the rushed, impatient, painful, distrusting way

things might go to shit right fucking now

One day in the future, perhaps when I’m dead, patience will come a little easier to me. I’ll be able to look at my earnings from my creative work and be able to focus on the long game of doing work I love, rather than feeling a sense of despair about being unable to pay rent through Substack. Or I’ll look at an unfinished essay draft, one that I’ve worked on for months, and feel some faith that it’ll get completed eventually, even if my writing is half-baked now.

If I don’t have it now, I won’t have it ever. This is perhaps the core belief that dictates my relationship to the future. I need to obliterate all the uncertainties I have about the future. If I don’t clamp down on all the birds in my hand, they will fly away, and I’ll have nothing left. That’s why I freak out so much about money. I don’t have enough money to fund the rest of my life right now, and this means that at some point in the future, I will run out of money, and things will go to shit.