A rough month

November was a really mixed month: here's the last three weeks of it.

☑ weekly planner accountability check-in x2 Really pretty art in November, even if it forces me to dig out a white gel pen to be able to read things. pic.twitter.com/MCPVHZWr9z

— sassa @ davesprite literature club (@AWildSassaApprs) November 26, 2019

Might as well do my ☑ weekly planner accountability check-in post while I'm here! pic.twitter.com/6hBk9h4Ku5

— sassa @ davesprite literature club (@AWildSassaApprs) December 2, 2019

Had my first panic attack in ages, and been struggling with a lot of self-doubt and ADD nipping at my brain at every turn. Hard to focus and hard to keep myself moving forward. This may sound like I'm disheartened, but I'm not - I know I can work through this. But I also want to acknowledge the fact that I'm struggling - ignoring it and pretending that everything is going great would only do me a disservice.

It's honestly a huge thing for me to be able to see that I'm struggling and talk about it honestly, rather than just trying to buck myself up and keep going. I mean, obviously I want to keep going, but so often the process of cheering myself up involves basically finding ways to numb my fears or pretend they don't exist, looking sidelong at them while continuing to plaster on a smile. Whereas being able to come here today and just acknowledge I'm struggling, and be okay with the feeling... that's a difficult thing for me to do. But, like. It's progress. So, woo. Progress.

But I am telling myself (and hoping it is true) that if I just keep pushing ahead (while not looking away from my problems) and keep chipping away at my goals, eventually I'll get out of the rut I started to fall into towards mid-November.

I know it's a fear-based rut, along with a few additional things. I'm not quite sure how to pull myself out of it, but until I hit on the thing that shakes the cobwebs out of my brain, I'll keep doing little things to chip away at it.

Hhh... actually I should mention I've been gaming basically every evening for the last two weeks, from about 10pm (when my partner goes to sleep so I have the house/TV to myself) to, on average, 2am. Light night, 3:30am. Even though I'm sleeping in, I'm being woken up in the morning by K getting ready for work and just... not keeping the same schedule as everyone else. Even though in my soul I'm a night owl, we live, as they say, in a Society, and keeping these hours is probably throwing me out of whack.

But why did I start? Probably because it's a comfort food... it's an RPG (The Outer Worlds) and slowly seeing my stats increase, helping NPCs and checking off sidequests is a very calming, restorative experience for me. Basically, I feel lacking in self care and nurture and all those relax-y type things, and I'm filling those needs with 4-6 hour late night gaming sessions.

But... as well as my fears of failure pushing back against me, and my ADD... probably the excess gaming/disrupted sleep cycle isn't helping. So... I really don't want to, but I think I have to commit to not doing those long nights at least for a few weeks. Maybe slowly dial it back, seetting a reminder at midnight to stop? I think so long as I go to bed by 11pm it's not too bad, and certainly would probably be better for me than 2-4am.

Sigh... I don't want to though... the comfort has been nice. It's been a rough month for having to support other people emotionally and care for an unwell cat... so I really need that self-care and nurturing. I just need to make more time for it during respectable hours...

And here we are. Six months of posting.

Here's last week's planner usage:

☑ weekly planner accountability check in. Bye, June! pic.twitter.com/js5fpWHc5p

— sassa: 100% (@AWildSassaApprs) July 4, 2019

I've always thought of myself as a positive person, but I think it's more that I'm constantly plagued by negative thoughts, which I then positive-talk myself out of. So I'm all 'Wow, I'm such a positive person, I always try to make the most of bad things!' when... a large number of the bad things are absolutely spawned by my own head to start with. I get the impression not everyone is constantly fighting a cavalcade of 'you are going to fail, you are tolerated by others at best, your skills are puny and your mental capacity is declining daily' thoughts continuously as they go about their day.

Or am I wrong? Are we all scared, all the time, and it's just some people say their lived experience is different? I just don't know.

I say this because on Sunday I finished reading Elanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland (adored it, and Coupland's writing really can't be described without throwing in the word 'craftmanship') and the protagonist was a very relatable woman whose way of thinking made me reflect on my own quite a lot. And my self-image as a "positive" person.

Positive thinking is a skill I have learned to manage the negative thinking, which is something so innate to me I don't even see it half the time.

I say it's innate, but was I born like that? I don't think so. But the negative thinking was embedded early and young for a variety of reasons, and while I can manage it, I do think it will be a part of me forever, at this point. I'm too old now to heal those places. They're too deep, now. A splinter that melded with my bones.

