It’s been a little bit hasn’t it!?
Quit my job, moved, did some stuff, survived a pandemic, made new friends, lost some friends, family, learned some things... Worked some work, built a marriage (ongoing) and upgraded from work to career.
Also I got a cat. He’s easy peasy and he knows right when the snuggles are needed most. Might I remind you, I’m 36- despite my writing. So I’m hoping, this time to keep up with this. Sharing my thoughts, what's going on, what’s happened. Not just to follow through with an idea my therapist and I came up with, (LITERALLY LOL’ing) but because it’s nice to get thoughts and feelings out into the world. There are VERY few who have even seen this let alone keep up with it on a regular basis.
So here we are, at the very beginning of a new career, a real career, a grown up job. Today marks the final day of training and surprisingly enough I (along with my awesome classmates) are really catching on. Yea, we do have a LOAD of questions and a lot of things incomplete but thanks to our fearless leader aka “fill-in-manager” we’ll be given the time to catch up a little. In the meantime, as of next week, we are on our own!
This is the culmination of years of applying and interviewing over and over, being let down, getting pep talks from my dad and new surrogate mom/mentor.. Everyday I tap my ID badge against a wall and I'm in the place that I’ve been working to get to for so long.
It’s been an exhausting process of putting in hours of “side work” in the last year, losing sleep, losing energy, interest, regaining interest, riding dopamine hyper-fixations, utilizing hyperfocus in the right places, sacrificing time, money, brain cells... Was it worth it? So far.
Things have got easier over time. Taking the time to celebrate the little achievements, taking each in stride so things have got better over time and this processes isn’t yet over. There’s still a lot to do. Just as with everything in life, things are continuous... Until they’re not. In the meantime, my hope is to leave some kind of permanent mark somewhere.
So, to my point. I’m here, making dinner, looking at my fridge. We have this little mood chart that I dug out of one of my old (doom) boxes I have hidden around the house. It had been magnetized on my parent’s refrigerator for almost as long as I can remember. It wasn’t used often and if I’m honest, it still isn’t. My hope would be that this worn, advertisement for a behavior health company I’ve never heard of disguised as a novelty therapy tool, would be another communication tool for me and my wife. We don’t always, everyday get a chance to have these conversations to express how we’re feeling generally on a day to day. Most of the time I don’t even remember if, when I look at it, I was the last one to use it or my wife. Just looking at it reminds me to, as the Jedi say, “be mindful of your feelings”.
All this of course, sounds quite silly.
For us, it works. Things like this, let us be more our genuine selves with each other with all of the stressful things we have going on. I kinda like it.
