Enough apparently is not enough.

'What do you do, as a job?'

Hi there, welcome to my newsletter, which I treat it as therapy. Mainly for me, hopefully there is something for you too? In this newsletter, I am going to address what happened to my last newsletter and my pitfall, and the audacity to be ‘just enough’ and not more, not less.

Previously…
For Working Girls Only kicked off in the height of my freelance career, working two regular gigs and believing that I can find time to take up other projects too. All the while, I travelled a lot, a freedom in finance and annual-leaves I have never experienced before (which also made-up for the doom that is 2020). I felt like I have made it, in terms of the freelancer lifestyle -the everyday hustling, while managing to have fun and look cool on Insta. The plan for that newsletter was to share my 'success' stories. It was my way of hyping myself out of being anxious, worrying about being exposed every morning commuting to work. I thought by talking about it in a hyper-confident persona, and figuring it out from there would help. Well, it never did and hence the one-click-wonder newsletter.

It was quite frankly an obsession of thinking of myself as a career woman, and that I am the exceptional success in becoming a freelancer. Clearly I am not, 1) The exception, 2) The success, looking back it was rather delusional of me to think that. Me not being able to pinpoint an answer to the question 'What do you do?', made me think that working freelance is the only valid response. It was a safe way to distract from the fact that my CV is all over the place, without any grooves leading to a clear career path. Vagueness was safety. Within a year, all that came crumbling down. The anxiety to keep up made me constantly think of myself as an imposter, it crippled me in doing my best work. One job I quit, the other one I was let go. I made one of my employer felt taken advantage of, which in my head equates to 'I am a bad person.' The shame that comes with it paralyses me from processing this pain. Every-time I want to work out what went wrong, the 'Bad Person' title rings and I let it echo and linger in my head.

After my short-lived ‘career woman’ lifestyle, I took up a part-time position working three days a week, thinking it will be a short-term thing. Coming up to a year since I signed-up, I am still only working three days a week, and nothing much has changed apart from me embracing being the recluse that I am. Six months into a pandemic, this inadvertent decision turns out to be the best one yet. Not only do Ben and I depend on its salary (Ben is my husband. He is a freelance Drama Teacher, all his classes got cancelled since March. Update: Classes are now slowly resuming. ), my social wellbeing also depends on my weekly visit to the office.

Is enough not enough? - Part I: Where I plateaus
Since stripping back our lives and finance from the beginning of the pandemic, I noticed how little it requires for the two of us to live on, both materialistically and emotionally. Upon fretting about finance, we budget our spendings down to a T, and realise how little it takes to feel self-sufficient when being intentional. Since graduating, I have been approaching abundance through the lens of earning a considerable amount of money, without ever considering how much that amount needs to be. It reminds me of the mention of a Happiness Threshold in Natalie Wynn’s (aka ContraPoints) video essay on Capitalism: ‘… the data shows that more income does lead to more happiness up to a certain point. But the happiness benefit of income plateaus somewhere between 65K and 96K USD a year (in the US). One interpretation of the reason why happiness increases up to the threshold is that at lower income levels, more income means less stress about paying rent or mortgages or medical bills or college tuition, but once you pass the threshold more income basically just translates into more disappointing golden pizzas (A BuzzFeed content reference, not worth checking out if you ask me).’ So there is no denying that sufficiency is a feeling, and that it comes with a price tag. The question is whether sufficiency can be achieved, and at what expense. I can see that we are getting closer to the threshold, comfortably making ends meet with money coming from a job I enjoy that serves others. Shall I stop at ‘making enough’, not proceeding to make ‘more’?

Is enough not enough? - Part II: So, what do you do? (Answer in a way that validates your identity, or I will ask more questions that makes you feel inadequate.)
The theme to teachers’ comments throughout my uniform wearing days, has always been ‘Plenty of potential’ or ‘Could do better’. Looking back, neither me nor my parents questioned whether school was doing me any good, not like there were ever options in Hong Kong. (Knowing how depression looks like now, I am pretty sure I was mildly depressed as a teen but that’s a whole other story.) That sense of inadequacy distinctly carries over into my adult life. It pops up here and there, in different shape and form, namely my parents’ inquiry over my financial and career prospect till this day, comparing my own accomplishments with people my age or younger.

