You’d think I’d be all caught up 💩
Q2 has come and gone. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you when things went sideways.
That’s life for you, though. I expect some level of chaos to throw me curve ball. You don’t spend 30-some odd years in the Vortex of Suck without learning a thing or two about resilience and picking yourself back up. But sometimes…. Sometimes, it feels like I must have crossed the threshold into insanity.
Okay, Q2 wasn’t THAT bad.
I’ve been through worse.
I could just point to the overload of Q1, where I was dealing with the stress of moving to a whole other country, getting married, and adapting to a new home all in the same quarter. At least I had the sense to not have anything other than packing and developing a cleaning routine for the house on my to-do list.
I mostly played Pokémon to cope while telling myself that I’ll be back to my old self when the move is finished.
It was a mostly true statement.
By the start of April, I had my corner of the living room all set up with two brand spanking new monitors, and best of all my PC was fully functional and not even a little rebellious after it’s flight outside of my overprotective gaze.
So I did what any reasonable-overly-ambitious-productivity-nut would have.
I announce to the world that I’m getting back to my old writing routine!
I was mostly successful too. Except for when I wasn’t.
See writing isn’t the problem. It all of the other things that is. What do you mean I have to make dinner? Eating is for the weak!
By the end of May, I was chugging along at over 2-hrs of writing a day, sometimes 3-hrs. It feels insignificant. But according to Cal Newport and various others who study flow and deep work productivity, which is the nature of creative work, the best the average person can hope for is 4-hrs.
With practice.
So I’m half-way there?
Well sort of. If all I’m doing is creative writing, as in writing the narrative and finding the right words to imply so much more than ‘See Spot run’ I can manage almost 3.5 hrs. But I’m brain dead after that. Cleaning, despite being a literal chore, now feels insurmountable. And you know what? I don’t really do that much cleaning on a good day. Now I just sound like a slob.
My house is clean. I just don’t clean it top to bottom every day. I mean the cost for the cleaning supplies would just…. I have a mortgage to pay. And with interest rates ballooning, I have to pick my battles. My mother-in-law would probably tell you differently though. I love the woman, especially her dedication to her home and family.
Damnit woman, do not so much as glance sideways at my vacuum!
I get it though. I do other people’s dishes when I try to quiet my mind in social situations.
Things were falling apart within a couple weeks of April. I denied it though. I told myself there was time to recover. I suppose there was. When it was clear I wasn’t going to recover, I told myself progress was king in these situations.
It’s true!
If you can’t get to a complete done state, being further along than where you were yesterday/last week/last month is still worth celebrating.
I’ll hold onto that sentiment with every fiber of my being.
But where DID things go wrong? I feel like I’m vague posting you at the moment, and I’m sorry for that.
See writing went very well as long as I didn’t intend to do anything else. Could be an endurance issue. I figure that’s the case for the most part. But…. Then I think: “Didn’t you work 16-hr days with no weekends for like 2 years back in the day? How did you even survive that?” Am I even that person anymore? I mean, I don’t want to be. There were some… factors about that 16-hrs/day that I had agreed to at the time because:
I was young, ambitious, and stupid.
Naïve enough to think hard work and dedication would get rewarded.
Desperately trying to pay down my student loans.
I’m not in that situation anymore. I value my time, and my mental health, but I can’t help but feel like I should be capable of doing more. Which sort of leaves me in this back-and-forth with myself, wanting to push to get more done, but knowing that most of my to-do list is deep work related, and I likely spent my daily mojo on the task that I valued the most. Which is writing.
I think things started going sideways when I intended to implement some new News Letter forms on my website. Don’t get me wrong the task itself is easy. I just like to overcomplicate things and do the design from scratch. I knew going in I wasn’t happy with the design. Looking at new designs is fun. Coding it…. Less so.
And then my website decided it needed updating. No big deal. I open my command exe thingy and type in the prompt…. Then nothing. I hate Drupal. My hate on for this website system really started two years ago. But I don’t want to get into all of the reasons I hate Drupal! But let’s just say, I had a handle on things until I didn’t. It’s always sudden. Now I can choose to contact the webhost, which I did, and got the issue resolved, only to get slammed again with another Drupal related update that basically locked me out of updating the security of the website.
-.-
(Pst! You’re reading this entry on SquareSpace. I got so angry with Drupal I moved.)
A. V. Dalcourt is the author of the growing non-romantic dark fantasy series Awakening and Awakening Fractured Memories.
Using the subtleties of human behavior to craft her demons, rituals, and magic systems, A. V. Dalcourt is a lover of modern sorcery, psychological character portrayals, epic battles between good and evil and the huge grey area that separates them.