So, I’m coming back to this space. (Or trying to at least.) The urge to blog has been nibbling on my brain for about a month now. But the old space felt stale, like it was missing something. I’ve been convincing myself not to start from scratch but instead to build on what I have here. I’ve been tweaking things here and there, trying to settle back in and feel comfortable. It still doesn’t look quite right to me. I think I’m going to try a few more things out.
 I haven’t reaaaally gotten around to posting yet, though. I’m trying to re-find my voice. MY voice. The voice that has been long submerged under my own fear of failure and need to please. Under my guilt at not being perfect, but having to try and try again. The phrase “try-hard” comes to mind, because I do too often find myself trying to be someone I’m not. Trying to project what I want others to see, which is usually just themselves reflected back. Most of the time, it’s easier than voicing an opinion and then standing up for it. Easier than trying to convince people that just because I look 12 doesn’t mean that I’m incompetent. If I hear one more person tell me that it’s a gift to look so youthful at my age I’m going to scream. All of this has rolled itself into one cohesive problem: Instead of doing what I love, I procrastinate. I make excuses. I hope no one will notice that I am slipping away slowly. Other times I start things but never end up following them through for the same reason. It can be somewhat crippling.
But my life has change a lot in the past couple months, more so than at any time that came before. I feel completely different. Life has given me a fresh start, and in a way I do want to start from scratch. I want different things, I look at the world differently. My needs and desires are different. Priorities shift. As one door closes, another opens. I know I am passionate about blogging, about interior decor, about streamlining life so that it is organized and allows the happiness of a home to flow. I’m passionate about my connection to the universe and about my husband and family. I love to share all of that with others. I am an emotional person, perhaps too easily affected by the emotions of others. But I find nothing more fulfilling than helping others on that one-on-one level, I like the tangible results.
And I like my life to be small. I know there are others out there like me, too. “Think Big! Go! Money! More! Easy! Cheap! Fast!” seems to me the siren call of this city. I prefer a different version of life, and I accept that now. I prefer quiet over loud. I am not good at asking “how high” when someone tells me to jump. I need to accept that. So I want to write about what is real to me, to share that with others, to put it into the universe. I haven’t always done that here.
I’ve been reading Meg Mateo Ilasco’s book Craft Inc. and this quote really struck me:
“It can be daunting and ambitious to set out to create new trends, but when you remove the pressure to produce something “great” and proceed at your own pace, you’ll see that it can be done. Allow yourself to be a beginner. Everyone has creative potential; it just takes time and practice to develop your personal style. Once your creative confidence kicks in, ideas will flow and you’ll shake your head wondering why you doubted yourself in the first place.”
When I read this, it made me think two things. One, I realized that, yes, it’s not a lack of time that’s holding me back from life, but a lack of courage to be true to myself and make the tough decisions. And two, that I’m not the only one who’s ever felt this way. It is comforting to know I am not alone.
All frothy on top.
I don’t think I could get by very long in a world where I wasn’t allowed to have my morning cup of coffee. I like mine strong but milky. Is that a contradiction? Whatever it is, it’s just so yummy, so comforting. Since I’ve been working from home, it’s become something of a routine that eases me, with caffeine love, into my day. My close companion through email checks, day-planner updates, feed-reading, and finally, settling into the workday.
Coffee and I are BFFs for life.
…and instead, put my life on a successful and fulfilling career path. That is Resolution #2 for 2010.
I’ve mentioned many a time how hateful I find my current job. Over the past year I must have applied for 50 jobs. But despite my education and work experience, nobody is hiring in this economy, not even entry level positions with salaries that would leave me barely able to pay the rent. It’s depressing. I should know, because I let this apparent failure on my part depress me for a good chuck of last year. I felt like I had no options available to me, like I wasn’t even hireable for the crappiest crappy job that was really no better than the crappy dead-end job I currently have. Worst was that few of the jobs I was being rejected for were even things that I really wanted to do.
So I started thinking real hard and doing some soul searching. After a while the answer became so clear that I wondered how I couldn’t have known what I wanted to do with my career the whole time. I’m going to be a Professional Organizer and Interior Decorator.
