Recently I was asked to pitch an essay about writing and money, and I decided, instead, to write about that here. I’m calling it “Garbage Person.”
I first started to think I was a piece of shit after college: age 23, working at a newspaper, beginning on a forever-trajectory of trying to turn writing into cash, starting to have the first inklings that this may not be a financially-lucrative career path. But it felt right — like a good way to spend a life. Passionate, emotional. Occasionally I got to tell tales of redemption and hope, and it felt vital to help those stories get out into the world.
I started to think of myself as a garbage person — and to be clear, I believe there’s a critical difference between a garbage person and a shit person. A shit person has no ethical code, seeks power, and money, and benefits from systems that shit on other people. Garbage people are the rest of us, the ones downhill, who try and try, who contribute and do the things other people don’t want to, but can never quite get ahead because shit people have decided what we do has no tangible value (or at least the shit people don’t think so). Maybe we bought into the idea that, say, a four-year degree from a private university would be a good idea, only to realize it injected us (me) into a system of student loans that our chosen career path (journalism) would not allow us (me) to pay down easily.
As a garbage person, I built a life for myself in the company of other garbage people: musicians, and filmmakers, and painters, and poets, and activists, creating a scene of our own. We made a world where we mattered. We knew we were rejects, but together, we found power.
Most everyone I knew was bouncing from job to job, quitting ones where shit people told them what to do all day. We worked in coffee and pizza and at bars, and at night, we had our scene. It felt like electricity.
Sometimes people ask me how I balance so many projects, and I tell them I’ve always been a doer. A maker. In those innocent years, I was writing about music for the local alt-weekly, freelancing reviews for punk zines and trying my hand at booking shows. I planned vegan bake sales. I wrote poetry, and hosted a community radio show until 2 am that I’m pretty sure no one ever listened to. For three years, I co-organized the largest music festival in the city.
Recently, I came across a video of this time, from 2010. A music writer I knew in Georgia was planning to make a documentary where he and a friend embarked on a cross-country trip to create a snapshot of what rock music was like right then. For 40 straight nights, he’d document rock shows across America. He wanted to come to Spokane; could I recommend a show? I had a better idea: I’d book one.
My two favorite bands agreed to play, and we packed as many people as we could into an art space on Third Avenue in downtown Spokane, told people to bring their own beer. After the music was done, our new friends from Georgia did interviews about what this scene meant to everyone.
It’s hilarious to see myself at this time, 29, making stupid drunken comments off-screen. When someone makes a reference to quitting jobs in order to make more art, you hear me pipe up: “FUCK YEAH.” Always the aspiring burnout, smoldering in the corner.
Eventually, I did follow my fuck yeah self and quit my job to become a freelancer. It was one of the truest decisions I have ever made in my life.
In 1961, my favorite writer, Joan Didion, wrote a cryptic essay for Vogue called “Self-respect: its source, its power.” Read this:
To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we post-pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un-comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
Right? Right? So good. But, she’s not done. Didion says people who respect themselves know that “anything worth having has its price.” Because the opposite of self-respect is what she calls “alienation from self.”
In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back ourselves— there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
For many years as a freelancer, I stopped doing all the things I was doing when I was younger — things I simply wanted to do. And I developed a new destructive lifestyle. I would write whatever anyone asked, for whatever amount of money. I knew that I could do whatever anyone threw at me — and if I didn’t know how, I took it as a challenge to teach myself. I figured I had to work my way up, which is crazy because, by then, I had almost a decade of local journalism under my belt.
Living that way slowly eroded me away. That ethos was not wrought of self-respect; it was forged from trying to please others.
By 2017, 2018, 2019 I was writing more than I ever had, for bigger and bigger publications. But I had nothing. I had moved away from the scene in Spokane, back home to Portland, and I was too busy to find a new one. So many of my fellow garbage people had moved on, too. We didn’t want to be shit people, but being garbage was also getting old.
Once I was waiting for a major magazine to pay me $1,000 for a story that I now know was worth ten times that, and I started crying in the kitchen to Joe. I was so tired. Exhausted. How could I be working so hard, and we still couldn’t get ahead? We had so much medical debt, so many student loans to pay. When would it end? What could I do to fix it? Nothing. I was garbage. This was the life I had chosen.
In the fall of 2019, I let it spill to a friend that I believed myself a garbage person — a forgotten artist, a person chewed up and spit out by an industry I loved, but never loved back. And I was fine with it by then: I’d never amount to anything. I’d gotten so used to saying this about myself, I was surprised when she looked me in the eye, confused, and said “No. You are not a garbage person.” She was so firm, I actually believed her.
What I slowly started to realize after that moment is that I had been waiting on the world to give me my self-respect. Hadn’t I earned it? As anti-capitalist as I purported myself to be, I had long been tabulating my worth on how quickly I was getting paid for my writing. As a garbage person, I was more willing to be sent to collections than I was to stick up for myself, demand my worth or fair contracts. I figured I deserved to be destitute.
I was simply collapsing into the bed I’d made: a bed of garbage and dashed dreams and a willingness to be outspoken only when I knew it would be well-received by people who felt the same way. Back in the old scene, I hadn’t been giving myself away. But as a freelancer, that was all I did. And it made me empty.
I have 2020 to thank for giving me a moment of breathing room to realize: I can still be a garbage person — the same weirdo filled with big ideas that I always was — and be paid. I don’t have to suffer.
And if someone asks me to? To be paid nothing for what I do? Says I’m not worth what I think? Well, then I know the truth: they’re a shit person.
12. Garbage Person
Also (because my first thoughts were just clouded with love), Congratulations on making this internal shift. I have found that my internal shifts change my life far more radically than any external events. My thoughts and prayers are with you on this new journey and may the Universe step in to assist. One of my favorite songs to orient to the world is "Love Is All I Got" by Feed Me & Crystal Fighters... and I see that in you, too... the love through which you orient towards the world. Sometimes it's not just lack of self-respect, but that love in our hearts that makes it so hard to say no. I had this realization going through my divorce... I always try to treat everyone as a human being... but the revelation I had was "including you (me), because you are ALSO a human being." Sometimes we treat ourselves like garbage because we're so busy loving and giving to everyone else. Self-love can sound like a buzzword (and I have had my own frustrations working on it), but I've come to realize it's not about pampering, or being selfish, or just making time for myself - it's about seeing myself as clearly as I would see someone else. Learning how to be my own best friend. Love you - so much - I value your work so highly... if you were paid the worth of your heart you would be a millionaire, and I don't say that in flattery or exaggeration or anything - just in truth.
I love this so much, Leah. Truly. And I have so much to say ... but goddamn would I rather say it in person than through a stupid website. I spent many years as a garbage person in a shit person's world and felt myself getting shittier and shittier myself, just in who I was kowtowing to, and I said fuck it. No regrets. I also find there are plenty of shit people masquerading as garbage people too, playing by the shit rules and scrabbling to claw their way over others to attain some level of shittiness that seems ludicrous to me, and I find myself continually maintaining the same outsider status as I did in the shit person world. But fuck it. I've reached a point where I don't give a fuck who comes at me. I'm ready. I'll probably die living in my car from some bullshit illness that is easily treatable for people who actually have health insurance and I don't really care. I've had a decent enough life and I've written some stuff I'm happy with. That's good enough for me.