And that's okay. We don't need to cure everything ailing us to still be capable of doing what we want to do with our lives. It's okay sometimes just to simply get by on some counts.

Today someone has contacted me about potential work they'd like me to do, which is great timing as I've almost completed my current big piece of work. And my immediate reaction inside my head was "That's great - oh no, they're local, they're going to meet me to discuss the project and then immediately pull out when they see how uncharismatic I am in real life compared to the way I present online. It won't matter how good my portfolio is or how suitable I am in terms of skill. I'm doomed. As soon as they see me they'll want to run. My LinkedIn profile picture is the only time I've looked attractive in the last three years."

You might scoff at this, but as a woman, I've experienced my own looks working both against and for me in a variety of situations. My fear of being judged for my looks is something I learned, not something I was born with. And when a man is offering you a job, there's two fears: you don't want him to think you're attractive, because he might treat you worse for it. And you don't want him to think you're ugly, for the exact same reason.The perfect world is one in which he thinks you are perfectly, unremarkably average, neither offensive to the eye or desirable.

If you're a man reading this, or a woman who feels men have never treated her differently for how she looks: please just trust that this is my experience. If you aren't reading this pile of journal-ish self-analysis with the assumption that I'm recording what's is true for my lived experience as, well, me, then, you're kind of wasting your time. This is not intended as some kind of PA-attack on all men, I'm just saying that this is something I've learned to be as careful about as possible, in order to avoid bad consequences with _some_ men. And when meeting a man you don't know, it's something you have to consider extra carefully if you're like me.

Still. While the risk is worth minimising through actions (dress as well as possible to present yourself as capable, though be sure to look a little frumpy, but in a put-together way.) I know my thinking is also on the extreme catastrophic end of things - even if it's worth being careful, there's no need to assume this piece of good luck will actually end in disaster. And even if this person finds my face ugly, they might still be happy to hire me. And even if, conversely, they find me attractive, they might be the kind of guy who isn't a jerk about that.

There's no point to all this writing, as usual. Just venting what's on my mind. And I definitely recommend reading Elanor Rigby. Though if you don't like a tough of the surreal mixed into your literary fiction, you might not like Coupland's work. But if you're like me, that kind of thing is a bonus!

February - March: I still have so much to learn

accountability check-in w my planner... h, pic.twitter.com/52eH3tb3ey

— sassa loves and appreciates u (@AWildSassaApprs) March 5, 2019

I'm an INFJ (and consistently test as one) and while you can't put everything on your type, the description really works for me, and learning about typical INFJ strengths and weaknesses has been a real help.

One INFJ trait is that we tend to see the big picture, pull together a lot of information well to make assessments but... get lost when it comes to the details.

I'm lost.

I'm doing my best. I think another thing I need to change is that I need to stop saying things like "work on Discord bot" as a checkbox, because that's _so vague_. Like, when is that box checked? When I totally code, implement, document, and share it (definitely not something I can do in one day right now). Is it "once I've started at this code for two hours, check the box?" (Yes, I'm aware of S.M.A.R.T. goals)

But even saying "Work on Discord bot for two hours"... rubs me the wrong way. Because sometimes you make so much progress in two hours, and other times, barely any at all. It's the same with saying something like "configure [feature X]" when... that could take two hours, or twenty, and at this point I don't know! Which means setting those daily three tasks that will make me stay focused and feel confident because way more stressful than I anticipated. Especially when you wind up checking none of the boxes.

How do I just... make myself function at 100% all the time? That's reasonable, right? Haha...

I also still struggle to take breaks that actually mean anything. My "breaks" are usually twitter, which, isn't really restoring energy... but if I don't, when am I gonna socialise?

Maybe I should try setting objectives in the morning, and then at the end of the day, recording three things I achieved... so I can set an objective of "work on Discord bot" and if that's all I do that day, maybe I can find three things I got out of it? Like, "completed feature X" "learned about AWS setups" and "learned about tracking down permissions conflicts and ownership issues with plugins".

It feels like cheating, but the thing is, _I'm_ the one setting the rules. And the KPIs! Everything I'm doing - the planner, the accountability tweeting, this blog - is all an attempt to improve myself - improve how I work now that I'm working on my own, a totally new thing for me - improve how I manage my projects - improve how I manage my own mind.

And I can't improve if I don't experiment. And beating myself up over failures won't let me get stronger, either. But not being afraid of failure is so hard for me, even when the cost of that failure is nothing but my own self-esteem - and only forced on me, by me.