I’ve always been madly obsessed with organizing and making things more useful and functional. I’ve also always had an eye for aesthetics and seem to know when things go together and when they don’t. Looking at catalogues or magazines, I put together possibilities in my mind’s eye. In every room I enter, I look at what works and what doesn’t and how it could be made better. It’s what comes naturally, and what I should be doing as a career.
So that’s my second resolution for 2010: to stop being afraid, to take the plunge into doing what I love and to work at it every day until I have successfully established myself in the field. It’s gonna take a lot of hard work, maybe some night school, and a lot of believing in myself even when I have nothing to show for it. But if I’m ever gonna have a career it has to be started now. I just gotta remember to take baby steps until I get there.
My mind moves much faster than my life does and I’ve been noticing lately how much of an issue this is for me. How incapable I seem to be at just thinking about right now instead of 20 minutes, 20 hours, 20 days or 20 years from now. I focus too much on what’s to come, on what’s next, instead of what I have to embrace and enjoy right now. The more I think of it, the more I realize what kind of debilitating long-term problem this has been. I am a collector of possibilities that I never seem to get around to fulfilling. And waiting for later takes all the joy and excitement out of something that was once shiny and new. It becomes old news before it has even begun.
I’m sure a lot of this has to do with how much I hated (and how trapped I felt by) being in school. Living in the moment was always the last place I wanted to be. I don’t think I was always like this though. As a child I lived in the moment, I’m sure. But once my horrible school experiences started taking over, I think that’s when my collector behaviour began.
This problem has been niggling the back of my mind for a while and it’s not something that I’m just going to get over tomorrow. But I think that if I keep it as a goal in my mind, to not just live in the moment but to appreciate it and find joy in it as well, then things will slowly start to change. It is the Year of Change, after all.
I need to allow myself to have some time to just be, because for too long I’ve been putting off for tomorrow what I could’ve and should’ve been doing today. Reminds you of the name of this blog, doesn’t it. Coincidence? I think not.
* Eating 10 pounds of sugar in the form of smarties, jub-jubs, cookies, etc. makes for quite the sugar-crash headache the next morning.
* Living in the moment seems a lot more fulfilling than freaking out, spending so much time planning for the future. Kyrie seems to do it pretty well. I think I should read her blog more often.
* It might be nice to try knitting a hat, but that might require me teaching myself how to knit in the round. Do I have time for that before Christmas?
* It is miserable outside. I do not like going outside when it is miserable. I have to go outside today.
* My camera is broken! Well, my good camera is broken. All I have now is my point-and-shoot. Sniff. No hand-shake minimization. I wish I could replace it with this but there’s no way on earth I could afford it. Double sniff.
* There must be an inverse relation between how much fun you have spending an evening baking cookies with friends and how much suckage there is cleaning up the kitchen the next morning. Sigh.
* Have I mentioned my good camera is broken? Whimper. Maybe I can look into buying a used DSLR….
Well, I’ve definitely decided that telecommuting is worth giving another try. Though it is gonna take some getting used to, finding a new routine. I’ve been telecommuting for a few days now, but inevitably I’ve been spending the whole day in my PJs and feeling out of whack because of it.
Today I’m trying something different. Attempting to ignore the pressure to begin work immediately upon waking up and instead starting when I’m good and ready. (Read “showered.”) I think part of the reason why the transition has been so hard and why it didn’t work before was because I’ve been trying to keep my hours up. But for me, working from home can’t be about putting in 40-hour weeks all the time any more, or I might as well be working in the office.
Changing one’s mindset is hard. And it’s harder than it sounds, acting as though you already are the person you want to be. Maybe I’m half way to pretending. Somewhere near that mid-lifechange point. There’s still a lot of prep work to be done and routines to be hammered out and some definite cleaning of my apparently neglected apartment to wade through, but perhaps once those things are in place it will be easier to wake up believing that I already am who I want to be. I just need to give myself more time. Time to settle in, time to clean up and time to focus on making plans for actually starting my career. Time to enjoy Christmas would be a nice bonus, too. And keeping crazy hours at my current job is not gonna help me with that.
So really, what this is is time to let go. I don’t have to be the best at that job anymore because now, I’m learning to be the best at something else.
