It is about time I talked about money here in my diary, or specifically my lack of it.

I am not adjusting well to the radical drop in disposable income I have experienced in this new year. For those of you who do not remember what I am pretty sure I wrote about in here before, my rent went from $300 to $380 in the new year, a net loss of eighty dollars a month.

That would be a blow even to an employed person, but I have an income of around $670 per month, and so this financial setback represents a loss of slightly under twelve percent of my income, or twenty one percent of my disposable income.

And when you are living on as little as I am, you feel every one of those percentage points like someone is carving them out of your flesh with a dull and ragged knife.

Normally, I don’t like talking about money. I like to think of myself as creative and resourceful enough to find a way to enjoy myself and keep bopping along regardless of how much money I have in my pocket. After all, I survived many years with no income at all, so anything has to be better than that, right?

Wrong. Sure, I survived, but I was very depressed. And I was mooching off others to survive, and that was a massive black hole of negative self esteem right there.

At least now, I am not mooching off the people close to me. I am mooching off the taxpayers of British Columbia in general. For me, that is big progress, and it’s how I have been living for the last twelve years or so.

But back to my emotional state and how it ties to my financial estate. The truth is, the money in my wallet has an enormous impact on my emotional state, and I am really beginning to feel that now.

I had one month’s grace, because I had money left over from Xmas gifts plus a GST/HST refund check to protect me from the gallows cold. But all that is gone now, and all I have between me and the wolves at the door is this thin plywood plinth with a picture of a castle gate stuck to it.

And the truth is, deep down where I really live, under my happy-go-lucky pretensions, I am someone with deep deep need for material security. I need money in order to feel secure, to feel safe, to feel like I hve some kind of protection from the cold harsh world. I need money to have access to the big and small pleasures that keep people sane and that tell them they are good dogs because they are being rewarded.

Being depressed is bad enough. Being depressed and poor is a terrible double whammy.

In fact, I honestly wonder how much of my depression comes from my poverty. It seems entirely plausible to me that if I just had a better income, even just a minimum wage income, I would be a much happier and less anxious and depressed person.

Too bad the depression makes it impossible for me to work. It’s a hell of a catch, that Catch 22.

I mean, it is not like I have a lot of prospects for improving my income before the depression goes.

They say you can work from home, but everything I have seen along those lines smells strongly of being a total scam. The working from home dream is an attractive one, but it is for telecommuting professionals, not fat beached whales like myself.

In theory, that is what the writing is about, a way for me to make money on my own and try to dig my way out of this deep dark cold pit that I call home.

And perhaps eventually it will do so. I am not counting myself out. But at the rate at which I am progressing now, I am not going to get anywhere with that any time soon. I am still far too prone to let the days go by and watch my life drip away while I do nothing to improve it. It is a rare day when I can summon the energy and momentum and focus and most of all the confidence to actually face the world long enough to make a furtive attempt to advance myself as a writer before scuttling back into my cave.

Sure, it’s cold, and dark, and poisonous, and killing me, but hey, it’s home.

Perhaps I should put the high artistic ideals to the side for now, and when I have trouble finding the motivation to go find places to submit my work or looking for writing contests to enter, I should just unleash my basically greedy nature and just think about the money.

After all, lots of prominent, well respected, now official part of the pantheon of literary immortals type writers have written, at least at first, exclusively with money on their minds. History is full of great writers who starting writing not because they felt the delicate stirrings of the breath of of their muse tickling their talent buds, but because they had failed at a lot of real world things and this was a last ditch attempt to get money for the rent.

And I am a flexible and creative enough person to think that I could take any set of requirements and make something good. Even if I took to writing Harlequin romances, mine would be better than the average, because I would meet all their arcane requirements and still write a more satisfying and interesting tale than the average hack.

So maybe the real lesson I should take from all I have discussed tonight is that I should give up on finding my deep down ambition and instead learn to rely on my much more reliable and long standing greed. Money money money! I wannit.

I hope this is not the first step to becoming a conservative.