I am done chasing money for my art. I want to say it plainly before I dress it up, because the minute I dress it up it stops being true. I am not walking away from money. The tip button stays on the site. The books stay for sale. The charges that cover the API connections stay, because those cost me actual money whether anybody shows up or not, and love has never once paid a hosting bill. I might make some of it cheaper later. I have not decided. What I am walking away from is the expectation that somebody, someday, is going to appreciate and pay for what I put my heart into. Everything on the counter stays where it is. The thing that is changing is something only I can see.
Here are the numbers, since I brought them up. In the whole time I have done this, I have made about seventy-five dollars from my art. Months ago, through book sales, mostly family and a few coworkers. I have never gotten a tip. The website has not made me a dollar. That is the ledger. I am not telling you so you will feel bad or do something about it. I am telling you because pretending the number is bigger than it is would be a worse thing to do than just saying it.
That last part is the one with a splinter in it. Some of those sales, when I look back, do not feel like somebody wanting the work. They feel like somebody doing me a kindness. A favor with a receipt. And I think I may have pushed too hard for a few of them. I am not going to forgive myself for that in front of you, and I am not going to flog myself for it either. I am going to let it be what it is, which is a little sore, still. Some things you do not get to resolve on the same day you finally see them.
Because here is what I saw, once I looked at the favors and the silence and a tip jar that has never had anything in it. I had been sending people a bill the whole time. On work I genuinely believed I was giving away for free, I had quietly attached an invoice, and I never told anybody, and I am not sure I even told myself. It was not only for money. If it had been only money it would have been easier to spot. It was payable in attention, in somebody saying they saw it, in some small sign that the thing I made had landed somewhere and not just sailed off into nothing. It was a bill for proof that it mattered. I handed people what I called a gift and stapled a bill to the back of it in ink only I could read, and then I stood around wondering why nobody paid it. Nobody paid it because nobody ever agreed to. Nobody even knew it was there. I am finding it now, in my own handwriting, and I do not remember writing it.
Now I know how this is supposed to go. This is the part where I tell you I tore the invoice up and something in me went quiet and I made my peace. And I could write that. It would sound good. But there is a version of this where the whole graceful little ceremony is a lie I am telling to make a plain failure feel like a choice, and I would rather say that out loud than hide behind the pretty version. Maybe I tried to sell my work, it mostly did not sell, that hurt, and now I am translating a business that did not work into spiritual language so it stops stinging. Maybe love for love's sake is just what a man says after he holds the work out for a while and almost nobody reaches for it. Maybe it is that I am scared to ask again and get the same silence back, so I have decided in advance that I never really wanted the answer. There is a kind of control you grab by declaring that the thing you could not get was never the thing you wanted. I know that move. I have made it. And some of it is happening right now, in me, while I write this. I cannot cleanly separate the letting go from the licking of the wound. They are the same breath. I mean every word of this, and that does not make the motive clean. I still want the money. I still want somebody to see it.
And yet there is one line I can draw through all of that mess that holds. Wanting something does not automatically turn it into an expectation. I can still ask without chasing it down the street. I can hope the work carries me someday without requiring it to carry me before I let myself believe it was worth making at all. I had all of those mashed into one lump, and the invoice was the worst part of the lump. The invoice was the requirement. It was the clause that said none of this counts unless the payment comes back to prove it counted. That is the only thing I am tearing up. Not the hope.
I tore up the invoice, not the hope.
I can still hope this comes back to me one day. I have just stopped making that hope the reason I am allowed to make the work today.
There is a trap even in this, and I can feel it. The easy next move is to decide authenticity is the real currency, that honesty is what finally sells, and to start performing my sincerity because it might move what the sales pitch could not. That is not a way out. That is the same invoice in nicer handwriting. So I am not doing it. The bills are still real. Love does not pay for the hosting or the connections or the next book or the tools or the hours or the plain fact of staying alive. I am not denying a dollar of it. I am only refusing to let a payment that may never come decide whether what I made today was worth making.
The tip jar is still on the counter. I did not take it down. If something lands in it someday I will be glad, more than I should probably admit. I am just not going to stand over it anymore, willing it, waiting for it to fill up so it can finally tell me the thing I keep asking it to tell me. So I am stepping back and getting to work, and the jar can sit there in the corner of my eye where it belongs. I do not know if this is wisdom or just the sound a man makes when he is worn out and trying to save face. It is probably both. What I know is that right now, under the conditions I actually have, the work is getting made from love, for love's sake, because that is the only reason left standing, and it still gets me up in the morning to do it again.
From The Grey Zone
The work keeps getting made under the same conditions this note describes: doors open, jar on the counter, no invoice stapled to the back of it. There is more of it here. https://thegreyzone.xyz
Tip the Kitchen
Nothing here is a bill. If the work has meant something to you and you feel like putting something in the jar, I will be glad, and if you do not, I am still glad you came and read it. https://ko-fi.com/mastergreygray
Take what's useful. Leave what isn't.