Same Procedure As This Year? Same Procedure as Every Year!

A new year is like a blank sheet, and there is something about the sound of the first day of the first month of the year. Anything seems possible, and you feel like you could reinvent yourself here and now.
 

But you also feel a strong sense of time passing by – it seems like yesterday that we were all worried about the Millenium, and now it’s 2015! 

I have a diary entry from the Common Grounds Café in Belfast on 27 March 2014, where I asked myself where I would be on 27 March 2015. Not that long now, spring has come, summer has gone, autumn has fallen, winter’s icy gales have started, and I am still in some aspects of my life not further on. Or am I?

I asked myself then, if I would be wearing the same clothes, having the same fears, with my dreams suspended in mid-air, left in half-hazardry, in a cloud of maybe & hesitation.

And now I can give a very convincing: maybe!

I keep talking about writing, and ‘I want to write more’ is on every resolution list I can think of. But sadly, my writing activity decreased steadily in the last years, while my insistence that I want to write more has become louder. 

Will I? Is the question of 2015.

The answer is, I need to earn money! Serious money.  I am falling apart at the seams, or rather, most of my possessions are, so I do need stop doing work for next to nothing and earn some! I want to see that paycheck coming in, feel the sense of earning cash again, and know somebody wants to pay me for the work I am doing once more. 

I seem to have too much energy, too many ideas, do too much, but get no monetary reward. There is a thought, especially cherished by Conservatives, that if you have nothing, you are motivated to get some. No, if you have little or next to nothing, or worry that the little will be taken away, something inside you dies, and with it the motivation. You wouldn’t ask a wealthy person to work for nothing (unless it is for a charitable event), but you expect people with little monetary resources to do it all the time. Give your creativity away, sell your art for cheap, join a workfare programme or get sanctioned, and dance to the tune of the empty fridge. 

There is a saying that a full stomach doesn’t study well. Neither does an empty stomach. An empty stomach also doesn’t work well, and does really shitty job interviews, too! And it is not a good political advisor either!

Writing on an empty stomach makes you write about the lack of food, and about all the things you want to eat, and eat immediately.

I tried to sell knitwear, worked as an IT advisor, am involved in politics with apparently no hope of a job and quite a few people telling me I am in the wrong party and that I will never ever get into that elusive club of people getting paid for political work, so I need to reinvent myself on 1 January and earn cash somewhere else. I am reading motivational books again, and try to find some inspiration. My sister still thinks I am wasting my time. But I am motivated to work on this blog again. So maybe they do work!

Happy New Year!