UPPER TIERS EXCLUSIVE: SORRY IN ADVANCE

I’m going to apologise for this in advance. It’s probably going to be a long post. It’s not going to be a particularly jolly one. I hope – I really hope – it doesn’t come across as self-pitying, but it might. 

Regardless, I reserve the right to embrace self-pity on my own Patreon, especially given where I’m currently at, so if it’s not something you want to read… please don’t. I’d rather that than you skipped it, than read it and went right off me.

Hopefully, though, most of you by now know me long enough to know that I’m not somebody who cries wolf, or goes seeking validation.

I mostly write these blog posts to help me process feelings. Sometimes I write them and don’t even post them. Just the act of writing the feelings down helps.

However, there are times, oddly, when it helps more to share them, as if having eyes on them makes them more real. It somehow takes the feelings out of me, shares the weight, and releases some of the pressure. 

Also, I have in the past said that I’m not looking for sympathy when I write like this (empathy is always more useful anyway). That’s very often true. But the last couple of times I posted about our financial and employment woes, I did get a lot of comments back, and I was surprised by how much those comments lifted me. Again, that’s not me fishing, or saying I want it, or even a request… it’s just being honest, and telling those of you who did take the time that it helped. I’m only human.

So maybe in sharing this it’s in the hope it’ll help me feel a bit less like I’m currently freefalling through life without a net.

Because, most days, that’s how it feels.

NEVER BEEN

I’ve never been out of work before. Being freelance, I’ve been between projects, but never for so long that I’d run out of money, or had no hope that there would be something on the horizon.

The closest I ever came to feeling like this before was back in the early-2000s, when I was writing Digitiser freelance, and Teletext decided to cut my freelance income in half. I say Teletext… it was more the decision of a new middle manager, who wanted to throw his weight around. Digi was made a bit of a scapegoat to his ambitions.

Back then, I had a young family, I had a mortgage… my TV writing career still had its training wheels on… there were no guarantees that I’d make money from writing for TV. I was scared, frankly. Scared of not being able to support my family, scared of never working again… scared of running out of money.

I got lucky. I had momentum to that early career, and within the year I was starting to earn enough to plug the gap in my income. Gloriously, that momentum continued for 20-odd years.

Until it didn’t.

Though I was always aware that it could come to an end, that there are very few older screenwriters, that it’s an intensely ageist industry in which there are almost no guarantees, I somehow kept dodging the bullets. Whether through hard work, or because I made myself pleasant to work with, or because the work I did was good and reliable, it didn’t come to an end.

I built a screenwriting career that by anyone’s standards was… kind of successful. Some years I earned decent money, some years I earned mor, some I earned less, but always enough. I gained countless credits, awards, lead writer roles. I worked hard, I did all the right things, got a good reputation, and the work never dried up.

Until it did.

Until Covid happened and life derailed entirely, and the rules of my career changed… and I’ve found it virtually impossible to get back on track.

OFF TRACK

Both Sanja and I are working really, really hard, every single day, to sort out the situation we’re in.

I’ve applied for actual job jobs – not just chased the freelance ones. Well, I’ve looked a lot, but have only applied for a couple of them. Turns out that almost 25 or so years doing a thing that’s really specific, even if I’m really good at it, doesn’t leave me with a lot of options.

I’m not young enough to start from scratch. I can’t even afford to start from scratch. In a weird way I feel a victim of being successful at my job, because it has sort of locked me into only being able to do one thing… so when the industry in which I do that thing seemingly doesn’t want me, I’m screwed.

There are times when I wonder what all that hard work was for. What did I really achieve? Why did I even bother?

There are times when I wish I’d never become a writer at all, that I’d stuck to graphic design… awards and credits and experience mean nothing if I can’t pay my bills in the here and now.

There are times I feel angry, because if certain things had been a little different over the last couple of years, I wouldn’t be struggling like this. Those are things I don’t want to talk about here, because I really don’t want to feel like I’m blaming anyone else for where we’re at.

Plus, it's not entirely fair to say that the industry doesn’t want me.

