This evening I wrote my “farewell” email to my coworkers and colleagues at the place where I’ve worked the past sixteen years. At the end of this week, I will no longer be employed there. As of that point, I become a full-time writer.

As many who are raised in the American society do, I often feel defined by my employment. “Who am I? Oh, I’m a software QA engineer working for such-and-such company. And you?” As of Friday afternoon, I’ll no longer be employed. Or rather, I’ll be self-employed, a state I’ve never experienced before. To some degree, until I get paid for my writing (still waiting on a response to my first ever short story submission!), I’m not really “employed” as a writer, am I? I suppose I’ll be an unpaid intern till then.

The reason I’m making a distinction is because other people already have. When I’ve told people I’m a writer, the immediate question is “what have you published.” When I say “nothing yet,” the posture changes, the voice alters, and the obvious message, intended or not, is that one is not really a writer until they are published. Until one is making money from their profession, it doesn’t count I suppose.

So I’m transitioning from someone who is gainfully employed in a high tech career at a world-famous corporation to someone who by our society’s standards is simply not employed. And I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a part of me that is bothered by that change. Societal programming runs deeply in the psyche, and bucking the norms is something we’re all trained to avoid (not that the training is always effective). In a country that seems to venerate “rugged individualism”, striking out by one’s self to follow a dream without the safety of a paycheck often seems to be considered an aberration. I’m still working through how that feels in my own head and my own experience.

Still, I’m excited by the upcoming transition. It literally has been a dream since childhood. I’ve been writing on an off since well before high school. (And the less said about the cringy fan-fiction of mine that my High School’s “literary magazine” published the better.) I’ve been practicing my craft for decades. It’s time to see if I can make something real and lasting of it.