Okay, so, it’s no secret: I HATE MY JOB. I hate it up one side and down the other. I can’t even remember when I stopped liking it and started hating it. Was it one year ago? Two? More? And yet, I’ve been fighting with myself about it despite wanting to quit. I guess the big problem is that I don’t wanna let a certain love of my life down. I feel like if I quit or even just cut back on hours before having a new job perfectly lined up to pay all the bills he’d be disappointed or worse. Don’t get me wrong, I know money is “important.” But with my current crappy job we are JUST paying the bills. No savings. No buffer. No spending money, even. And the problem is, with this job sucking away all my time (and me working way too hard for almost nothing) it leaves no time to look for a new job, start a business, or develop my passions. All I do is work and eat and sleep, work and eat and sleep. No balance. No hope. No future. And I know most people think that should be okay and be enough. I mean, I should feel lucky and privileged just to have a job at all in this economy, right? Because it seems like the general consensus is that money is more important than everything, even saving yourself from sinking into depression because you’ve ended up living a completely unfulfilling life.
Well, I guess money isn’t my only reason for sticking around at this crummy job. I really do like the people I work with, although most of them are gone already or headed out the door, at least. That shouldn’t really be a reason though. I shouldn’t stay in a job I hate for other people. But any way I turn, there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this situation. No matter where I look it’s the same: I need money. I guess there may be one way to ease my troubles. If I telecommute to the office there would be fewer wasted hours in my day. More time for the things that really matter. And the more I make those things matter, the possibly less I will have to work that hellish job. My only problem is that I tried that once before and the stress and deadlines of the job had me working in my PJs all day, unable to even take the time to walk my dog when she sat crying by the door with a full bladder. I guess it was the pressure not to disappoint or perhaps my inability to say “NO, THIS IS TOO MUCH WORK.” Or, you know, just to have the self-worth to put myself first over any crummy job making demands on my time. I was always super-distracted too because EVERYTHING in my life is way more important (in my eyes) than this horrible job, so it always felt like such a waste of time, working, when I could have been doing more important things, money notwithstanding.
But I can’t keep hemming and hawing forever. I need to pull the trigger, make a choice, set a direction and follow it. I need to stop feeling bad or thinking “what if” or hoping that a change will find me all on it’s own. Yes, money is important, but is it important at the expense of my future? I always thought that everything would be so much easier once I finished university, but it just seems to have gotten that much more complicated. Building a career is a lifetime commitment and there are no mid-semester breaks. There is no half-assing it if you want to be successful. You have to believe it and just do it. Don’t let money make you scared or you will spend your entire life living in fear (like I have.) I can’t do that anymore. I can’t be okay with that being my life. I can’t spend all my time worrying about what other people will think.
The Year of Freedom is almost over, gone before it every really began. By this time next year I’ll be 30 and I’ll be married. So maybe it’s time to stop dreaming of who I’ll be when I grow up and start living my life being that person. I read a blog post the other day from a very talented artist. Her words were simple: Fake it till you make it. Pretend that you’re already the person that you want to be and one day you’ll wake up and you won’t be pretending anymore. That’s just who you’ll be.
I didn’t really sleep that well last night. I woke up around 3 AM and never really got back to sleep. Just too much on my mind, I guess. But it was good in a way, I had time to think. And so I’ve decided that though I may have been up for hours already by that point, when dawn finally broke this morning I stopped being Sarah: wussy-faced whiner and chronic daydreamer. Instead, I became Sarah: professional organizer and interior decorator. If 2009 was the Year of Freedom, 2010 will be the Year of Change. You can bet your bottom dollar on that. I know I will be.
I found myself feeling overwhelmingly philosophical this morning. More than usual, it would seem. Most of the time I keep my philosophical thoughts to myself. In our “modern” world, it has become something of a faux pas to start up a philosophical discussion. And with the frantic pace of 21st century lives, who really has time to waste on philosophy anyway? So really, I guess I don’t talk about this much, but I am actually an acutely seasonally-minded person. More than any organized religion ever has, the spiritual side of me is awakened by a reverence for nature as it continually renews itself through the turning of the seasons. I see creation in all things from stardust to my pinky toe and I have respect for them all, equally. Call it what you will, this is just how I feel in my heart.
