I have no idea what I’m doing.

But no one else does, either. (I think.)

That might be an odd way to start my first Substack letter. But I believe in being real (you know, like the Velveteen Rabbit?), and right now, I have no clue what I’m doing and I’m scared shitless.

In October 2023, I did something that I know in my heart was the right decision for myself, even if it wasn’t necessarily the wisest or most practical one: I did that whole leap of faith thing and quit my full-time job. For two years, I had worked for a mental health nonprofit. It was the sort of day job that I had always wanted to have (since, unfortunately, most of us have to have one of those): I worked from home, had a flexible schedule, good pay and benefits, and the knowledge that the my work was doing something to actually help people rather than crank the cogs of a soulless corporation. Really, what more could I have asked for while I continued to work towards my real, lifelong dream of becoming a full-time writer? It was an ideal setup.

Or at least, it seemed that way. While I am grateful for my time at my previous job, I learned — much to my disillusionment — that working for a nonprofit does not necessarily mean being you’ll be treated better as an employee any more than you would at a for-profit business. Eventually, it came to a point where I was so frustrated with being micromanaged and overburdened and having my concerns and feedback dismissed and having my work overlooked or downplayed again and again, despite putting in what I truly felt was my all to do well at my job and contribute to the organization, that whatever joy I had once felt in my work was replaced by crippling anxiety every time I clocked in. And I came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense to work at a mental health nonprofit if it was causing my own mental health — with which I have had more than my share of struggles over my life — to suffer.

So I said fuck it. I’m going to follow my real dream, the one I’ve had my entire life. I’m going to make a sustainable living off of my creative work. So many other people are doing it, even if it’s hard. So why can’t I?

It wasn’t a decision that I took lightly, though. In fact, it was probably the second scariest decision I’ve ever made in my life. (The other being the decision to leave a marriage behind, but that’s a whole other story.) You see, for several years I after I graduated from college, I really struggled to find and keep consistent work. I have never actually been unemployed at any point in my adult life, whether that was doing freelance work or service work or holding a few different part-time communications and marketing jobs at the same time. But it wasn’t always enough to make ends meet or give me much wiggle room. Part of it was, of course, the nature of being a Millennial fresh out of school in the United States in the twenty-first century. Part of it also had to do with being neurodivergent and having undiagnosed bipolar disorder. Thankfully, I was able to get diagnosed and begin treatment after a few years of struggling, and things did start to improve (I love my meds, yay!). But it was still an uphill climb to find my footing for a few years. During that time I worked several part-time jobs and did some freelance writing, alongside taking professional development courses in copywriting and SEO to beef up my resume, determined to claw my way up from the pit I’d been stuck in for so long.

So landing that glorious full-time job at the kind of work setting I had always hoped to be in since I got out of school until I could make it on my own felt like a HUGE accomplishment. It was a huge accomplishment. I felt like I was finally a “real” adult. It was the most stable I’ve ever been in my life.

Leaving it behind was terrifying. In some ways, it made me feel like a failure all over again. I even said out loud to myself — multiple times — “Nori, you are out of your mind.” I was petrified that I would blow it, that I’d simply end up back at square one, broke and struggling and feeling like a complete and utter loser. To be honest, I’m still kind of afraid of that.

But I’m more afraid of not trying.

When I was a little girl, I could never understand why so many of the adults in my life seemed so lost, and so stuck, and so miserable and sad: working jobs they hated even though they paid well, stuck in loveless marriages where screaming matches were more frequent than kisses and I love you’s (if those things even existed at all), struggling with various substances just to get through their day. Oftentimes I was told (or overheard) that they had, of course, once had different hopes and plans for how their lives would go. And most of the time, they deeply regretted not following them. They wished they could go back and change course.

And I remember being very, very young, and promising myself that I would never, ever be like that when I grew up. I wouldn’t do the “safe” or “practical” things just because they were expected of me, even if they weren’t what I wanted. I wouldn’t let my own dreams fall by the wayside — even if things didn’t pan out exactly the way I wanted them to, I would never give up. I’d keep going until the road ended.

That’s not to say that, at 31, I’m naive to the harsh realities of adulthood. We live under late-stage capitalism. Everything costs too much. No one can afford healthcare. Children have their lives brutally snuffed out every day from gun violence and mass shootings. The planet is on fire. At this moment in time, Gaza is being bombed into oblivion, Ukraine is fighting for its life, Trump and the GOP are planning a complete Christofacist takeover of the government should he be re-elected this year, and…well, the tragedies are too many to list. We don’t always have the ability to chase our wildest dreams. With the exception of a very privileged few, we all have to do things we would rather or not just to survive as the world tries to break us over and over again.

But I suppose that sometimes, you just have to do the insane-sounding thing.

Right now I’m hard at work finishing a big book project that I hope will take off. I’m blogging and recently returned to social media to share my work after taking a hiatus for a few months after leaving my job to clear my head. I’m doing this Substack thing and the Ko-Fi thing and doing freelance work again to cover my bases, as well as working at a witches cooperative in my city that I helped launch. I’m doing a lot, and I feel good about it for the most part…but there’s still that nagging voice (you know the one) that says You know this is doomed to fail. You’re an idiot for even thinking this could work. You don’t have enough experience for this. You’re doing too much of this. You’re not doing enough of that. Your dishes are piling up which means you are drastically failing at adulting. You’re going to fail. You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea what you’re doing. You have no idea what you’re doing. And why the fuck are you writing about this on fucking Substack for strangers on the Internet to read when you know the Internet is a Very Scary Place???

In many ways, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing. But to be honest, I don’t think that any person striving to make their way in the world as an artist in the year 2024 really does. We’re all just sort of figuring it out as we go and doing the best we can with what we have to work with…which probably means we know more than we give ourselves credit for. At least, that’s what I like to think.

So I guess all of this is to say that this isn’t one of those “Just quit your job and follow your dreams and you’ll make six-figures as an Internet guru and also you should totally buy my bullshit badass business girl boss overpriced very-nebulously-described coaching course please!” posts. It’s more “Hey, I’m doing a risky thing in order to have a shot at making my lifelong dream come true, and you might also be doing or thinking about doing a risky thing to make a dream of yours come true, too, and I just want to let you know that it’s okay if you feel like a buoy untethered in the middle of the ocean hoping desperately that a shark isn’t circling below or that those clouds in the distance don’t mean that a hurricane is coming to swallow you whole, because I feel that way too. But I think if we just try our best with what we’ve got, we just might have a shot at making it happen. And I want that for you as badly as I want it for myself, so I hope this gives you a confidence boost even if it’s just a tiny one.”

If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you got something out of it. That’s really my biggest hope when it comes to sharing my work with the rest of the world: that somebody, somewhere, gets something out of it that might make living on this pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam a little easier, or maybe even a tiny bit magical.

Hope to see you around here.