Ganarse la vida

As a kid, I never liked going to school. I guess, like many others, I found it an inhospitable place where they made you memorize things that, precisely because they had only been memorized, never sank in beyond the few hours the exam lasted.

I always felt that wasn’t my path. I could feel it deep inside, like a piece that didn’t fit. When I finished school, it became clear: I needed to learn at my own pace. If something interested me, I could spend hours absorbed in it. If it didn’t interest me in the slightest, I couldn’t even remember what it was about.

For a long time I thought I was a little broken. That I didn’t fit into conventional society because I couldn’t follow its rules. Or because, even when I could, I was never the best at it.

Later I understood that school prepares you to fit into a very specific machine. And of course, it doesn’t prepare you to live. In fact, it often convinces you that what you have to do is keep your head down and stay with the flock until the end of the line, because something wonderful is waiting for you there. But they’re just sending you to the slaughterhouse. And you’re going to die the same way as the girl in front of you.

What they promise you at the end of that line has a name. In English, you’d call it earning a living. In Spanish, we say ganarse la vida, which literally means earning your life.

It’s a beautiful expression, sadly used with a negative connotation, as if it were something bad. David Trueba, a Spanish screenwriter and director, has a book with that very title, and in it he writes:

Ganarse la vida is a most fortunate expression that unfortunately tends to carry a merely monetary, material meaning. Earning one’s life should be a person’s highest aspiration, but earning it in the sense of honoring it and living up to the gift.

If earning your life were only about money, everyone who has it would be happy. And they aren’t. What that phrase awakens in me is something I’ve been learning over the past year or so: earning your life is an act of hope. It’s leaving the flock they try to keep us in. It’s not fitting in and not caring. It’s feeling the strength inside you come out and grow stronger. It’s gaining confidence after every blow.

Life is a gift. We don’t have much time here. That’s why there’s nothing more beautiful than, instead of giving that time to something you couldn’t care less about, the way I felt about school, giving it to something that genuinely sparks your interest. Because we’re all good at something. And in the end, since nothing makes sense, why not give it that.

Life is earned in every good decision. In every relationship we choose to keep, and in every one we choose to let go because it doesn’t do us good. It’s earned in every battle against ourselves that we come out of standing, in every problem we manage to overcome, in every small moment we’re able to appreciate.

There’s no destination, only an ending. That’s why earning your life, in Trueba’s sense, should be our greatest ambition: honoring it to the fullest and filling it with everything we’re capable of doing.

This past year working on my own projects, I haven’t earned much of a living. But I feel more alive than ever. I’m learning to earn my life, to ganarme la vida, and that’s what matters.