Turning Pro by Charlie Martin

I had a dream the other night.

I was in some desert town — in my mind, it looks like it’s from a Looney Tunes cartoon, a single building in the middle of a cartoon desert. Cartoon saguaro cactus and everything.

I was buying some clothes. They might have been desert clothes — khaki twill pants, a buttoned shirt that might have been a shirt that used to be a favorite 40 years ago. But when I dressed, the belt I’d worn into the store was wildly the wrong size, so the clerk in the store made me a new belt. I’d normally have bought a dark brown belt, but this one was very light, lighter than the khaki. When I put it on it fit perfectly, and then when I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized that not only did it fit perfectly, but that my stomach was flat.

Those of you who haven’t seen me in person might not know this, but I’ve actually struggled with my weight basically for my entire life, going back to when My mother told me to put on a shirt because I was disgusting. This happened when I was no older than nine.

My highest weight was about 320 pounds, several years ago, but I now weigh around 223, and my “goal weight” is 220. (Strictly, I weigh 101kg and my goal is 100kg.) That’s not the point of this, though, except to observe that I have lost around a hundred pounds and I am aware that I’ve had to buy a lot of clothes because of that.

But that’s real life, not dream life.

I’ve also spent an inordinate amount of time in therapy, and my favorite therapist was a pretty committed Jungian. Now, Karl Jung was sometimes called der alte Zauberer, “the old magician.” He wasn’t shy about slipping or even leaping into mysticism; he believed there were common roles, archetypes, that were common to all humans, and that the unconscious was shared among all of us. That is, there’s only one Unconscious that we all share.

A Jungian looks at dreams as composed entirely of symbols, and all the symbols reflect parts of your self. Or your Self. I was describing this dream to Sarah in a direct message when I realized I knew what the dream was saying. See, the town is Wichita — which I realize isn’t really an isolated desert town but roll with it —— and I’m getting new clothes is a new outwardness; the business of having a flat stomach is seeing myself as good enough, as not needing anything else, I’m satisfactory.

So, what I promised this week was to write about “turning pro.”

That’s prompted by one of my favorite writing books, written by one of my favorite authors, Steven Pressfield. I recommend all of his books, and in particular his writing books: The War of Art, The Artist’s Journey, Do the Work, and of course Turning Pro. I knew when I got to the end of the last “Re-learning to Write” piece that I wanted to use Turning Pro as a jumping off place, but I didn’t really know why. My brain is like that: it often knows what it’s doing even if I don’t.

So to prepare for writing this, I opened it and very quickly came to a description of a dream he had, in which is woke up in his room, which he had left in a cluttered and disorganized mess. In the dream, his room was clean, his boots were out from under the bed and even clean and polished.

Except for the names and few other changes, it was the same dream.

Now, since I’ve been in Wichita, and even before when I was still mooching off Sarah and Dan, I’d gotten back into morning pages, I’d started writing pay copy of one sort of another nearly every day. Since I’ve gotten my own place, it’s even better — I go to bed at about 8:30, I get up at 5:30, I write morning pages longhand, then type 750 or more words of braindump, then write articles for PJ, work on some of the projects Sarah and I have planned, and write some fiction. It’s around 4000 words a day total, and it’s every day.

Well, okay, I slipped one day after not being able to sleep at all.

The point here — I bet you were wondering — is this. What Pressfield is talking about in Turning Pro is the change in attitude when you go from writing — or any other creative endeavor, painting, dancing, acting — as a hobby, and doing it as a professional.

I seem to have turned that corner. I’m getting writing done, and maybe more important, I’m keeping my life going at the same time. I get up and “go to work”, even if it just means climbing the stairs to my loft office. I clean up the house, I do the dishes, I feed the cat — not that he’d let me forget that — I’m just living a life as an actual professional writer.

And you know, I talked in a previous article about what the 12 Step Programs call the “pink cloud”, when you’re first sober and everything seems brighter, clearer, just better. I suppose this could be a sort of extended pink cloud, but I don’’t think so.

As the great sage Yogi Berra said, “prediction is hard, especially about the future.” But I think this is important and I think it’s good.