Why I’ve Given Up on Making a Career Out of Writing

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

In 2013, I was sitting in my bedroom in my apartment in East Harlem when I had an epiphany about what I finally wanted to be when I grew up (For the record, that was after I had already graduated college). I decided then and there that I wanted to be a Writer. From that epiphany blossomed many things — my Wordpress blog, my Medium account, and many articles that were published on a variety of online publications.

Over the course of the past seven years, I devoted countless hours towards writing and supporting my writing. I promoted myself and my articles on social media, created a Facebook page to showcase my writing, and established myself as a Writer to the public. However, despite all of these efforts, the largest income that I ever really made in a single tax year was about two thousand dollars. That’s hardly even enough to consider it a part-time job.

So, because of this less-than-ideal sum of money, I never got around to quitting my full-time job because, well, how could I? How could I make a living from writing when my annual income from writing could barely make a dent in my cable bill, let alone my student loan debt? How could I support myself? Over time, the idea of making a career out of writing became less and less realistic. Eventually, I stopped trying so hard towards becoming a full-time Writer. But, despite these…