summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2015-06-15 10:11 am
summercomfort) wrote2015-06-15 10:11 am
1 Year
So it's been a year since I left my old job and started my new one.
There's a lot of this job that I aggressively don't like doing, and so I procrastinate a lot. And there isn't enough of the stuff that I *do* like to properly spread out the parts that I don't like. And I desperately miss the sense of scheduling and pacing of my old job. I miss having something to work towards every day.
Ironically, I'm happiest when the shipping person is gone and I can do shipping, because that's something that I can work on every day, that has a clear daily deadline for. Now that he's back, I've fallen back into the malaise of "everything needs to be done..... later"
Part of me also feel like I've discarded a shell of my former self. Now that I'm not a teacher at a high class private school, I've basically stopped being socially competent. Sometimes I turn it back on and I'm like "whoa, this is who I used to be." In the mean time, I've let too many emails slide, I've dropped out of contact with my school colleagues. As the year progressed, turning on that persona has gotten harder and harder. Basically I've become a recluse over the last half year. It's like a return to middle school: lacking external pressues, I basically disengage completely.
There are some plusses to this -- I've had a year of just waking up when I feel like it (usually around 8:30-9am, and that has been *bliss*. I think that alone has countered all of the bad eating habits I've let myself fall into. I've been trapped in this state of ennui, yes, but at the same time, I'm not anxious and stressed. I don't think my sense of purposelessness is any more than at my previous job, it's just no longer masked by that "gotta get shit done" veneer.
But yanno what? I think I'm ready to re-engage again. In a calm, measured way (versus the various creative flailing that I've been doing on tumblr this last half year, and the various "last minute deadline panic" flailing that I've been doing at my job.) I need to do it in a way that's *not* just a turning on of my old persona, because that persona was too stressed to even have regular periods.
What are the things that I want to have in the new "me" that will also be sustainable?
I want to be RESPONSIBLE:
- assign myself a daily list of tasks that can be completed by 5pm, and then holding myself to those tasks, no matter how much I want to procrastinate
- the trade-off here is that by getting these things done by 5pm, that allows me to *not think about work* at home.
- I want to have better self control: eat better, sleep better, relax better.
I want to do things that MOVE MY LIFE FORWARD:
- I think that involves being a parent.
- It also involves doing creative work that I'm proud of.
I wrote a thing here about interacting with friends and creative work, but I'm not done thinking about it yet, so I'm gonna throw it behind a cut and come back to it later.
I want to engage with humans through creative work.
- This is a part of teaching that I really miss! I miss structuring a lesson and then taking the kids through it by constantly assessing how well they are learning something. I miss this assessment-progress-feedback cycle: it made the kids better and also made me better.
- The idea of you're more creative when you want to give to others came across my tumblr dash a few days ago, and I've been chewing on it since. I mean, the importance of an audience has always been a given in creative work, but I really like the emphasis here on a *giving* relationship.
- That said, I really like knowing how my friends' lives are going???? in a way that's completely divorced from their and my creative endeavors? So it's like a venn diagram type thing.
I also have all these followers for my fandom blog that I don't know what to do with. I don't just want to be making stuff *for them* -- that's kind of pandering, and it also locks me in to a specific "type". I don't know why they're following me, and a part of me wonders if I should put that much weight on the reason anyways -- there's no way I can follow all of them back, not even BNF or whatever.
On the other hand, I do like drawing stuff for my Patreon, where I'm specifically engaging with 8-11 individuals. Am I okay with my work being tailored to a smaller audience in exchange for feeling a more personal connection to said people? It goes back to that quote about the difference between shouting creatively into a void versus the intimate creativity amongst friends.
But then the money thing comes into it. Right now the Patreon is basically at cost, and I intend to keep it that way. But by putting a value (even a cost-of-materials) value to my creative work, it makes me more confused about creative work I do for friends outside of the patreon context.
Oh god this is such a confused jumble. :/
There's a lot of this job that I aggressively don't like doing, and so I procrastinate a lot. And there isn't enough of the stuff that I *do* like to properly spread out the parts that I don't like. And I desperately miss the sense of scheduling and pacing of my old job. I miss having something to work towards every day.
Ironically, I'm happiest when the shipping person is gone and I can do shipping, because that's something that I can work on every day, that has a clear daily deadline for. Now that he's back, I've fallen back into the malaise of "everything needs to be done..... later"
Part of me also feel like I've discarded a shell of my former self. Now that I'm not a teacher at a high class private school, I've basically stopped being socially competent. Sometimes I turn it back on and I'm like "whoa, this is who I used to be." In the mean time, I've let too many emails slide, I've dropped out of contact with my school colleagues. As the year progressed, turning on that persona has gotten harder and harder. Basically I've become a recluse over the last half year. It's like a return to middle school: lacking external pressues, I basically disengage completely.
There are some plusses to this -- I've had a year of just waking up when I feel like it (usually around 8:30-9am, and that has been *bliss*. I think that alone has countered all of the bad eating habits I've let myself fall into. I've been trapped in this state of ennui, yes, but at the same time, I'm not anxious and stressed. I don't think my sense of purposelessness is any more than at my previous job, it's just no longer masked by that "gotta get shit done" veneer.
But yanno what? I think I'm ready to re-engage again. In a calm, measured way (versus the various creative flailing that I've been doing on tumblr this last half year, and the various "last minute deadline panic" flailing that I've been doing at my job.) I need to do it in a way that's *not* just a turning on of my old persona, because that persona was too stressed to even have regular periods.
What are the things that I want to have in the new "me" that will also be sustainable?
I want to be RESPONSIBLE:
- assign myself a daily list of tasks that can be completed by 5pm, and then holding myself to those tasks, no matter how much I want to procrastinate
- the trade-off here is that by getting these things done by 5pm, that allows me to *not think about work* at home.
- I want to have better self control: eat better, sleep better, relax better.
I want to do things that MOVE MY LIFE FORWARD:
- I think that involves being a parent.
- It also involves doing creative work that I'm proud of.
I wrote a thing here about interacting with friends and creative work, but I'm not done thinking about it yet, so I'm gonna throw it behind a cut and come back to it later.
I want to engage with humans through creative work.
- This is a part of teaching that I really miss! I miss structuring a lesson and then taking the kids through it by constantly assessing how well they are learning something. I miss this assessment-progress-feedback cycle: it made the kids better and also made me better.
- The idea of you're more creative when you want to give to others came across my tumblr dash a few days ago, and I've been chewing on it since. I mean, the importance of an audience has always been a given in creative work, but I really like the emphasis here on a *giving* relationship.
- That said, I really like knowing how my friends' lives are going???? in a way that's completely divorced from their and my creative endeavors? So it's like a venn diagram type thing.
I also have all these followers for my fandom blog that I don't know what to do with. I don't just want to be making stuff *for them* -- that's kind of pandering, and it also locks me in to a specific "type". I don't know why they're following me, and a part of me wonders if I should put that much weight on the reason anyways -- there's no way I can follow all of them back, not even BNF or whatever.
On the other hand, I do like drawing stuff for my Patreon, where I'm specifically engaging with 8-11 individuals. Am I okay with my work being tailored to a smaller audience in exchange for feeling a more personal connection to said people? It goes back to that quote about the difference between shouting creatively into a void versus the intimate creativity amongst friends.
But then the money thing comes into it. Right now the Patreon is basically at cost, and I intend to keep it that way. But by putting a value (even a cost-of-materials) value to my creative work, it makes me more confused about creative work I do for friends outside of the patreon context.
Oh god this is such a confused jumble. :/