And as you know, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my day-to-day life, what it’s been like for these past few years and how much of it has been lived on autopilot. And part of what bothers me so much is that I don’t live what I feel, partly because I worry about being judged as a weirdo, but more because of this autopilot fallback postioin my life often takes. I guess it’s just another offshoot of the general thoughts I’ve been having about mapping a direction for the rest of my life. Now that I am happily engaged, it seems as though philosophical and practical questions are colliding. I’m questioning what kind of future I want it to be: Where do we want to live and “settle down”? How soon after the wedding do we want to start having kids? How are we even gonna afford this wedding and what kind of lifestyle changes will we have to make to save that kind of money? How do I start living a more seasonally-minded life so that I don’t feel quite so spiritually hollow all the time and can start creating the home and family that our future children will eventually be welcomed into? And where does a career and the need to make money fit into all this? Because I am still struggling with knowing what to do in that aspect of my life, and generally trying to fight back the overwhelming fear that in this recession-ridden world, me and my Celtic Studies degree are completely unhireable.
As usual, I don’t seem to have any of the answers to my questions. Part of it is that I don’t really know where to begin and part of it is that no matter how hard I try, it is increasingly difficult or me to feel at home in our cramped upper floor apartment, living in someone else’s house in the dirty urban core of a major metropolitan city. No money + no car + no job with a future = staying put right here without even being able to change my surroundings even a little bit to spruce it up and make it feel more homey.
There I go, sounding all down and sorry for myself again. I’m not really, I swear. I guess I’m still just floundering, looking for square one of where to being. It’s just hard to feel connected to nature when all you see outside your window is concrete and brick. But take that first step I must, whatever it may be, because I refuse to stay living in this limbo. I need to start being mindful and fully present in my own life, not just coasting through it. I need to create the life and the future and the family I want, not just lie back and wait for it to find me.
Well, well! I have some big news! The biggest news ever, actually. But first, let me start at the beginning.
So, this weekend was the (Dave’s and my) 3-and-a-half-year anniversary of our first date. I remembered that it was coming up a little while ago and so the two of us made plans to take a nice romantic walk on Sunday. As for Saturday, I made plans to get together with a friend of mine, leaving Dave to his own devices. However, my Saturday plans fell through and since neither of use really had anything better to do, Dave suggested that we play some rounds of our favourite card game: Fluxx.
Well, Dave’s a sore loser and I’m sorry to say it, but I’m a sore winner. Not an excellent combination when I kept winning and Dave kept losing. He got grumpier and I just laughed. One hand, two. A third round, then a fourth. I just kept winning.
After I won that fourth hand, Dave was practically fuming. “You don’t wanna do that,” he said. “Take it back.” “Ha, ha!” I laughed. “Too late, too late! I win again!” Dave grumbled as I gathered up the cards for him to shuffle and he dealt out the fifth hand.
Now Dave meant business. He immediately got rid of any cards I might use for a quick win. Then he made me discard all the cards in my hand so I had nothing left in my hand to win with anyway. Finally, he went on a “take another turn” rampage, playing card after card until finally, he played the “Love” keeper. And on its heels, he played a custom card he’d made that I had never seen before: the “Marriage” goal.
“What the heck is this?” I asked, picking the card up off the table. I read it: “If both Love and the Ring are on the table, we both win.”
Confused, I asked, “Does this mean I win too?” Then I looked down at the table in front of him. There, beside the Love keeper sat the most beautiful ring in the whole wide world. I looked up at Dave, saw him smiling and immediately started laughing hysterically with joy. He walked around the table and got down on one knee, slipping the ring on my finger. I hugged him tight, half jumping up and down in my seat, still laughing hysterically. He just smiled and smiled. And finally, I came to my senses long enough to shout, “Yes! Yes! We BOTH win!”
So there we are, happily engaged and brimming with joy! We’re thinking Fall 2010 for the wedding, which will give us some time to plan. I’m so excited already, I can’t wait! Which means you can probably expect many more wedding-related posts in the months to come!
Yippee!!
Safe or happy? Safe? Or happy?
That was the question that was twirling around my mind on the way home from physio yesterday. Do I choose a play-it-safe life or do I choose one that’s happy and fulfilled? Is there a way to choose both?
And what keeps holding me back from being my authentic self? From leading the life I’ve always wanted to live? From doing what will make me happy rather than continuously falling back into bad old habits. That is one of my biggest fears right now, that after this whole month-long experience is over, I’ll simply go back to work and nothing will have changed.
