The cost of failure

I was sick from 1994 to 2000, so I can relate to this:

Back when I made comics, I lived in a forest. I was poor. I had few options in life. I avoided the topic of college because I didn’t know what I wanted to “do with the rest of my life,” and I didn’t have the money to pay for it. It was much easier to tell myself I wanted to “do what I love, make comics for a living.” It even says that on the back of my first graphic novel.

But comics was a terrible longterm strategy. (In the days before Kickstarter and Patreon, I was too early to the party, the first to leave before things got started.) I couldn’t admit it to myself because in my mind it was the only and best option. And it did get me out of the forest and into a city. It did get me friends all over the world. I did change lives with my comics, and I still get emails saying as much to this day.

Some of those emails make me sad.

Sometimes I’ll hear from a young woman in a similar situation. She’s in a bad place in life, but she’s determined to make a living writing eBooks or blogging. And I want to say, “Be careful. There’s no one there to catch you.” But I don’t. I wouldn’t have heard such words myself in the same position.
Something I would’ve told myself.

We hear “do what you love” so often from those few people who it did work for, for whom the stars aligned, and from them it sounds like good advice. They’re successful, aren’t they? If we follow their advice, we’ll be successful, too! And a crow will turn white as swan if only it lives in a pond and eats weeds.

We rarely hear the advice of the person who did what they loved and stayed poor or was horribly injured for it. Professional gamblers, stuntmen, washed up cartoonists like myself: we don’t give speeches at corporate events. We aren’t paid to go to the World Domination Summit and make people feel bad. We don’t land book deals or speak on Good Morning America.

Advice is just something we would have told our younger selves. But we are all different with different life expectations and abilities. A globetrotting heir to a vast fortune will have a much easier time finding and doing what they love than a young mother in the rust belt with three jobs.