summercomfort (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
summercomfort) wrote2022-12-31 10:27 am
summercomfort) wrote2022-12-31 10:27 am
2022 year in review
Look, I know that 2022 happened, but for some reason, it still feels like 2020. Like... those other 2 years aren't real or something???
This year has really been one of putting one foot in front of the other. I was telling spouse that I *know* I've done things, and that I had feelings about them (usually positive) while the things were happening, but when I think back, it's really hard to remember what exactly I did, and what feelings I had. He thinks that makes me a flavor of depressed, which may be true, but that's neither here nor there for the time being.
Anyways, 2022 has really been the "let's all pretend that the pandemic is over!" year. 2021-2022 was basically a normal school year, except that everyone was wearing masks in the classroom and we were doing weekly COVID tests. In the 2022-2023 school year, about 2/3rds of the students have stopped wearing masks in the classroom, though we do biweekly antigen tests. People are also traveling more, including us! In February we went to Tahoe for the first time, because Miss Rutabaga wanted to see snow, then in April we visited family in Chicago, and in July we visited family in Vermont (and then got COVID, woo). We're still pretty cautious about masking, but it seems like very few others are.
I think a big life change this past year is that Miss Rutabaga is now attending the same school as I am, and we're out the house by 7:15am and get home at 6:15pm, which makes for very long days. On the other hand, Spouse is now fully work-from-home. What that means is that I get home completely exhausted and peopled-out. Thankfully spouse takes over and I get a chance to decompress, but it just really saps my energy for the rest of the evening. And then after Miss Rutabaga is asleep, spouse is tired and needs to decompress, whereas I start feeling antsy but also tired. Our creative/productive/relaxation energies never seem to quite sync up. It's the same for Saturday afternoon, since now Miss Rutabaga and I do Chinese School together. This has been a year of trying, not quite successfully, to find the right balance for the evening -- sometimes we go too far in one direction and spend the post-Rutabaga-bedtime time working on our own stuff (often work) and not interacting. Sometimes we go too far the other way and I'm left with no self time to be creative. It's never quite the right blend of spouse/personal time and creative/productive/relaxation time, which has been frustrating. It's something that we're actively trying to address, though, so hopefully it'll be better in 2023. Part of it will be the both of us really leaning into the anti-hustle at work (I prefer "anti-hustle" as a term, versus "quiet quitting"). (Sometimes I'm like "why am I so exhausted all the time?" and then I'm like "oh yeah I'm working 50+ hours per week." 0_0) Part of it is figuring out a better day-to-day routine that would allow us to sync up a bit more. Part of it is being more deliberate about how we spend our evenings.
I had high hopes for doing creative work this summer, but instead my creative flow kind of got gunked up. Looking back, I think a couple things happened:
- This summer, instead of 9am-5pm preschool, Miss Rutabaga had summer camp from 9am-3pm. I thought it'd be nice to have shorter school days in the summer so that Miss Rutabaga can have a feeling of "summer" that's different from normal school, but I didn't count on how much it impacted my self time. Basically, after I dropped her off and got home, it would be 9:30am. Putzing around the internet and getting my brain jumpstarted took me to 10:30 or 11am, and then it was just an hour before lunch. I enjoyed getting lunch with spouse, but that meant that I was back in "do stuff" mode at 1:30pm, and by that point, I had about an hour before I had to go pick up Miss Rutabaga again. So 9am-3pm really came out to be two 1-ish hour chunks of self work time, which really isn't enough to get the creative juices going. Next year, maybe I can ask spouse to do morning drop-off, which would then free up some brain runway time in the morning?
- I was working on a couple of comics that were "serious" -- Happy Birthday Steve and my anthology comic, so drawing wasn't particularly fun, and it felt like a chore. (I've also run out of good crime procedurals to watch?!)