How do I be that person and live that life that I always dreamed of? What makes it so significantly different from the life I’ve been leading? The answers to these questions are, I think, the next big list that I want to tackle. I like lists. They work for me and often help me pinpoint the swirling thoughts in my head. I just need to do some good, hard thinking about the whole thing.
Because I want to be the one leading my life, making the conscious choices and decisions. I do not want my life to be leading me. Ever.
Okay, here it is. I’ve gotten to a point that I’ve been to before but rarely, if ever, moved beyond. The dishes are under control, the laundry done, the apartment clean, tidy and organized. I so rarely get to this point. (Have I mentioned that already?) It is my normal state to be behind, trying desperately to do all the things yelling at me all at once to get done. Where do I go from here?
 This feels like new territory and I don’t wanna mess it up. I think the next step is to tackle the kinds of things that I always put off. The things I get excited for when they are new but then they inevitably end up on a shelf because guilt stops me from indulging in such “wastes of time.” I rarely start projects and it’s even rarer that I finish them. I wonder if I’ll be able to introduce this next step successfully without guilting myself into ignoring or avoiding.
I know I sound vague, but my life has always been, “one day I’ll have the time/money/energy to do that.” Maybe that “one day” is now. Maybe I can figure out how to live a normal life…
So, at the end of my first week of freedom, where do I stand? I’m all but phlegm-free for one. But has any progress been made? What have I learned about myself and what I want? Well…
I like this slower pace.
I like not having headaches all the time.
I like quiet mornings and quiet evenings and busy in-betweens.
I don’t like downtown Toronto, would rather live in the country but will settle for someplace far enough away from the core as soon as I can afford a car. Because while a car is crazy expensive, my time is worth too much to commute from the fringes by transit.
I really dislike not having a private yard, so I’m still toying with the idea of moving. We’ll stay here until October and see where we stand at that point. Maybe I’ll wait till spring if the new jobs are within commuting distance from here.
Because I do need a different job. I don’t think that, in general, I will mind working hard enough and long enough at a job to get the things I want, but I hate my current job with its harsh deadlines, zero respect and the inability to ever get a raise or promotion. I think a lot of my unhappiness has been coming from feeling trapped in that job and the stagnating version of my life that is the direct result. I just have to keep applying. It doesn’t matter if I’ve applied for a million jobs and heard from none, all that matters is that I keep trying and keep applying. I mean, someone’s gonna have to hire me eventually. I just need to keep trying and not let myself get discouraged when I don’t hear anything.
Because I can’t control everything in the universe. Shocking, I know. But I actually have very little say about what inevitably happens, so I need to start trying to let go of my stranglehold on events and trust instead that things will work out.
And part two of that is to stop holding on to so much stuff, all in the chance that I might need it one day. Holding onto things just in case or for sentimental value never leaves room in your life for wonderful new things to come in! So I’m thinking of doing some reorganizing and purging while I have the time. It may be slow goings though, since I’m trying to really think about the purpose and the function of everything.
Well, that’s all I’ve got for this week. It seems like a lot of good stuff to have figured out already, considering I’ve been so sick. Here’s hoping that the rest of my time off is equally productive.
So I thought about it, and here’s what I came up with as a template for my days:
On most mornings, when I’m not fighting off illness, I tend to wake up naturally around 7:00. I’ll do the tea/coffee and email/blog thing for a half hour or so. Just enough to keep the email landslide at bay. While I like and enjoy technology, I’m trying to make sure I’m not a slave to it. I was starting to feel that way for a while there, but I think that recently, I’ve found some balance on that front and no longer need to read every twitter or respond to every blog post. There just would never be enough hours in the day.
After that is the usual shower/breakfast/get dressed trio, and Daisy often needs a mid-morning walk as soon as I’m presentable. Perhaps I’ll take the camera along on some of these and see where we go.
An early afternoon snack, say around 1ish, with a magazine and a cup of tea may be a nice way to break up my day. I’m thinking it also may be enough of a break to shake me out of any possible morning brain-stuck I feel setting in. Because the plan is to not waste away entire days uselessly.
Tuesday afternoons are the Farmer’s Market/CSA pickup, and taking some time to peruse fresh veggies is always a real treat. And the bonus of being off this month is that I can get there early and swoop up the good stuff before it’s gone. You know, instead of being the one at 5:45 in the afternoon, moaning, “Darn! The peas and spinach are all gone again?!”
