Blogging Is My Only Chance For Income Anymore
What started as a hobby weeks ago may have to keep me afloat, pennies at a time.
This Is Why People Aren’t Reading Your Articles
Dear Creative: This Is What You’re Doing Wrong
Why You’re Not Making Any Money on Medium
These articles mean well.
They’re also dangerous for a new writer on Medium, desperate for income, and out of options.
An unemployed writer who will see dollar signs for the first time in weeks, and spiral downward chasing that high.
These articles were largely written pre-pandemic, a bygone era in which I could shop for groceries without masks and panic attacks, or see friends with my own eyes, not through a screen.
Back then, I rode public transportation to college classes and served coffee at a brunch spot, not giving a second thought to a deadly virus circulating the same space.
In November 2019, I asked my restaurant’s manager to temporarily remove me from the schedule for the first time in two years so I could focus on school. I was a wide-eyed journalism major, used to the cushy praise of peers and professors. I naïvely expected the working world to welcome me with open arms once I graduated the next month.
Overworked barista life and a lack of rent made me grow very comfortable with having more cash on hand than I ever thought I’d need. I sometimes opened drawers or car compartments and find a wad of tips I’d socked away thoughtlessly after a long day of coffee bean slinging. This cash, plus upcoming Christmas and birthday money, could keep me afloat while I sought out Baby’s First Post-Grad Job.
It took until mid-January for tossing meticulously-edited resumes and heartfelt cover letters into the void— and nearly getting scammed twice — to sending me crawling back.
I texted my former manager about picking up shifts. Just weekdays, to entertain the illusion of not needing the busy weekend money.
No response.
Whatever. She was just a temporary manager filling in from another location, running the ship until we’d hired someone permanent. I couldn’t blame her for not answering. A bit rude, but maybe she left our shop and truly didn’t have an answer for me.
I was even a little relieved. I could float by in the funemployment bubble a little longer, exploring new and exciting job search sites until I finally stumbled onto The One.
February came. The financial bump from Christmas and my birthday helped me stay on top of my loans and bills, but I couldn’t stay ignorant forever. I texted the restaurant’s head barista, a lovely woman I’d worked with for years.
No answer.
Alright, maybe I’m a pushover, but she’s a working mom with a lot on her plate. Maybe she could use all the shifts she could come by and didn’t want competition. Understood.
I could always find a job at some other restaurant, sure. But returning to an old job was less stressful, and didn’t require training. A new restaurant with decent pay might reject me if they know I was only sticking around until the job I’d gotten an expensive degree and sold my soul for finally answered my prayers.
Nearly March. I was soon embarking on a trip to California with my sister, and I was broke. Thank God she’d offered to pay for a good chunk of it, but I was looking forward to some miserable debt on my return.
I found out that a former manager was back in charge at the restaurant. I shot him a text.
No answer for three days. I asked another former coworker if I texted the right number. She confirmed, and probably prodded this manager into finally answering with the following aggravating run-on:
“Hi jess let me see what I have I will reach out next week.”
Next week comes and goes, and as do I, from New Jersey to Los Angeles and back. No more texts.
But I get it now, because it’s March 2020. The pandemic is here.
I’ve spent the past five years deeply insecure at my high school and college peers’ progress. I watched them dance effortlessly from elite university, to cool enviable job, to independent living.
Meanwhile, I struggled mentally and academically, transferred schools, attended community college, and battled bureaucratic academia hell to finally graduate five and a half years post-high school.
For the first time in that half decade, I’ve been thanking the powers that be every single day that I live with my parents who don’t charge me rent.
But the world still turns, and I still pay bills.
I’ve canceled nearly every monthly subscription and donation. I’ve been a real Karen in demanding refunds from several companies I’d at first ignored accidental charges from. I’d foolishly paid my student loans early, before the Department of Education said “sike”. I was a diligent, responsible idiot.
My first college — the one I transferred out of — is still beckoning repayment for their private loans. Guess I should’ve considered that when I was applying for college at seventeen years old, when I had no concept of financial debt and no clue what I wanted in life.
And if anybody knows of a Satanic ritual that I can perform to cancel — and not postpone — the My Chemical Romance concert the dark lord Ticketmaster bamboozled me into paying off monthly, please let me know.
Oh, the stimulus check? Who’s she? My parents listed me as a dependent in 2019, when I was 23 and a full-time student, so I wouldn’t know.
Unemployment checks? I’d love to know them! So would everyone else in the comments of this post asking why their benefits have been “not payable at this time” for weeks on end.
Hopefully, I’ll soon win the daily help line lottery and reach a real live person on the other end, who can send four weeks of missing money my way. Until then, I’m stuck navigating the phone menus that tell me to check the website, the website that tells me to call the phone line, so on and so forth, until I finally lay down on the Garden State Parkway or throw myself into the Atlantic.
And no, I can’t pick up a part-time grocery job, at the request of my asthmatic and heart complication-ridden family. Some of us aren’t willing to let their loved ones die for the economy. Sorry!
At the start of April, my pal Noah Levy, a Medium veteran, asked me to contribute to his new music publication, The Riff. I’d already been writing about music elsewhere, but here was the option for a looser structure, more free-form thoughts, and the novel concept of getting paid for my work. How could I say no?
While scrambling to cover my monthly bills now hitting, I slapped together a piece based on a very topical issue — death — and hit publish.
The next day, I checked my article’s stats and saw the promise of a whopping 23 cents coming my way at the end of the month.
I welled up. Finally, someone or something believed I deserved to work, and deserved to be paid.
I wrote another article — well, a listicle. I wasn’t so proud of it, but part of the game is a prolific portfolio, right?
I then had a meltdown for an entire week straight, trying to write the singular, most perfect, most iconic piece of music journalism of all time. One that could keep me afloat until unemployment acknowledged my existence.
I bookmarked and scoured the ever-popular Medium money hack pieces.
I beat myself up for writing something imperfect.
I stopped writing.
I beat myself up for not writing.
I wrote again, and I hated it.
I couldn’t write about music.
I couldn’t write about not-the-pandemic, because pandemic-induced stress — financial, personal, universal — was all I could think about.
So, I gave in. I let it be all I write about.
It’s why I’m writing now — and it’s finally not just because I need money from its fallout, but because I’ve got something to say about it.
I have one request for the side-hustlers of Medium: Do not take this platform for granted.
Writing is a distraction, an opportunity, an expression. It’s everything we need right now, financially viable or not.
Two weeks ago, when I published my first article, I asked my social media circles to contribute to The Riff — to write about music if they had something to say.
Friendly faces — many of whom I barely knew — reached out, climbed aboard, and put out some of the most inspiring stories I’ve ever read.
These people have plumbed their minds and bared their souls for the same reasons I first found solace in writing:
A distraction from overwhelming crisis.
An opportunity for tangible feedback from splashing their feelings onto the web.
An expression of hope.
Encourage the little guys. This might just be their lifeline.
