Nothing Boosts Your Productivity Quite Like Absolute Fucking Terror!

^source

There's good news! I won't be homeless. I will have to power down a chunk of my savings, but not even as much as I thought since I found some money in an account I had forgotten I had. My troubles aren't solved, but they are delayed for at least a month.

However this experience scared the bujeezus out of me. Which in turn drove me out of my comfort zone, during which time I submitted my work to a bunch of publishers, applied to a bunch of paid blogging positions and reached out to contacts who may be able to help me get traditionally published.

I don't want to say these are things I wouldn't have done anyway, but then, I began writing seriously in 2012. I had six years to get all that done and I didn't. It took a big scare to light a fire under my ass, and finally get the ball rolling. That's what this article is really about.

Fear gets a bad rap. There's no shortage of philosophies which disparage fear and every other negative emotion as useless, toxic, fit only to be purged from yourself. But why do we have those emotions? Evolution does make small mistakes sometimes but fear wasn't one of them. It serves a crucial purpose.

Fear is what jostles us out of the rut we're stuck in, forcing us to make the drastic changes we need to survive. Of course we prefer the pleasure of comfort, but comfort is death. When you're dead you have no problems. You haven't a care in the world. Does that mean it's an enviable condition?

To live is to struggle, and nothing motivates me to struggle quite like the fear that I'll be sleeping out of my car and eating out of dumpsters if I don't. If anything I'm ashamed it had to get this bad before I made a serious, aggressive attempt to conventionally monetize my work.

I mean shit, there's plenty of it. Many authors wrote no more than I have in their entire lives, and lived off the royalties from it. I've got what, for most people, would be an entire writing career's worth ready to go. That's half the problem solved. I am confident in my talent too, which is another quarter of the problem solved.

The last 25% is just getting it in front of the right eyeballs. Everybody I know tells me that it's only a matter of time, but that's not quite true. It's also a matter of effort, which is where I've let myself down until recently. No more! I have never been so miserable as in the past few days, and it really put everything into perspective.

I cannot rely on Steemit for my income. Not unless I got to where I could cover 4x my living expenses with SBD at or slightly below a dollar, and I fall short of that mark by about a thousand miles. Steemit's been very good to me overall but now is the time to search for greener pastures.

I think no matter what I'll keep posting here if only because of the people I've met. There's sincerely a good community forming here and quite a few treasures to be found. It's also all I've got lined up for the immediate future, so I may as well. But if things don't improve in the next month, I may have to make some hard decisions.

I've solved my rent and utilities problem only for the next month. I've bought myself some time. Now don't get me wrong, a lot can happen in a month. Maybe SBD will recover. Maybe I will land a book deal. But one thing I swear I won't do is continue to burn up my hard earned STEEM Power.

Steemit still has tremendous untapped growth potential. Fear has many valid uses, but if I let it convince me to gobble up my savings now, then STEEM skyrockets in value like ETH and BTC did, I would never forgive myself for missing out. It hurts badly enough as-is, powering down for such a pitifully low price per coin.

All things in moderation then, fear included. I feel I've struck a healthy balance, having received loud and clear the message that I cannot simply continue on as I have been until now. More than that, I know what I need to do, and have begun doing it in earnest. All the puzzle pieces are in place, all that's missing is a stroke of luck.

It's poetic, isn't it, that fear would constructively motivate a horror author. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that's been a consistent theme in my life. I am very fear driven. I have something to prove. I don't want to disappoint the people who love me and hold me in high esteem. I don't want to prove my enemies right by failing.

Probably you could mount a persuasive argument that it's not healthy to live this way. But it's healthier than dying, and it's gotten me this far. Let's see just how much further it will get me.

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^{Stay Scared!}