Aaron M. Fortkamp

I’m officially out of school again, which means the clock is ticking until my loan repayments start. Right now my loan repayments are set to begin in September, but it’s still got me on the income-based repayment plan it did when I was only teaching college classes, right before I started this job and went back to school, which means—zero dollar payments. Of course, I am making 8x now what I was making then (which really doesn’t tell you at all what I’m making now, does it? Because if I told you I’d made $5000 the year I set this IBR plan up, you’d believe it, and you’d also believe $500, or $10,000, none of which is livable because we really really really do not like to pay people for teaching in this country).

Anyway it’s more, I make more now. I’m in a wealthy area though so cost of living being what it is I might not have to make the full potential payment I would otherwise if I were making this much in a normal area of the country. Even if I did, though, I could probably swing it, if I continue not to have a car payment for a little while.

So why can’t I get a date, I wonder.

Maybe that should be my profile intro. Hey ladies, I got money, hit me up. Except I don’t, really. It’s not like I’m forever dumping funds into my stock portfolio over here, I am just so used to living on a salary of virtually nothing and student loans, or working part-time for $12 an hour, that just breaking even makes me feel like Mr. Moneybags. Which is what I’ll be doing, when the student loans come due. Breaking even.

I think this might be contributing to my lack of output in terms of writing and other creative projects, apart from having practically zero time to work on things of that sort every other week, which really breaks the flow. My off weeks from parenting, I do have time, and I have been dipping my toe back into the pool lightly, but—I’m comfortable. I’m not desperate. I mean yes I’m still an anxious puddle of self-loathing, granted, but not over mere matters of survival. My own personal future seems relatively secure. I’m not writing like my days are running out, is what I’m saying, which is what I used to do, I wrote like I had to write, because I didn’t see any other path into the woods of the future, no maps, no trail markers other than a vague sense of hope.

The problem with building a career as a writer is the same problem as building a novel or a story. From the end, it seems perfectly clear and inevitable that it would always end up this way. But from the beginning you don’t know if you’re writing a story or if this particular idea will peter out after a paragraph. Every writer I’ve ever heard speak about how they became a successful writer, even the uninitiated, the newly published, the rookies, even they both acknowledge the luck and happenstance involved in how their career got started and the essential people in their corner who made sure the right people in the industry saw their work, who gave them the breaks they needed or the time they needed or the inspiration they needed and would not have been successful without, and at the same time the tone they use to discuss their good fortune, it’s like of course it was always going to work out this way, in retrospect it’s perfectly clear how these stars were going to align in my favor, how the Rube-Goldberg machine was definitely going to work on the first try. Because, I suspect, all writers also know how hard they had to work to get to where they are as well, the hours upon hours upon hours, revision upon revision, rejection on rejection, before the success came. It’s harder to acknowledge that in public without sounding like a braggadocious buttwipe, but in one corner of their mind it makes perfect sense that all that work rendered some positive results. And if I do ever see some success, I’ll sound exactly like that, because I’m sure it will come as a result of some lucky break, someone I know pointing out some agent or contest looking for clients or entries, at which point it’ll all become clear that oh this is how it was supposed to go. I still won’t be happy—why couldn’t all of this happened sooner, for instance—but at least I’ll be smug, which as far as I can tell is pretty close.

Just ask a banker.

Like, can you even believe I never made a 30 under 30 list? Or also a 40 under 40? Do they make 50 under 50 lists, or is all possible success by that point in your life no longer impressive to anyone? Also would they have to skip out on anyone under 40, just to avoid stepping on other list-makers’ toes?