My mind has just been blank the last few days, much more blank than I ever recall it being. I've edited To Change the World (the book I just finished writing), done a little reading, less writing, started exercising again, saw my family, and got in contact with a few people that I've needed to contact, began a little work getting back into the swing of programming, and caught up with a few things that I was putting off while I made a final surge on my book the last few days. It doesn't sound like nearly as paltry a list as it is, when I list it out like that, but that's most of what I did over the past three days, and I don't even know what I thought about in between. My mind has just been blank, and I've had a growing sense of worry building up in the back of my head the past couple days.
I guess I've been looking at profiles for literary agents and reading about what I should do in my next steps and started thinking about my job search quite a bit. When I start to worry about something, time just evaporates. I feel tired, but I don't feel like I've been up long today. I felt exhausted yesterday, and again felt exhausted without having felt like the day had existed. I think anxiety messes with my sense of time a lot more than I used to think it did. Hopefully, I can overcome that.
I don't know what to do about my job search. I really don't know what sort of career I'd like to have. Some part of me wants to go back into developing software. It's just an easy way to do something where I know I have a lot to contribute, and would do well... especially if I can avoid becoming anxious, which I should be able to do. Another part of me remembers that I've just come from a recent experience that I don't want to go back to. I was too isolated at my last job for sure. Part of the problem was that I was working from home. Sometimes, I truly love writing code. Sometimes, I think it's one of the most fun things I've ever done. (Writing, painting, reading, and playing music are also up there with it for sure.) I pretty much quit playing computer games when I started learning to write code, because it was more enthralling in a similar way. It's puzzles to be solved and progress to be made in a highly imaginative medium, but I also burnt out really hard when I did eventually burn out.
I don't know. I'm halfway tempted to think that I should go back into programming and start taking medication if I do start to burn out again. If I can find a job in an office with interesting people, programming in a language that I like (preferably Python or Haskell) working on something that interests me (algorithms, possibly some design and UI), I think I would enjoy it a lot more than what I've been doing. It's just, I don't know where to find that.
On the other hand, if I can get a job doing consulting, spending most of my day interacting with other people, doing research, and writing up the results of my research, I think I'd have a lot of energy to spend on programming when I get home. I want to work on a project that I can keep developing for years, and I just don't think I have much hope of maintaining my enthusiasm for development if I do it at work and do it again on my own time. I'm a complete variety junky.
I suppose my real options are that I either get a job where I code by day, and then I come home and I write nights and weekends or I find a job where I write and research during the day, and then I come home and code nights and weekends.
That should solve my problem for me. I ought to be able to have a better career doing coding than I would as a consultant, and I would expect to have more success as a writer on my own than I would as a developer on my own. Either way though, I have to scrap a ton of what I want to do with my life.
That's my biggest problem. I want to do way too much.
I always feel like I'm wasting my time because I always feel as if there is something more important that I ought to be doing, if I could simply figure out how to be doing all of it.
I need to be doing things like this just to keep my sanity. If I wasn't writing through my thought process, it would keep spinning out into all sorts of irrelevant directions. I actually do accomplish far more when I let myself indulge in a few minutes worth of writing stream of consciousness each day than when I try to organize my thoughts some other way, so I need to keep doing that. I also accomplish more when I go for a run (and I'm way happier too) so long as I keep my runs pretty short, so I need to do that again. But then those things start to feel like a waste of time as soon as I have something else going that seems productive. It's a catch 22 that I just need to accustom myself to, I guess.
But then there are the projects that I really wish I could spend my whole life working on... I really wish I could divide myself into multiple copies so that I could spend a lifetime writing songs, another lifetime writing books, another lifetime painting, and another lifetime writing code. Maybe more than one on a couple of those.
I have so many thoughts in my head that I feel like are screaming to get out. Designs related to programming languages and AI, images that I really want to see, songs that are half-completed, unfinished books for which I have a chapter or two and an outline. Somethings got to give. I know I need to abandon my music... but it hurts. I probably should abandon my art, but that also hurts... I didn't bring my painting supplies home with me because I knew they would distract me from my writing if I had them, and I miss them. (I went a little while without a piano when I moved back out to Chicago, that was also really hard for me. It wasn't the hardest time I've had when I tried to give up piano, but it was close. I actually became depressed one of the times I tried to quit, and I've never even made much of an attempt to give up singing. In some ways, I want to, in others, I'd rather just die. This is just such a part of me.)
I should probably just take a day sometime to let myself cry, and face the fact that I can't keep these things in my life as much as I'd like to. I need to grow up, and growing up is... fucking stupid. Seriously, pretty much all I want in life is to have the freedom to split my time between four productive activities that I've loved. (Ok, I'd also like to spend some time researching and learning, and other time socializing and being in relationships with other people, and a little bit exercising and showering and eating.) But the chances of that happening any time soon are practically zero.
Whatever, I need to go to bed tonight, and tomorrow, I need to come to turns with what I'm doing in this world.
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