And I hate late dinners (one of the blights of my current existence) so if I start cooking promptly at 4 p.m. every afternoon, I’ll never have to worry about feeling bloated at 10 p.m. and may even have enough space for the occasional dessert!
And finally, since I generally tend to run myself into the ground every evening before plunking down into bed too tired to even wash the makeup off my face, 8 p.m. will now be my Gettin’ Ready for Bed Time. I’ll still probably end up doing all sorts of things in the evenings before falling into bed exhausted, but at least I’ll be doing them fresh-faced and already safely in the PJs.
Now you’ll probably notice that there are a lot of things that I didn’t book into this schedule, and that was on purpose. There are things I wanna do when I’m ready, when the mood strikes. Not when my schedule says I must do it. Stuff like writing, trips to the gym and the library, more walks with Daisy, visiting with friends, chores, chats with my mom, etc. I want each individual day to have its own feeling. To be memorable in some different way, instead of each being exactly the same, stamped out by a cookie cutter. I get enough of that during my workdays. This time isn’t about that, it’s about discovering me.
Well, my chest cold has broken into a lovely cough with stuffy/runny nose to match. But I do seem to be getting my energy back, albeit in small spurts. It was enough for me to take Daisy on a walk around the block this morning. And I really should’ve taken the camera with me when I did. New summer flowers have been popping up everywhere while I’ve been cooped up inside. Roses and tiger lilies, especially. They’re everywhere and they look gorgeous. Note to self: Remember to take the camera next time we go out.
And because I’ve had more energy, this morning actually resembled something closer to a real morning, rather than me just getting up and moving directly to the couch. Which reminds me. I did have “plans” to settle on a rhythm to my days, something that everything else will free-flow around as I see fit. So I’ll be posting my shot at putting virtual pen to paper and thinking up a routine that works tomorrow.
PS – What the HECK was the name of that show from when we were kids where two teams of two children had to do ridiculous things, including making some disgusting concoction that the other had to eat the most of before the time was over. I seem to recall flour and M&M’s and peanut butter but…. What the heck was the name of that show?!
 When I was young, I used to dream of being a writer. I had all sorts of fairytale-esque story outlines tucked in notebooks all over the place. I remember during my babysitting years, telling two of my charges a bedtime story based on one of these story scraps I had. Inevitably, their parents returned home before we came to the end of the story and I left for home. The next day, their mother called me. Apparently both girls were desperate to know how the story ended. I had to tell them that I didn’t know how it ended because what I’d told them was all I’d made up.
I used to be a voracious reader as well, inhaling anything with even somewhat intriguing cover copy. As I got older, school readings became more important than anything else and my love of reading dwindled under the weight of being told what to read. But my love of writing never really faded. It did, however, quickly move away from the fictional towards the introspective and autobiographical. As I grew up, and there was less of a chance that my siblings would sneaking a peek, my journal entries became much more self-reflexive, without the fear of reprisals. When I write today, it continues to be self-reflexive, and I am buoyed by all the like-minded blogs I read out there from equally introspective women. (Peruse the blogroll at the side or email me for recomendations if you’re interested.) Even my reading has turned from the fictional to the non-fictional, even so far as the autobiographical. I’m picking up The Gentle Art of Domesticity again. It’s a book I’ve owned for a while but didn’t have the energy to devote to the kind of digestion that it deserved. During this month, I think I’ll have the clarity to take it all in, especially since my own goals in life so closely reflect those pages.
My mother still thinks that I should write children’s books. It’s true that I do have a vivid imagination. But I’d much rather write about this life as I experience it. The joy and pain, the ups and downs. There’s a whole section in the library for autobiographies, mostly those of famous people who have done wonderful or terrible things. But what about the autobiographies of simple people, doing simple things? To me, those are the more important. They are the true reflections of a society, of a life, of a time. So that’s why I write, to preserve my memories as they happen. To write my own autobiography as a testament to the simple and to the good.
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Copyright While they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, please remember that all content on this site is my sole intellectual property. If you would like to use any of the words or images on your personal or professional site please contact me at: sarah@tomorrowortoday.com
© 2009-2010 Sarah Jenkinson
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