I'm so easily disheartened. It's all too easy to over-promise to myself, under-deliver, and then find myself unable to focus on my work because I'm so demoralised over my inability to do something there's no way I'd ask someone else to do in that short a period of time, let alone when they're working on other projects at the same time.

I just don't know how to be realistic. I get S.M.A.R.T., but that whole "Realistic" part of the phrase?

I have. No. Idea. How to be realistic. And it's making me feel so lost.

I don't really know exactly how to tackle this right now. All I can really do is keep attempting to learn more, and solve the issue in new ways, and hope that eventually, one of them will work for me.

February 2019: Week 1

It's that time again!

Week 5 planner check-in! I'm living for the buff Morgana snowman. pic.twitter.com/61sy2evhBI

— sassa loves and appreciates u (@AWildSassaApprs) February 5, 2019

Something I've been a little hesitant to talk about publicly, but I do want to touch on at least a little today, is just how much my last job took my brain to pieces and then ran a magnet over the pieces. (Let's pretend my brain is some kinda magnetic storage device so that this metaphor actually works).

Anyway; I was scrambled.

It's frustrating looking back at some of the work I was embarking upon five years ago, and how all that work and passion drained out of me so quickly over the time between then and now.

My skills were a perfect fit for the job. If anything, I was over-qualified. (After years of downplaying my own skills and achievements, I'm trying to treat myself like I would someone else. That is: well. Which includes recognising my own skills (as well as my weaknesses)).

So yeah. I'm skilled. I spent years honing those skills. On paper, the job was a good match.

Sadly the work environment is something difficult to gauge on a job description - and even in an interview. But I was desperate to build up my savings after years of living paycheck to paycheck, and this job paid better than anything else I'd ever done - so I stuck with it.

Those five years can't be gotten back, no matter how much I'd like to. And besides, I got what I was striving for: enough savings that I can now attempt something new, and riskier.

What surprised me, on taking this new step for my career, is just how badly I really was scrambled from that last job. I figured hey, leave, it might take a month for you to let off steam and remember who you are, but after that you can work just as effectively as you always did, but in a totally new career setting.

Hah. Hahahah. A month.

I have been working ever since leaving my last job, but nowhere near the intensity I'd imagined I'd be at by now. It's now been four months, and I'm honestly only just beginning to find my feet.

I would have been angry at myself before. Setting unrealistic standards and then kicking myself when I inevitably don't meet them is kind of my thing.

Or, it was my thing.

I don't intend to do that to myself any more.

If I want to succeed as a freelancer, I have to be my own number one ally. And that's going to take a while to learn.

And this week's lesson is absolutely: transitioning from one career to another, even if you've been saving to do this for years, doesn't happen seamlessly just because the date changed and you're now called something else. Healing from five years of being constantly gaslit by your boss (amongst many other issues at that workplace) doesn't instantly happen once you haven't seen them for four weeks. If I was saying this to someone else, I'd believe it, but saying it to myself, all I hear is 'lazy!' 'worthless!' 'weak!'.

But like I said, I want to be an ally to myself from now on. I want to give myself the benefit of the doubt, and the opportunity to breathe and develop a new routine. Just like I would for someone who isn't me.

Anyway, all that said, I actually feel excited for the future for the first time in a long time. I wasn't excited when I left my last job. I was grateful it was over, but feeling anything other than the scream of the electrons all misaligned in my brain was tough.

Now, I'm actually excited. Well, first, I spent the week above feeling kinda terrified, wondering if I'm really cut out to do this, and if I have any hope of success at all.

But I let myself feel that fear, rather than fighting it, and then: I acted. Just little things. Started a few balls rolling towards what I want my life to be life, along with keeping up the level of work I was and have been doing so far. In another month, I think things will be even better.

I can't predict exactly how much more I'll have healed, how much more efficient I'll be, and how many new leads I'll have on future freelancing gigs in another four weeks.

But I believe if I keep moving forward, and keep facing these fears, and keep working on being a friend to myself: things will get better. Every month, they'll be better.

And how can I be unhappy with that? (I can, because part of me still wants to Achieve and Succeed Like Some Kind of Demi-God regardless of reality, but I'm getting better at looking at those feelings and then allowing myself a little slack to say: okay, but until Zeus himself admits to fathering one of my ancestors, maybe just aim to keep on spiralling upwards, lining up those electrons in my head carefully and slowly, one by one).