People wonder why I am not motivated by money. That one is easy, I have never had money so I don’t know what having money is like. The employers I do the most for wonder why I’m not motivated by money when they haven’t paid me enough to even live on my own in a modest apartment. Hope comes from crumbs. When you are making enough to have a modest apartment you settle in and think about a starter home if you just work harder. Since I’m still stuck not living on my own there is no pipeline for me.

I have always been motivated by muses, though I didn’t realize it formally until recently. My first muse was my grandpa on my mom’s side. He was a very kind and generous man. At age 14, I showed him how I got my self-booting slideshow in an Amiga public domain disk catalog, and he was proud of me. There was a teacher in the Amiga community I was close with who was my muse the next year. As a junior in high school, my muse was a high school crush who was a great artist. My iris painting was for her. That one broke up when she ended up dating someone who wasn’t me, and my senior year, I turned inward.

I went to a Christian college which there was an intense amount of good as well as bad swirling around. The good was my employers, I had the highest respect for my student employment boss and my other boss who I worked with the first two years out of college. Fast forward to 2015 to 2019 and my muse was a poet who ran an open mic I performed at.

I no longer have a muse and my work suffers or doesn’t happen at all because of it. Some people can have abstract muses like “God” or “truth,” but my mind can’t do that.