Life continues to be chaos, as it is wont to be these days. At least I made it to my writing night, for the first time in a few weeks. Granted, I’m the only one here in person today, but so it goes.
(Incidentally, if you’re interested in a writing night for spec fic authors in Seattle on Wednesday nights in-person, or virtual wherever the hell you like, drop me a line. And maybe don’t read the rest of this post, I’m sure I look like a basketcase.)
A very, very quick summary of the chaos:
- Somewhere in here I went on my first date since the breakup last year. It went well, though at the moment it doesn’t look like a second date is going to come together. We’ll see.
- I lost my voice for like a week afterwards, between that date and a 45 minute phone call the next day. Talking loudly in a bar for two hours messed me up, and I think the phone call pushed me past the point of injury. It was hilarious and also ridiculous and annoying.
- My temporary job at a great nonprofit ended mid-September. It was a temp job, but it was also one of those situations where I sort of hoped the person on long term leave would decide to not come back. Turns out I like being the main IT person for a small org! Just like I suspected I would! I was hoping I’d get a chance to argue for them having a second permanent IT person, but one of the folks there I trust confirmed the money just wasn’t there. (They have my contact info and know my interest for whenever they do decide to get one.)
- Wrapping up that job was more brutal workload-wise than I thought it would be, as I tried to wrap up any outstanding projects and button things up enough to make the handoff easy. I think I succeeded as well as I could have, but I ended up working extra hours and being pretty stressed the whole time. Not because of pressure from management or anything, just pressure on myself to do the best job I could. Wanted to leave a good impression both for obvious reasons and because I really like the folks I worked with.
- I planned on having at least a few weeks off, which was going to be good so I could help Jabberwocky through her latest pretty serious illness, which was eating up a bunch of time. I also had some projects I was looking forward to having time to do.
- A week later the temp agency called me with two different possible jobs, and I suddenly had a new job slated to start on October 2nd, about 2.5 weeks after my nonprofit position ended. I was nervous, because it’s full time and I wasn’t sure how to manage Jabberwocky’s care around that.
- We were waiting on more information from a very slow specialist, so it was unclear what sort of treatment she’d need and when.
- Jabberwocky died fairly suddenly on the Friday before the new job started. She’d been sick a long time, but seemed to be more or less stable if not better. She had what looked like a down day or two, but still not terrible. And then she died in a few hour window between when I fed her breakfast and I went to check on her again.
- She was *old*, and sick, but the fact that she went from “hanging in there” to dead in a relative snap was hard to deal with.
- Found out later that day that what we’d thought was a hopefully-treatable infected mass was actually just a straight up giant tumor. Basically it just finally pressed too hard on something vital and that was it. It was very much her time to go, and it was good in a way she went as fast as she did. It was still very hard to deal with. Still is, honestly, though a few weeks has given me some time to process.
- Was very sad and just let myself be a bit of a wreck for the weekend and the following Monday.
- Spent Tuesday essentially going “AAAA how am I going to handle working full time again???”
- Started working full time again. It’s the first time I’ve done a 40 hours a week job since I got laid off in May of 2023.
- Adjusting to working a job where I’m not just immediately handed all the admin access I could ever want has been weird! Not bad, but it’s so different from my other IT support experiences I’m still adjusting. I’m not used to a place where the answer is “oh, this one person does that.” I’m used to “we all (mostly) know how to do that, or it’s a complete other team’s responsibility.”
- Got some constructive feedback on a creative project. Valid feedback, but I had to work through some Feelings about it before I could use it. The project will be better for it, in the end.
- I haven’t been writing and I greatly dislike myself for it. At least this blog post happened.
- Realized my form on several (weightlifting) lifts is flawed and am now working on fixing that. It’ll be far better in the end, but it’s a lot of re-learning. More muscles will be targeted though! So I’m hoping it’ll help me break through a lot of “why is this muscle not getting bigger/stronger” barriers I’ve run into over the last several years of lifting. If I’m real lucky, it’ll even help me not injure myself again.
- Fell off doing some physical therapy stuff, feeling the effects, trying to get back on.
- And to top of it all off, it feels like my ADHD has been acting up something fierce and really fucking me over. Like, a lot of the “I haven’t been doing X thing that’s important to me” and “I feel overwhelmed and so I do nothing” stuff feels like it stems from this.
- I just feel like I can’t get my shit together? At all? As a person? I realize, looking at my life right now, that I’m going through a lot even if a given thing isn’t an immediate problem standing in front of me right this second. Still, I’m just frustrated and mad at myself.
So yeah, chaos. I feel like my optimism and hope went and died in a corner at some point. Good headspace. Go team.
Oh, and I’m turning 35 in three days, so I get to deal with feelings about being 35 and…not being anywhere near where I wanted to be in life at 35.
Coooooool.
Everything’s going great!
It’ll be fine in the end.
Probably?
I hope so…