Do you ever have those days where you don’t feel like doing anything? I do. I am having one right now. It is just after 10:00 AM here in East Tennessee. I am drinking coffee out of my new coffee mug, which is a 20 ounce Chip from Beauty and the Beast, which you can see here. I love him.

There is a blanket of snow on the ground, briefly turning our grey mountains into an Alpine paradise. Of course, snow is a Catch-22 in Appalachia. It makes everything beautiful – because frankly the bleakness of barren trees and muddy mountainsides is not beautiful unless you throw a coat of snow on it – but also inaccessible. Still, if it has to be winter, I prefer there be snow.

When I was in high school, we would regularly miss the entire month of January, or nearabouts, due to snow and ice. I lived up a curvy, narrow, one-lane road with traffic that went both ways. You had to pull over to the side to let the other person pass. That might mean your car is mere inches from a 100-food plunge down the mountain. Dangerous at the best of times. Besides, no school bus could make it up a hollow in the snow.

Like I did as a teenager, I am having a bit of a snow day today. Maybe its the weather. Maybe I didn’t get enough sleep. Maybe its the fact that we just lived through an attempted coup. Who can say? All I know is that today is a day for taking it easy.

That doesn’t mean I won’t be doing any work. I’m looking ahead to next week. There’s some research for a piece I want to pitch about the 50th anniversary of All in the Family, a piece I may begin that I’d like to put on Medium on Sunday, and a few other things I’m working on. So, even when I’m not “working,” I’m working. But that’s okay. I enjoy my work.

My goal this year is to make $2000 a month. So far this week I made $350 – though $50 of that was a payoff from work I did last month, so I’m not sure if it counts. If I can make $2000 a month, though, I can breathe a little easier. That’s going to require some hustle.

I had a pitch rejected this morning, which isn’t great for my bottom line or my ego. But it’s part of the game, and you have to be prepared to hear “no.” As the proverb goes, you take the good, you take the bad, you take ’em both and there you have the facts of life. Who said that? Oh right, Mrs Garrett.

I fully expected a rejection, though, so it wasn’t devastating. I shot my shot, but I knew it was a long one – my pitch really was outside the scope of what they were looking for, though only just, so I thought I might have a chance. You win some, you lose some, but you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Who said that? This one I don’t know. Someone famous, surely. Anyway, it’s a good idea for a blog if not an article, so you’ll probably read it sometime next week.

2021 is the year of taking every chance, though. It is also the year of being persistent. The worst an editor – anybody, really – can say to you is “no,” and “no” is not so bad. Whenever I am feeling down about a rejection, or a piece not doing the numbers I’d like, I remember how much I hated working in mortgages. Whatever downsides to being a freelance writer (and there are several), it beats being miserable in a job I hate. But, I have a pitch out for an essay on that topic, so I won’t say too much here.

Interestingly, though, I stumbled upon a reminder of that very fact this morning. I finally linked my Gmail account to Outlook (easier than I expected), and in doing so found an e-mail from a former colleague, dated May 2012. She had forwarded it from her work account to my personal e-mail, I suppose so that we could talk about it without the powers that be monitoring us, though I can’t remember and that makes no sense as surely they’d see her forward it out-of-house.

Either way, it was a real eye-opener. Or rather, a stark reminder. My God, we were treated terribly. I forgot just how much extra work we were asked to do for no extra compensation. This was around the time I made the transition from the underwriting department (where I was essentially an assistant, though I bore the title junior underwriter) to processing. It paid more, so at the time it seemed like a good move. A promotion, even. In hindsight, if I wanted to make mortgages a career – which was never the plan – it was a mistake. I should have remained in underwriting.

Either way, reading this message reminded me of why I left the mortgage industry in 2019. I suddenly had flashbacks to myself, sitting at one of those long communal work stations in an open office environment plopped in the middle of an old warehouse on the North Side of Chicago, suddenly and uncontrollably weeping at the pressure the CEO himself was placing on my team’s shoulders.

None of us could manage. Most of us were gone within a year, either to different departments or different companies. I left for a different department. Then I was laid off.

Whenever I feel glum about my career, I try to remember mortgages. The first job I had, and the last. Both were terrible. (The one in the middle wasn’t so bad, though I didn’t realise it at the time – but that was down to other factors, and is a story for another day.) When I think about it, I know I made the right choice. This is where I belong. If not forever, for now.

That seems like a good place to leave it. Chip is empty, so I am going to refill him and probably finish reading Spark’s Press, the new novel by Sarah A Chrisman. I want to review it when I’m finished, so hopefully you’ll read that next week. I’m also going to figure out how to film a reaction video, which I hope to have up by next weekend – though that could take longer, depending on how long it takes me to figure out how to film said video. Either way, every day I’m hustlin’.

Who said that? Oh, right, Rick Ross. A philosopher for our times.

x. Skylar

Skylar Baker-Jordan is a freelance writer based in Tennessee. His work has appeared at the Independent, Huff Post UK, Salon, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @skylarjordan and become a sustainer at www.patreon.com/skylarjordan