My reputation remains good. I’ve not been “cancelled”. People still have huge respect for me, and all that I’ve done. There are those in the industry who are trying to help me. But… it’s slow. Painfully slow, and, bluntly, we’ve run out of money. In fact, we’re less than broke, because we’re broke and we’re in debt, because we’ve had to get into debt to get us through the last 18 months, once the money started running out.

Now there’s no more money coming in – and what money is coming in is being shovelled into that money pit – we’re out of options. We’ve been hanging in there, and hanging in there, and waiting and waiting and waiting, for the many irons I’ve got in various fires… but the waiting has gone on so long that I can feel myself starting to give up.

RAIN, RAIN

They say to plan for a rainy day, but what do you do when the rainy day lasts two and a half years, and the rain just keeps getting heavier?

I get days where I see flickers of hope. Nice emails. Meetings. I get days where I feel that the dam is about to break, and then I get days – like today – where I just feel terrified, and I think it’s never going to get back to how it was, and I wonder how much worse things are going to get.

We genuinely can’t go on much longer this way, but at the same time we feel stuck.

We want to remortgage the house, but I can’t remortgage until I start having income again. Which leaves us with the option of selling the house and getting somewhere cheaper, but somewhere cheaper means moving further away, and we can’t do that because my parents need us nearby. It’d also mean uprooting the kids.

We also both have the option of taking/applying for jobs that don’t exactly take advantage of what we’re capable of doing, or my years of experience. Delivery driver. Working in a shop. Something like that. But it’s unlikely to bring in enough to cover even the mortgage (you’re welcome, ex-wife…). It’s an impossible dilemma. Especially when any one of my potential jobs could happen at any moment. And we’re loathe to do anything which threatens the sole income we do have right now… this Patreon.

It’s frustrating. It’s stressful. It’s not even like grief, which at least has stages, and is a process. This sort of searing cycle of hope-panic-terror-anxiety-hope-terror-panic-hope has no apparent end point. On top of that, my sisters and I continue to deal with enormous stress to do with my parents, and I’ve got a hospital appointment tomorrow to have some tests on a dodgy-looking mole, because it just keeps on coming!

KA-PLOUGH

I do sometimes marvel at my ability to just plough forwards in the face of it all. I’m lucky to have such support from Sanja. I don’t feel for a second like I’m ever going through it alone. She is amazing, and I am so blessed to have her. To have that emotional support from someone who doesn’t put the blame on me.

Nevertheless, I do feel guilty. I get moments where I think… if she’d never met me, I’d never have dragged her and the kids into this mess. I want to be more present for everyone instead of constantly worrying, or trying to find solutions. I can’t socialise, because that feels like I’m not working towards a resolution. Not that I can even afford to see friends right now. My daughter is getting married in a couple of weeks, and I can’t even afford to help out. I feel wretched. I feel like I’ve failed everyone. Even my beautiful new grandson. I wanted him to meet me at my best, not when I’d hit rock bottom.

BUT… I also know none of that is true.

I know I’ve tried everything. I know that I could’ve done things differently in terms of my career, but I followed the flow. I went where it took me. Even if I could prepare for rainy days, I couldn’t foresee the huge – global - upheavals ahead. Or that I still wouldn’t have recovered from them more than two years on.

I know I’m still working hard, every day, to find a way out, even when there are days where I dream some kind billionaire would just give us 5 minutes’ worth of interest off the top of their savings account.

You’ll be glad to hear that this Patreon, and our Digi and BYAMPOD audience, are among the best things in our life right now.

I know I say it a lot, but that’s because I don’t know if you all understand just how important you all are to Sanja and I. Aside from the fact this is the ONE reason we’re able to put food on the table right now – even if it doesn’t quite cover everything else – the kindness of all of you is part of what keeps us going. Every time somebody new signs up to the Patron we high-five. Those little flickers of hope, those micro-celebrations… we need them.

Same as we need Digitiser and BYAMPOD – a focus, something to work on, to distract from everything else. It’s so, so important. And I dare say if so many of you weren’t supporting us, we probably wouldn’t have that distraction.

So for about the millionth time… thank you, thank you, thank you. How such a small channel and podcast have managed to attract such a lovely, generous, and loyal audience never ceases to amaze me. You make us both feel much less alone.

Obviously, you’ll all be among the first to know if I do get a job.

Paul