The short update is the personal trajectory of the last couple years is not good. I have been having a crisis of spirit that more or less leaves me dissociative and paralyzed. I want to say it started with the end of my last relationship, but I think the problems that led to the last 1.5 years of inaction were a partial cause to the break-up, not a result of.
In any case, change is coming. My research job of two decades is going half-time come July and will probably only be a few hours a week maintaining old products a year or so after that. This is worrisome in that it punctures my bubble, and extremely good in that I have been needing some positive change for quite a while now.
The habits I have been cultivating recently have not prepared me for positive change, which I am working on this month. I think I'm about to undergo some serious emotional and cognitive whiplash in hitting the job market again. I think in a year my life and habits will be much better or much worse. Fingers crossed for the former!
I still don't know what I want to do next. My skills are all in science and coding but all I want to do is write, philosophize, learn languages and play music. I will likely continue in tech/science in some fashion and try to develop those hobbies on the side. I should probably still try volunteering at a hospice or two and see if that's something I really want to get into.
I also desperately need to find a place and a community I belong to. It is surprisingly easy to completely isolate yourself in the modern, connected world and I have done a staggeringly good job of that the last couple years. Isolation makes you crazy as it turns out. Tom Hanks and Wilson tried to warn me.
I think it will probably be an extraordinarily good thing to find work locally where I see people every day. Telecommuting can be a quiet hell if you don't have a local community and social/support network to rely on, and I have been absolute shit at finding those things since leaving Adventism, coming out of the closet and moving to Portland.
I have been waiting for some sort of divine revelation about what I am here for on this planet and what to work for and why to work for it in a world ruled by selfish, amoral people, but I have yet to find it. Depression and some sort of ADD have resulted in me largely dealing with this by dissociating, largely with video games which may genuinely qualify as some sort of addictive disorder for me.
I have been making progress, just slower than I'd like. The philosophy book I'm reading is already helping me past some mental roadblocks. More on that later. I'm a little irritated that change is forcing discipline upon me rather than getting ahead of it myself, but ultimately, my absolute terror and lack of clarity about the unknown aside, this is probably a good change. I think it may be true that connection to other people in some fashion may be requirement for personal willpower.
In the meantime, I have a lot of story ideas, and a lot of blog ideas that I'm not writing and that has been making me crazy by itself. It is not healthy for someone who needs to write not to write. I think even a massive decrease in job status coupled with a massive increase in writing output would be considered a win at this point.
Anyway, change is coming. I have been quietly dysfunctional for quite a while now and I would dearly like that to change. Perhaps at last I shall.
But of luck and I hope you make it through this transition as painlessly as possible. I'm sure there is some well known story I can't think of about some character who isn't as contented and happy as all of the others seem to be who as a result embarks on a difficult journey and ends up in a better place and wiser for the experience. I believe in that kind of thing. There is no point in someone beating themselves up for no reason. But beating yourself up for a good reason, there can be a lot of value in that, in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, a little unsolicited advice from someone who struggles with the same kind of thing… the plan or strategy that creates the opportunity to do all of the things you want to do won't emerge on its own regardless of how much you genuinely want to do those things. It's the opposite. You have to create the strategy first. If you had the time, place, and presence to do those things then you would see they are rewarding enough to justify making the effort in the first place. But it's really not possible to see (i.e. internalize it) without actually doing the things. It's a bit of a chicken or the egg scenario. And like the chicken or the egg, there is only one answer. It takes a chicken to lay a chicken egg. (The chicken was a mutated something else.)