With Your Teeth In Your Mouth
I didn't really tell you this, Internets, but I took a four-month full-time gig working on a public awareness campaign for a non-profit. I'm at the end of my third month. During my first month there Aunt Flo bombed into town twice. Stress. That's what that is. Stress and anxiety. Not so much from the work that I'm doing, which is not stressful at all in and of itself, but from the shell-shock of flinging myself back in—this being my first full-time situaish in five years—and everything else in my life having to work around this one thing that now takes up most of my time. Also, it's like being a spy or an anthropologist. I'm an outsider kind of on the inside. I'm not invested in the long term so I see what goes on; the ways in which people are treated and how people treat themselves, the subplots and the cast of characters. I happen to think the environment I'm in now is sort of an extreme case, but all this meshegas is a huge reason why I opted out of the game five years back. Nothing like it to remind you there's more to life. Or, at least, that there should be.
I'm writing. I'm making art and plans. I'm practicing all these things. I'm overwhelmed, but I have systems. Not really certain what the systems are, though. I've been trying to pave a road before following it because I can't help but almost always think that's the way you're supposed to do things—strategies and outlines and planning, planning, planning—and also that I'm too old for it to be okay to fly blind. Certainly it can't be safe or smart. But then I remember (and then I forget again and have to remind myself again, repeatedly, trying to get through like a soft drill in my head) that sometimes you can only see one little step ahead of you at a time and so then that's just the step you take.
