that freelance writers should have impeccable grammar.  Yeah, I’m not so sure about that.  For instance, regard the second line of this paragraph where I end a sentence with a preposition.  I’ve never been a stickler for grammatical rules.  My philosophy has always been that once you learn all the rules of writing you’ve earned the right not to follow them.  My number one priority is to suck readers into a story, and sometimes sticking to the rules too stringently can interfere with that.  Geoffrey Chaucer learned that all the way back in the thirteenth century.  People want to read stories written in their own dialect.  People don’t want to read pieces that are written in a stiff, formal language.

                Also, there’s the added fact that I will probably massively screw up my first assignments because I’ve never done a freelance writing assignment before, and the thought of that fills me with terror.  I hate making mistakes, and I hate the fact that doing something new makes mistakes inevitable.  It was okay when I made mistakes on my books, because I could fix it.  I was my own boss.   No one was going to scold me or refuse to pay me because I made a mistake.

                I guess at the end of the day my issue is I’m facing the unknown, and I don’t like that.  I’ve never liked change.  I’m able to acknowledge that change can be a good thing, particularly for me, who if left to my own devices would still be working the same dead-end job I was laid off from after eight years, doing the same assignment, and complaining about it.  I’m trying to be optimistic and look at this transition in my employment as an opportunity, not something negative.  But the fear of the unknown is the worst fear of all.