- A coworker wanted me to do something mid-July, which I was mentally planning to do in August. I didn't want to do it in July, but promised that I would, so I procrastinated on it for about 2 weeks (and ended up doing it in August anyway), but that just generated a lot of icky feeling of "I *should* be doing ..." (So next year, I really need to protect July as sacred)
- I was modding STS, which was a bingo this year. Generating bingo prompts was lots of fun, and I had a bunch of ideas for fics that I started. ... But after hitting my head against them for the month of July, I finally realized that the way that these words generated a fic idea... doesn't actually work with my usual fic writing workflow. As in, I had these prompt words that I was trying to build a fic around, and so I made up a plot, and then started trying to write out the plot ... and it felt really wrong and weird and I kept not liking any of what I wrote. Finally, I realized it's because usually when I write fics, I start with a "what if" premise or scenario, and then try to explore that and suss out the themes as I go along, and I let the plot kind of happen as the themes/character arcs demand. So the Bingo setup was completely opposite of how I usually do things, and so I was writing things that felt like paint-by-numbers. Hence: a month of hitting my head against a wall and constantly writing crap. I managed to completely start afresh mid-August and got one fic done for the bingo, but wow, that was frustrating.
- The end result of all of the above is that I have a bunch of creative "todos" piled up -- half-drafted fics that I need to decide whether I can salvage, I still need to do more Anthology work, my Tape v Hurley comic isn't even drafted ... and so creative stuff feels like an obligation and not fun and rejuvenating. :/
Anyway, that's the saga of "How I managed to fuck up my own creative flow", and now I have to slowly work my way out of it. I've managed to draw a few pics and also finish a fic this winter break, which has been good. I just need to keep putting one step in front of the other.
Health-wise, it's the "oh yeah I've hit middle age, my metabolism has slowed down, so I need to recalibrate my diet and physical activity" thing. I'm doing ... okay?? at that since I started being more conscious about it starting October. Once again, small steps.
Oh! I got an EV and we did some good work re-organizing the dining room and living room, so our house is now only 40% trash pile, instead of the former 75%, so that's pretty good. And Miss Rutabaga has solidly hit the "kid" age where she is her own person and can have playdates and also understands that her parents sometimes need introvert time, so that's pretty rad, too.
All in all, 2022 has been a solidly "Meh" year, maybe even a bit of a "Grrgh" year, but I think I've started figuring out some stuff that will hopefully make 2023 better.
This year has really been one of putting one foot in front of the other. I was telling spouse that I *know* I've done things, and that I had feelings about them (usually positive) while the things were happening, but when I think back, it's really hard to remember what exactly I did, and what feelings I had. He thinks that makes me a flavor of depressed, which may be true, but that's neither here nor there for the time being.
Anyways, 2022 has really been the "let's all pretend that the pandemic is over!" year. 2021-2022 was basically a normal school year, except that everyone was wearing masks in the classroom and we were doing weekly COVID tests. In the 2022-2023 school year, about 2/3rds of the students have stopped wearing masks in the classroom, though we do biweekly antigen tests. People are also traveling more, including us! In February we went to Tahoe for the first time, because Miss Rutabaga wanted to see snow, then in April we visited family in Chicago, and in July we visited family in Vermont (and then got COVID, woo). We're still pretty cautious about masking, but it seems like very few others are.
I think a big life change this past year is that Miss Rutabaga is now attending the same school as I am, and we're out the house by 7:15am and get home at 6:15pm, which makes for very long days. On the other hand, Spouse is now fully work-from-home. What that means is that I get home completely exhausted and peopled-out. Thankfully spouse takes over and I get a chance to decompress, but it just really saps my energy for the rest of the evening. And then after Miss Rutabaga is asleep, spouse is tired and needs to decompress, whereas I start feeling antsy but also tired. Our creative/productive/relaxation energies never seem to quite sync up. It's the same for Saturday afternoon, since now Miss Rutabaga and I do Chinese School together. This has been a year of trying, not quite successfully, to find the right balance for the evening -- sometimes we go too far in one direction and spend the post-Rutabaga-bedtime time working on our own stuff (often work) and not interacting. Sometimes we go too far the other way and I'm left with no self time to be creative. It's never quite the right blend of spouse/personal time and creative/productive/relaxation time, which has been frustrating. It's something that we're actively trying to address, though, so hopefully it'll be better in 2023. Part of it will be the both of us really leaning into the anti-hustle at work (I prefer "anti-hustle" as a term, versus "quiet quitting"). (Sometimes I'm like "why am I so exhausted all the time?" and then I'm like "oh yeah I'm working 50+ hours per week." 0_0) Part of it is figuring out a better day-to-day routine that would allow us to sync up a bit more. Part of it is being more deliberate about how we spend our evenings.
