Playing with Passive Income

 Finding an at-home job hasn’t been particularly successful but I admit, I don’t put a ton of effort into it. I still have health issues I’m working to identify, treat, hopefully resolve this year so not only are my physical abilities limited, but my ability to handle stress is as well.

I’m going to hop off-topic before I even really started (sorry, post heading) to say I went to an ophthalmologist with my left eye annoyed with a persistent floater and twitching in the upper eyelid. Possible glaucoma, failed the pressure test, but only slightly so she’s going to wait a year, check again, see if anything needs to be done. I now need glasses, which I also suspected when it comes to reading anything on TV, opted for no-line bifocals since my livelihoods rather often rely on reading screens. I’m excited to start seeing better again but it’ll be a couple of weeks before I get the glasses and a couple of weeks of constant wear before I can switch to ‘as needed’.

Needless to say, that gave me some small peace of mind and explains why my visual struggles have been contributing to those stealthy rising stress issues. It’s made me all the more determined to ‘use it before I lose it’. My two crochet patterns for sale have been popping up a bit of passive income and crochet is one thing I can do without a ton of visual strain. I often come up with ideas and am excited to find when they’ve never been done in crochet. No competition, no accusations of copying. I’ve started keeping a book and writing down ideas, researching their availability and amassing a potential list of unique patterns that may prove lucrative.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a young, healthy body. My energy levels aren’t reliable and I never seem to have the experience employers ask for to pay me a salary I do have the skill to deserve. I’ve thought a lot about the value of inspiration and my house-elf way of planting secret seeds of wonder through my designs and patterns and, well, being the unconventional sort, the security and stability I want so badly just sputters out on conventional paths.

So where does that leave me?

Passive income. As long as my country can offer insurance that I can’t afford to keep producing patterns and designs I can get by on, I have some hope. If I sell a lot, it will present new problems as I do have to be taxed on income reaching a certain point. However, I will be selling on one platform that does track that activity for me.

So I can still pursue passion projects that may not earn me a cent, squeezing in a new addition to my pattern library, hopefully building a level of passive income that makes up for the struggles and frustrations of narrowed abilities. I think, like many artists, aiming for that sweet spot where I’m earning enough for necessities, emergencies and even a few luxuries will more than make up for the lost prospect of ever retiring.

I put too much hope into making writing and drawing boost my income but those things take a tremendous amount of time and, without a secure income, can lead to despair for the failure of a minimum turnout to make it worth hoarding all of my resources.

So I’d love to put this to the test while I struggle to make sense of medical issues. I can’t just sit and wait for a healthy me to put things in motion. Stasis is brutal for me. I think developing patterns will allow me to exercise creativity with my current challenges limiting others.

Don’t mean to sound vague but I’ve drilled these issues over many blog posts and I’m not being secretive. I’m dealing with localized and all-over pain, ADHD, sun sensitivity, annoying allergies, constant lethargy, hormonal shifts… I’m sure there’s more but it’s not that interesting. I’ve struggled with these things for at least half of my life if not more and rarely had the insurance to ever do anything about it and sometimes the treatment was worse than the disease. I’ve also detailed extremities of exercise and diet that toed the line of what might actually be safe or effective at all. They’re boring and irritating and get too much of my headspace but also consume and determine what I can actually do to distract myself from it.

I look forward to being able to crochet, document and use graphic design to make some beautiful patterns and help others make them too. I’m glad the unexpected fortune of a few humble sales prodded me into the possibility. I’ll take it.