When I said I wanted to be a writer many people told me “you’re gonna be broke”, you wont find a job”, “te vas a morir de hambre” (you’re gonna go hungry). I didn’t listen, because I wanted to write, that’s what I love doing and they always told me “you have to love what you do or else you’re going to be miserable”. I thought they were just saying that back then but fast forward to today, five years after graduating and I still don’t have a job.
I don’t know if this is the case for my Writing Major classmates in college or for anyone who didn’t have a TBI before graduating, but for what I’ve seen in the job market while looking for jobs, there aren’t really many jobs for us. I don’t like to think the TBI has much to with it.
Then I saw The Last Word, a movie about a young writer who is asked to write a woman’s obituary while she is alive. This woman was a writer, who’s job was writing the obituaries for the newspaper. While she wrote essays on the free time, she kept them to herself and wrote the obituaries to pay the bills. This wasn’t her dream job but it was a job and she got paid.
I really enjoyed the movie; it’s funny, it’s sweet and, as I think I’ve said while talking about other movies, my grandmother cried. Those tears are a stamp of approval, and while I also thought it was really moving, I felt it spoke to writers and journalists and showed what working in these fields is. It is a difficult time to be a writer and we really have to take any job we get, this is true for a lot of careers, but from my experience, it’s really difficult for us writers. There really aren’t a lot of jobs for us out there and when you find a paying job as a writer, you have to give it all you have. If you find a job writing obituaries, you write obituaries; even if you have to write an obituary for a woman who is alive, because these experiences will eventually help you in figuring out your life.
Unstoppable María 