An image I hold onto as reminder and comfort, is one of a shelf described in Birds Art Life Death by Kyo Maclear. The book follows the author and a musician birdwatching in a big city, while contemplating on artistry and staying true to their desire for their work to be small and significant.

Oh yes, the shelf. In the book, in a conversation about showcasing ones’ art, the musician paints an image of a massive library with stacks and stacks of towering shelves, imagining all the artists that he loves with a shelf of their own. A legendary pianist would have two shelves, another artist would be right near the top with three shelves. (I would like to imagine my favourite artist Feist have books dotted around the library, on different shelves too.) The musician describe his humble desire to secure a tiny spot on a shelf, a few inches of space alongside all the gifts of the made world. ‘Maybe in a corner. That would be nice.’ he says.

I remember that feeling of ‘wanting to be small’, especially during my time in art college. Perhaps it was the changing of time, or my return to a capital-driven city, I have lost touch of that desire to carve my own space, not pertaining to its size. Attuning to other’s idea of a creative career, my vision of success has since then been muddled with earnings and exposure. I have forgotten how to create not for outward achievement, but for the sake of creating and to find fulfilment in it.

When the world slows down during a pandemic, I start to notice that, indeed I have been creating things. Things like inventing dishes, making bread from scratch, jotting down fleeting thoughts on my phone, making crafts out of scraps, etc. They are things that are worth sharing for sure, but I wouldn’t have made a spectacle out of them either. Share on Instagram? Yes. Make a career out of it? Err, no.

Perhaps, a 1080px by 1080px square on Instagram, is my spot on the shelf.

Is enough not enough? - Final Thought: Am I doing enough?
For a while, the indicator of ‘enough’ lies on the brows on the person asking ‘So, what do you do?’. The more scrunched-up the brows, the more I feel the need to fill them in with details of my job nature. Sometimes I add or subtract definiteness, depending on the person. With other’s impression of me at stake, how then should I phrase this: the dishes and the bread I make, the entries in my journal and my phone I write in, the books and links I read and the walks I take, are part of what I do. That’s the long answer that gives context and meaning to my work, unfortunately not the answer most people are looking for. Ironically, it’s not quite enough to answer their question. On top of that, if I am to provide that as an answer, I worry about the way it will be perceived, too.

In this extended period of time of less networking and more staying at home, seeing myself (and Ben) taking care of house chores, eating well and keeping our dog healthy and happy, while supporting ourselves financially, in my humble opinion, is quite enough.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t have ambitions in my life, it only means that my ambition is not in a job. In my pursuit of being enough, I have crossed off one item on the list of things to explore. Wow, that conclusion came to me in real time, let’s just leave it at that.

Whoop! Hope the length of this first post didn’t scare you, I promise to have something lighter next time!

Run out of things to read? Hold my laptop.
A list of essays and articles that informs this piece.

• Do you believe in work after work? The religion called Workism.

• The work you do, the person you are - If you are to read one thing, let it be this.

• ‘Everything that’s good is bad, everything that’s bad is good’ - A long read on where millennial's burnout comes from. Not everything applies to me, so I took it as a prompt to reflect. This line is pretty awesome though: “Laziness,” at least in the way most of us generally conceive of it, simply does not exist. “If a person’s behaviour doesn’t make sense to you,” they write, “it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple.” 

• Sounds corny, but apparently all you need is love to be motivated at work.

• A poem to your client.

• Fuck the bread. The bread is over.

  

  This is the part where it’s less about me, and more about you! Kinda like non-religious confessionals: Have you ever struggled to describe what you do / want to do when asked, and how does it make you feel? What kind of situations give you the doubt that you are not enough (or the contrary, makes you feel that you are enough)? Or, are you in the pursuit of being enough, or more? I would love to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in, and see you in a week or so!

  Love,
  YT