Hello friend,
These past few months have been rather tumultuous. Many life changes. I’ve been starting to dip my toes into the recruiting/freelancing world, and I’m encountering all these complexes I have with rejection.
If you’re like me, the words ~Thank you for your application unfortunately~ triggers a very deep-rooted, internalized shame (sry if I sent you through that wormhole) that I sometimes don’t have the energy to face. I’ve done this thing for most of my life where I conflate academic/career/extracurricular success with my self-worth, and now it’s coming to bite me in the ass. Meaning — when I don’t have the energy to face those complexes, I shut down and numb myself and let that same numbing attitude seep into the rest of my life…
….which is decidedly bad.
My mental space will get cluttered with a lot of gunk and sadness and there are weeks where I will be utterly unable to get anything done, where I sit there watching Survivor (plowed through 30 episodes in a month ha ha wait what? If you are a potential employer pretend you didn’t read that) for hours on end.
But then there are also inexplicable weeks where I have unbounded energy and where I’ll do great work and won’t miss a single to-do and will get in my daily exercise and write 5,000 words and also make time for my friends and just live in this perpetual state of flow.
Weird. The most infuriating part is trying to pin down what separates those weeks from each other and finding just waaayy too many confounding variables.
See I’ve been living somewhat nomadically for the past half-ish year. As in, I haven’t stayed in one place for longer than a month. As in, I’ve been in a different city every other week or so, on average. As in, when one does this one finds that it all sounds quite fun (and yes some of it is) but quite a lot of it is also very very difficult.
It’s really hard to get settled and/or develop good habits that spur you on when willpower reserves get depleted, because once you get settled and develop good habits it’s time to get up and prepare for your next move, and then you lose all those environmental cues you worked so hard to imprint into your neural pathways.
At some point I gave up and went aarrrrhhhh who cares we’re all going to die anyway and … well yeah. Not the best mindset to have and also not an ideal attitude for sticking to long-term projects and *really* not great for an ENFP like myself who loves to start a bunch of things and not finish any of them.
Now, to be clear, I’ve got nothing against the whole digital nomad thing. I think there are ways to do it much better than I’ve tackled it this time around, and besides, the main reason for all this chaos is due to my current state (it’s not u, it’s me)
Right now my career path is surrounded by a bunch of question marks and I simply don’t have the energy to (a) move so frequently while (b) figuring out such a large pillar in my life and also (c) keep my mental health afloat.
Conclusion … digital nomadry = something to consider when I have steadier clientele / a full-time gig / more runway. And even if I do do something like this again, I think you gotta stay 3 months minimum in one spot. Maybe follow seasonal patterns for ideal weather conditions ... hmm …
Anyway.
I’m settling down in SoCal now and starting to see a lot of friends I haven’t seen since the beginning of the panorama, which also means that for the first time in a long time I’m regularly around people who have full-time jobs. Aka people who are going out every weekend and who are planning what festivals they’re about to hit and — let’s put it this way — engaging in activities that are far easier to do when you know exactly when and how much your next paycheck is.
Sometimes, it all makes me feel a bit unmoored. As if everyone else is starting to make the descent back to normality from the zero-gravity that was Covid-19, but I’m still floating off in space, watching everyone below. Fear of missing work? (FOMW?) Never heard of her, but she’s knocking at my door people.
To top that off, I’ve also had a lot of anxiety surrounding writing. Specifically, sharing said writing. I’ve still been writing frequently but I’ve been struggling to share it with other people. Writing is (and has always been) an excruciatingly vulnerable exercise and some days I just want to *not be perceived*.
It’s all fine and good when I’m scribbling away in my journal, but these days when I try to write something while also possessing the knowledge that other eyes will be on it I immediately get *cue fanfare* debilitating, paralyzing, horrible writer’s block.
So how am I writing right now, you ask?
Well, I’ve discovered this great trick where I pretend I’m actually not going to publish this and that it will actually be in drafts forever and — would you look at that! Words come out.
Don’t worry, it hasn’t been all so neurotic out here. I’ve picked up a slew of random hobbies like sketching and woodcarving and cross-stitching and just about any creative outlet I can reach out and grab. It’s mainly because all the energy that usually gets directed into writing isn’t able to escape my body (because of aforementioned anxiety) but I still need to channel it somewhere. So out it goes.
Outside of creative outlets, I’ve also been enjoying having conversations with people about things like consciousness and language and how words sometimes warp our experience of reality.
I first started thinking about this because I noticed that sometimes when I try to define a feeling, like, I feel sad, it causes me to overlook the finer contours of that emotion. My brain goes — Well I’ve certainly felt sad before — and dismisses the experience. And then I end up missing out on so much!
I think that when you start to do this habitually, where you let words constrict your raw experience of reality, life begins to feel really repetitive. You feel like you’re stuck in the armpit of existence and you start to think things like sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt.
But that’s not the case.
Those fresh, untrodden versions of life are all out there, waiting to be felt. You just gotta look a little closer and try to catch yourself before you start thinking you’ve seen it all before.
