How are you doing?

To say the last couple of weeks have been turbulent would be an understatement, so I wanted to check in and see how you are doing. 

How are you holding up? 

I feel like I’m both holding up well and terribly depending on the moment, and I’m often moving between them like an out of control metronome. One second I feel content and uneasy, and then the next my whole body is screaming for some sort of relief. 

It hit me hard last Monday and Tuesday when I passed through the first weekend when I missed out on a big convention. Wondercon is normally a $3,000+ show for me, and that’s my mortgage + my health plan + operating costs in one three day span. 

Then, I missed out on Los Angeles Festival of books last weekend, which is generally a $2,000+ show for me, meaning in the last two weeks I lost $5,000, and that was a huge kick in the teeth for me. 

On top of that, or honestly probably because of it, I had to cancel our next anthology project and shutter my marketing company due to lack of clients. 

So…yeah…the past week a lot of foreboding things came to pass, and it knocked me on my ass. 

However, I try to remember a couple of things in these times. 

1. Self-worth is not tied to money, a job, or success.

Our self worth is intrinsic to us existing. It exists even if we don’t want it to, and whether we are the most famous person in the world or a gutter rat in Bombay, our self worth never changes. We deserve to exist just for being born. 

2. Nobody is a success or a failure, they are a person who has succeeded or failed, but that is not all they are in the world.

You are made up of many, many, things. You are a son or a daughter, a sibling, a friend, a reader, a video game lover, a seamstress, a parent, a writer, or any number of a million things that make up who you are, and only ONE of those things is the job you have or the thing you do. 

3. Money can always be made, but time is finite.

Perhaps the biggest gift of this crisis is that it has given us time; time to spend with our families, and our friends, and those that we love. Time to spend with our hobbies, and engrossing ourselves in new (or old, comfortable) worlds. It might feel, especially if you are living paycheck to paycheck, that the world is falling down, and it is for many of us, but the silver lining is that I have connected with tons of people who I hadn’t in years, I’ve tried things that were new and scary to me just a month ago, and I’ve taken that time and tried to spend it with the people I love.

I know that sounds like a bunch of entitled bull, but I had no control over this happening. I have very little control of how its being handled. What I do have control over is how I think about it, and I’m trying to remember that TIME is a gift we will never get back, and hopefully, if nothing else good comes from this, it will have given us the gift of time to try new things and spend time reconnecting with those we love. 

There’s always another job, somewhere, even if it’s in a different industry, for less pay, in a different location, but there is NEVER more time. 

4. We are all going through this together. 

Aside from world war, I can’t remember a time in our history where something was being felt by everybody all over the world at the same time, and that bonds us together in a way nothing has since WW2. That’s pretty amazing, because for the first time it’s not war that binds us together, but love and hope. We have willingly chosen to tank the economy so that the most vulnerable among us can live. 

Far from a dystopian nightmare, or the Apocalypse, that is some first rate Utopian stuff right there. In a Utopia, we all suffer a little so nobody has to suffer a lot.  

5. There is hope in the darkness. 

In the darkest hour, when we are at our most scared, all that remains is hope; hope that we can find a better life; that we will see the light again, and feel it’s warmth on our cheeks. When all is lost, the one thing we can hold on to is hope. 

I hope that helps, and for me, I will cling tight to that hope, knowing that in times of darkness, it is my only light.