I said to him I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur and he laughed.
I have been testing different beginnings for this newsletter and none of them worked, and then I remembered this writing teacher who told me to just begin where I want to begin because it shouldn’t be so hard, Juana, and so I want to start off by saying that I said to him I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur and he laughed. He didn’t laugh at me. He wouldn’t, he’s kind, but he laughed at the word. I probably said it in a funny way. I’m bad with French in general and French words in English sentences in particular and I was tipsy which always makes my Argentinian accent float to the surface. It must’ve sounded funny. I also know he laughed because the sentence, said by me, was ridiculous. Well, of course is probably the only way you can follow that. Of course I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, I’ve been telling myself since then, duh. But in that moment it sounded like a breakthrough.
I keep being reminded of how far you can get from the obvious parts of yourself if you take social discourse seriously. It’s not pretty, but it’s still fascinating.
He laughed when I said I didn’t want to be an entrepreneur because it’s clear that that’s not where my heart is. I was fascinated by the discovery because for four years I’ve been working towards exactly that, whether I like to admit it or not. I don’t particularly like to admit it but I do it nonetheless because, well, how else am I going to untangle this whole mess?
I call it a mess because I feel scattered, messy, untidy. For the first time in a long time people ask me what I want to do and my answer is vague. I know there are areas I would like to focus on, I know how my ideal life feels like when I close my eyes, I know where I’d like to be in four months. But no, I don’t know where I’d like to work, and I don’t know in what capacity I’d like to devote myself to that, and I have no idea where to start. All I know is that I want to stop working for profit. I want to stop worrying about making money. I’m not saying I want to live off the earth and hunt my own rabbits. I know I have to do something I will sometimes find boring, I know I will have to give up some of my freedom, I know money will always be part of the equation. What I’m saying is that there is a difference between earning money and making money, and for years I earned money and I was fine with that, until I started doing my own thing, my girlboss thing, my freelance thing, and I started to make money, summoning it where before there was nothing. Almost all my income now comes from things I built up, packaged and put a price on. And it’s wonderful, it’s liberating, it’s empowering, it’s exciting, but it’s also not for me.
What is for me is teaching. It has always been. I’ve had a teacher aura all my life, which I’m sure some people take as arrogance, and I’m not sure I can disagree with that. But the point is that I love teaching and I’m good at it and this is what makes the thing tricky, because almost all my income now comes from teaching, most specifically teaching things I love. I love having my writing workshops and talking to my students about things I like as if they were distinguished narrative theories because I create the curriculum and yes Taylor Swift is amazing as a subject study if what you are interested in is a character’s superobjectives. I love having 1:1 sessions and helping other writers with their novels, their newsletters and their creative practice in general. I also love teaching Spanish to adults who want to take up a new hobby and I am obsessed with telling them how rules work and how they sometimes don’t. I love my job but I don’t love how my income varies month to month, and I don’t love that I cannot take holidays without taking a pay cut, and I absolutely hate that in this current social landscape it’s not enough to just be a teacher who created their own curriculum and shows up with excitement and is never late, in this social landscape I also have to be my own marketing executive for free. Everyone is talking about unpaid labour now so yes, this is me also bringing it up.
I love the creative independence my job awards me but I am also aware that independence is loneliness’s pretty cousin. And the truth is, I am alone and I feel lonely. I’ve talked to friends who also have creative independence and they also told me they are alone and feel lonely and we chatted until we felt better but then we went back to sitting at our own desks and pushing ourselves to think about ways to improve our own little businesses in a ruthless economy and eventually we went back to being alone and feeling lonely. And eventually I started asking myself what it is that I am working so hard towards, what it is that I see myself doing if all my hard work pays off, and I ended up realising that the end goal of what I do is not to be a better teacher, or a better writer, or a better person (that stopped being the goal in 2021) but an entrepreneur. Which is weird and feels embarrassing to say, but is also the truth. The end goal of having a small business is that the business grows and becomes a company, and you get employees that work for you and you benefit from passive income streams and you are so successful that you can go on holidays without taking a pay cut and you build a team that makes you be not alone and feel less lonely and that is great if it works for you but I kept looking at that imaginary life and thinking ‘but when do I get to write? when do I get to teach?’
A lot of people think that teaching is explaining, which is why we sound arrogant, but I’ve been teaching for years and what I’ve learned is that teaching is sharing. That’s as simple and real as I can put it. Understanding that helped because it made my recent exhaustion around my work make sense. Because I’ve explained a lot of things but I’ve struggled to find the space to share. I do appreciate the fact that having my own workshops allows me to share knowledge I care about without having to abide by rules I don’t believe in but the reality is that when you’re stressed about money you don’t always find the generosity that is needed for sharing to be more than just dumping. I know myself and I can now admit that I’ve been operating from a place of taking, rather than giving, and I understand that it’s fair that we take, especially if you come from backgrounds of lack, especially in this ruthless economy, but I know myself and I know my brain and I know my standards. And for years now I have been giving in the hopes that it would eventually allow me to take something, and it’s something I’ve not been able to rewire even though I tried, and I know it’s not the person I want to be. I don’t want to be generous so I can attract good karma, I don’t want to dump what I don’t need in the hopes I’ll get to take something I want. I want to share, from a generous place.
I still don’t know what I want to do exactly but I have been looking at other people who do things I believe in. None of them are entrepreneurs or girlbosses. They do noble things and they get paid for that. They earn money for what they do instead of making money by exploiting what they love. They work for non profits or schools or organisations where the focus isn’t on making more money but on distributing it to open doors that have been closed until now. I want to be more like them. I don’t see myself ever leaving teaching and writing behind completely, but I want to find a way to do my job from a place of generosity. I want to teach because I want to do it, not because I need it and I want to write for an audience because that’s how I understand the world not because the world tells me I should get a cute side hustle.
Until the picture of what I want to do becomes clearer, I’ll focus on what I don’t. I don’t want to be an entrepreneur, I’ll tell myself every time I need it. Of course you don’t, I’ll reply. Not as a daily affirmation because that also stopped being cool in 2021. More as a reminder, as a way to get back.