And that’s how I became an accidental contractor.

I’ve been at my parents’ house where time stood still. I have no idea what day of the week it is.

Or what season. I stepped outside this morning and felt spring in the air; but the drive home was dark and gray as winter, but it was 70 degrees and humid.

One of the items C took with her when she left was a gift she had given to me for Christmas or my birthday, part of a planning system she had gotten into, it was basically a more involved, more complicated Myers-Briggs or occupational aptitude assessment. We got a hotel and spent the night ordering these values and concepts by priority. We had a hard time choosing only 4-6; it’s hard when there’s so many “good” things to choose from–like, yes “hard work” is a value, and so is “safety,” and so is “fun,” and “respect,” and I have to pick only two? But I want to inhabit them all?

I had entrepreneurship as one of my picks, but I recall C suggesting we drop it. So I dropped it, thinking, our selling stuff online and our renting a room and our wanting to start a farm isn’t entrepreneurial for entrepreneurialism’s sake–the goal isn’t just to work for myself. Maybe if that was my bag I’d have joined an MLM. If anything, the value or the goal these ventures represented was autonomy. They still are.

But I also remember thinking, “well hell, entrepreneurship had better be a value or else what am I doing?”

I think there’s a form of ambition that an “entrepreneur” (so many denotational quotes in this one!) often exhibits–maybe that’s what both of us were picking up on. This form of ambition can be vain, myopic, assured, self-important–none of which I’ve ever much honored in myself.

But. But. I’m in this process of changing my life, and trying to stoke its flames, and I am seeing how my ambitions are like gravity, persistent but easily escaped. I am seeing how–I’m not sure, comfort? fear? distraction? other ambitions?–something has prevented me from taking aim at my ambitions, and hustling to make them happen.

I think for a long time I’ve been hiding my gold.

A couple months ago I posted to FB, “what are other writers doing to make money?” An acquaintance wrote, “I’ve never been so idiotic to think that creative writing would be a source of income.” Meanwhile I’m listening to stand-up comedians say, “you have to be kind of crazy to think you can do this.”

I’ve been hiding my gold, lest someone think I was ambitious, or vain; lest someone see me as an idiot; lest someone see my crazy. I let someone else say, “you’re not an entrepreneur, right? Right?“

Another word for crazy:

wild

It’s all coming together. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job connecting the dots. But I see it.