I’m stressed. I have now been unemployed for five months. I get up every morning and look at the job boards. If I find anything, I write a cover letter and email or fax it off with a résumé. I then start my day as a blogger and article writer. Writing and photography have become the only sources of income for both me and my wife and it is not enough, thus I’m stressed.

I started writing again a few months ago. At the time I was still confident in my ability to find a job quickly and was using any spare time I had, when not job hunting, to write. I used to constantly write articles, fiction, and poetry when I was in my teens but gave it up. I thought this would be a great way to start expressing myself again, something I just wasn’t doing anymore. I loved it, I still love it. Writing non-fiction was at the bottom of my priority list when I was younger but I find it more enticing now, only partly because of its monetary value when publishing online.

Lately I’ve been finding it harder to love sitting at my computer to write the way I had a couple of months ago. It feels like my head is going to explode with the stress. Each morning when the job boards are devoid of work I am qualified for, and I have gone through all the job postings on the writing blogs and freelance sites, I start to tense up. I have just spent four hours or more searching and applying for jobs that will likely never call. For the last week I keep going into a frenzy after each job search trying to force myself to write. I have bills to pay and we need to be able to buy food. I have to write, and need to get paid for it. So instead of writing, I scour the internet to try and find more markets to write for. Markets that pay better then Triond or Bukisa. I found Bright Hub and I write for them, but 10 dollars an article still isn’t enough. I have found others, each I have dismissed for one reason or another. I also found Elance and Guru, freelance bid sites, and I am attempting to gain work through them. All the while I tense up more and more.

I got so tense I started getting headaches last Monday, I’ve had one everyday since. It is now Friday. I realized this morning as I made breakfast, that my headache was all stress. The muscles in my shoulders were so tight that it felt like my skull was being pulled down my neck to my shoulder blades.

I forced myself to relax. I took a minute and realized something else. I was taking something I loved, my writing, my rediscovered way of expression, and I was bastardizing it. Yes, I need it to make money and yes, my goal has to still be a monetary one, but I need to remember that I am doing this for the love of the written word. Everyday my stress level was rising because not only was I not finding work, but I also wasn’t producing any work. I spent so much time ogling the internet for higher paying work that I was ignoring the markets I had already found and loved writing for.

So here I am, laying it all out and starting over again, loving the written word, and taking everything in stride. I have been following a Triond writer named Guy Hogan, and he also had a great view of writing and passion. I am going to spend my time writing again instead of stressing over not writing enough or not making enough for my writing.

My hope is that the love of what I am doing will show through in the final product and with that, the rest will come together.