What I've been up to for the last two months
I haven't seen much of my friends over the last two months because I've been adapting to several major changes in my life!
I've written here about how construction at my home required me to move out... I've now moved three times since late September, and I'm still not home. I'm back in San Gabriel again, and really enjoying it. I have a bigger desk now, and a bit of genuinely entertaining work to do on it. I can walk to get a coffee every day. This is basically all I need to live.
Regarding work... the other big change has been adapting to being unemployed. Though I have no day job, I still have a variety of side gigs and smaller responsibilities that I can be summoned to do at pretty much any time. I used to rely on my day job to help me structure these small time commitments during my week - when you have 8 hours a day blocked out for other work, you have a very good excuse to prevent them from taking over your attention during the middle of the day.
Now, however, I don't have that structure, and I don't have anything to stop me from prioritizing a short task at any hour of the day, whenever it might arrive in my inbox. This has been extremely disruptive for me! It's not a huge change, but it does feel like I've thrown my life into a blender, a bit. I had an 8-hour office day job to worry about every day of my life since 2011... and now I don't. Learning how to structure my work without that has been a very, very odd experience. I'm genuinely less efficient without the day job to fence off most of my time, haha.
The good thing is that I genuinely like these little tasks. Freelancing can be very serene (which is part of why I've been doing it alongside a day job for so many years). I've always enjoyed being able to participate in a creative project while deliberately opting out of internal company meetings, crises, and anxieties. Now that I have no internal company anxieties of my own to worry about, I'm, like, mega-dosing serenity. Undiluted. Crazy stuff.
The other issue is that the lack of a day job structure has severely impacted my blogging. I used to write a lot of posts during my lunch hour. Now, I no longer have a scheduled team lunch hour. I'm writing many more of my posts on the actual day they go up, which is a bit stressful. I'm still doing it, but the vibe is way different, because it's no longer an escape from anything. It used to function as a kind of mental reset for me. Not sure what it currently functions as, to be honest.
Anyway, that's what I've been dealing with lately, and it's why a lot of posts go up in the evening now instead of in the 9 AM hour (which almost always meant that they'd been prescheduled by me). So far, so good... but I don't feel very settled in any of my new ways yet. I'm not stressing about that, but it's definitely a very strange feeling after so many years of such predictable structure.