I knew that between flaring politics and the needlessly-long pandemic that life would be challenging for myself and most everyone else. Yet for some reason this year still felt like more strain than I anticipated. I spent so much time playing catch-up between everything going on, that I had little room to work on my personal affairs let alone growth. A lot of good happened too, but, it’s hard not to look back and just see a big haze. I could write down what I did on any given day to help parse things out, but that in itself felt daunting so I trusted myself to just keep moving forward. Now I’m doing weekly summaries for myself, which double as check-ins for my journal. I just want more energy to do that or anything else more easily.
One of the really cool things that happened is my new part-time job: babysitting! Never thought of it before, despite being a caregiver (mostly respite) since I was a teenager. I’m a caring person in general, and I guess it also works because acts of service is one of my main love languages with regard to society. Anywho, the job can be easy or challenging depending on the day and it pays fairly. More fairly than any other job I’ve had, in fact. For the same amount (or several dollars lower) per hour, I used to bust my body in half at short-staffed sit-down restaurants or be constantly dealing with a million issues at Costco. With babysitting I have just one focus, one subject for the entire shift. It gives me some peace in that way.
Since it’s part-time work, that leaves me room to at least try to work on personal projects and other job opportunities. I’ve been toying with the idea of opening my own merch shop for several months, and I’m re-training for game development. All of that is exploratory for now, have to see how certain other things pan out in the meantime. Going to pace myself and focus on self-care. One day at a time.
I missed writing, which is funny because I still don’t see myself as a big “writer” per se. However… lately it’s a lot easier for me to put my words into digital text than verbally. Maybe it has always been that way to some extent? I dunno!
Until next time ~~