I had high hopes for doing creative work this summer, but instead my creative flow kind of got gunked up. Looking back, I think a couple things happened:
- This summer, instead of 9am-5pm preschool, Miss Rutabaga had summer camp from 9am-3pm. I thought it'd be nice to have shorter school days in the summer so that Miss Rutabaga can have a feeling of "summer" that's different from normal school, but I didn't count on how much it impacted my self time. Basically, after I dropped her off and got home, it would be 9:30am. Putzing around the internet and getting my brain jumpstarted took me to 10:30 or 11am, and then it was just an hour before lunch. I enjoyed getting lunch with spouse, but that meant that I was back in "do stuff" mode at 1:30pm, and by that point, I had about an hour before I had to go pick up Miss Rutabaga again. So 9am-3pm really came out to be two 1-ish hour chunks of self work time, which really isn't enough to get the creative juices going. Next year, maybe I can ask spouse to do morning drop-off, which would then free up some brain runway time in the morning?
- I was working on a couple of comics that were "serious" -- Happy Birthday Steve and my anthology comic, so drawing wasn't particularly fun, and it felt like a chore. (I've also run out of good crime procedurals to watch?!)
- A coworker wanted me to do something mid-July, which I was mentally planning to do in August. I didn't want to do it in July, but promised that I would, so I procrastinated on it for about 2 weeks (and ended up doing it in August anyway), but that just generated a lot of icky feeling of "I *should* be doing ..." (So next year, I really need to protect July as sacred)
- I was modding STS, which was a bingo this year. Generating bingo prompts was lots of fun, and I had a bunch of ideas for fics that I started. ... But after hitting my head against them for the month of July, I finally realized that the way that these words generated a fic idea... doesn't actually work with my usual fic writing workflow. As in, I had these prompt words that I was trying to build a fic around, and so I made up a plot, and then started trying to write out the plot ... and it felt really wrong and weird and I kept not liking any of what I wrote. Finally, I realized it's because usually when I write fics, I start with a "what if" premise or scenario, and then try to explore that and suss out the themes as I go along, and I let the plot kind of happen as the themes/character arcs demand. So the Bingo setup was completely opposite of how I usually do things, and so I was writing things that felt like paint-by-numbers. Hence: a month of hitting my head against a wall and constantly writing crap. I managed to completely start afresh mid-August and got one fic done for the bingo, but wow, that was frustrating.
- The end result of all of the above is that I have a bunch of creative "todos" piled up -- half-drafted fics that I need to decide whether I can salvage, I still need to do more Anthology work, my Tape v Hurley comic isn't even drafted ... and so creative stuff feels like an obligation and not fun and rejuvenating. :/
Anyway, that's the saga of "How I managed to fuck up my own creative flow", and now I have to slowly work my way out of it. I've managed to draw a few pics and also finish a fic this winter break, which has been good. I just need to keep putting one step in front of the other.
Health-wise, it's the "oh yeah I've hit middle age, my metabolism has slowed down, so I need to recalibrate my diet and physical activity" thing. I'm doing ... okay?? at that since I started being more conscious about it starting October. Once again, small steps.
Oh! I got an EV and we did some good work re-organizing the dining room and living room, so our house is now only 40% trash pile, instead of the former 75%, so that's pretty good. And Miss Rutabaga has solidly hit the "kid" age where she is her own person and can have playdates and also understands that her parents sometimes need introvert time, so that's pretty rad, too.
All in all, 2022 has been a solidly "Meh" year, maybe even a bit of a "Grrgh" year, but I think I've started figuring out some stuff that will hopefully make 2023 better.
no subject
I also feel that "I know I've done things but I *feel* like I haven't done things" feeling. I know I've done things! I made a whole list! But the overall impression is malaise.
No constructive thoughts really but a sad fistbump of solidarity.
no subject
::sad fistbump:: XD
no subject
*cheers you on*