Jaimee Eat World

When I first started writing when I was really young, I didn’t have any sort of understanding of why – I just wanted to, so I did.

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There’s No One In Town I Know

I don’t think I ever really thought about it – I was way too young to have any sort of real depth about the idea. I just sat down one day and wrote. I can’t remember what it was, but I know it wasn’t long before I started to write short stories, written appropriately for my age with animal protagonists like a lot of childrens stories. You might have rightly guessed these were usually dogs.

Dogs who got up to all sorts of shenanigans, but also had some very real problems. Like befriending the rougher dog from the other side of town, and then later losing that dog pal to unforseen circumstances.

Tragedy, unfortunately, is critical to a great story.

I’m writing this once again from my childhood basement and thinking about all of the people who have been through here for one reason or another. When friends of mine would sleepover in grade school, we’d throw blankets and pillows on the floor here and stay up late watching TV. Some of those friends I was sure I’d know forever, but most of them now are for one reason or another, gone.

When I walk around my neighbourhood now, I can still point out their homes, but the rest seems like distant history.

You Gave Us Someplace To Go

When I was in Phoenix I’d walk every day passed the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, which doesn’t really mean anything other than they adopted his name for the school, but it would remind me that at one point I was strongly considering going to school for journalism instead of music.

There’s never really been a point where I lost my love of writing (see also: this blog series and the ones that came before it), but there was a point where I started to feel like my writing needed to matter more. Surely it couldn’t be enough to write about dogs with people problems or to write songs for the sake of writing songs.

I think that’s where a lot of us go wrong along the way. We start our hobbies out of sheer passion for a project and with no real want or need other than the personal satisfaction or to satisfy the pull of the act of doing and somewhere along the way we feel like we must assign some sort of value or meaning to it beyond that.

It’s how so many of us have been convinced to try and turn our hobbies into side hustles. “You love doing that thing, you should try to make some money from it.”

And when suddenly the things we loved to do for free fail to provide some sort of tangible value; money or social media likes, it taints them.

Because now our passions are jobs and if you’re anything like me, you begin to hate them. Resent them. And yourself. And then one day you stop wanting to do them at all.

I’m glad I never became a journalist. I know I would have learned to hate writing.

I fell into a similar trap in the early stages of this project.

If You Were With Me Tonight

I assigned expectation to myself and this project because I’ve been conditioned like so many of you that I must, but I have to be clear that it never started there.

It started like my stories about the dogs; I loved fables and wanted to write my own so I did. I was too young then to understand anything about monetization or why the lessons in fables have such strong value to young readers, I just enjoyed the journey.

I loved these songs by this band and recording music, so I wanted to try my own, and so I did. And continue to.

I went to Phoenix just because I wanted to see it in person. I had nothing meaningful to write about it; I had a great time and it was the first time this year I felt calm and content. That’s something, but only I was able to feel it.

In all instances I was pulled by the act of doing and have accomplished absolutely nothing beyond that. It’s wonderful.

There are friends of mine that are no longer with us at least in part because they could not be satisfied by the act of doing for the sake of doing. They were pulled too strongly by the seeming need to be valuable and to create meaning where there doesn’t need to be any.

If you were with me tonight, I would tell you that you were always enough. Just as you were, just as you stood, even when you were doing nothing.