my feelings are not letting me rest
this week I've had the hardest time rallying. every day I look at my desk calendar and I feel the need to have something filling each of those little boxes. as I jokingly said to my D&D group, I think I have a productivity problem. but it's also been purposeful, to me, at least – I just feel like I need to do the little things to keep things going, to create some kind of momentum, in the hope that someone will pick up what I'm putting down eventually.
it's very difficult to do all this stuff and see no impact from it, though. I guess that's the reality of looking for jobs right now, but it gives me a lot of employment anxiety.
I meant to take a rest day and do absolutely nothing productive. I practiced sketching for thirty minutes, but I felt like I didn't know what I was doing and I couldn't figure out faces or hands, and then I started to think about my website and my case studies and then I made a couple edits and then I checked my email every ten seconds (waiting for what?) and thought maybe I should be doing outreach for freelance...
so, yeah, I felt a little shitty and I decided to self-medicate with a second cup of coffee and some journaling.
maybe I am supposed to be using this as an unexpected season of rest, but my feelings are not letting me. that twenty-something who hustled for a career is freaking out about the job market and not being good enough and staying unemployed forever and all of this going down the drain. I feel her in my throat closing up. I feel her comparing life now with life in 2018. back then I was in an internship and trying to make things happen. I don't have anything quite so "productive" as that – volunteering and teacher training are as close as I can get, and teacher training doesn't start til june. but... things are more stable now. I'm not beholden to roommates, I have more cushion, I'm not just starting out in a career... but I understand her fear, especially with all the context we're getting now, layoff after layoff, industries shifting toward senior talent only, etc. I want to live a soft life, but maybe that was a little idol that I've held too tightly.