Blood Socks

Three days ago, I was feeling completely lost and miserable—now, I’m drastically better. I did a few days of paid work this week, and though the work isn’t stable or complete yet, it has gone miles towards improving my outlook. For the first time in over two weeks, I feel totally relaxed, and I even played a video game for a couple hours, shame-free. My plan to to give myself time, energy, and balance through freelancing actually appears feasible and enjoyable again.

So what happened?

Looking back at it now, there doesn’t seem to have been cause for such alarm. I still had a few weeks before I needed to just give up and take a job, and I even knew of a couple of specific positions I’d be likely to have if I did so. Not to mention, this paid work I just did, I knew it was coming the whole time, just not an exact start date. During my first week home in Brooklyn, my attitude reflected these facts—optimistic, confident, and busily following up on leads.

Then, nearly all of these leads fell through, at no fault of my own. I heard some scary freelancer stories. Having to tell great people who wanted to help me that I wasn’t interested in working full time got real old. The mounting stress made it difficult to pursue my interests, so explaining to friends what I was trying to do began to taste like ash in my mouth.

It’s at about that time that I stopped thinking about what to do, and started focusing on all the things I’d done wrong. All of the preparations I should have done before leaving Blue State, all the money I should have saved over the past 3 years, how stupid and reckless I was being, all of that. I started sleeping longer, and my appetite decreased to practically nothing—once, at the trough of it, I gagged at the thought of eating. Complete misery.

After a couple of days, I recovered some, and forced myself into a sort of heady optimism. Since it was based more on bravado than substance, by Monday it began deteriorating again, and though it never got as bad as before, by Wednesday morning my thoughts were mostly dark and confused. That same night, after a day of work, I felt good. After another, by yesterday night, fantastic. And tonight, after a third, I feel back to normal.

But don’t worry, I’m planning on being a mess again by Wednesday. If I don’t learn something from the tornado of personal failure that was the last 2 and a half weeks, and shape the hell up, I certainly will be. This means exercising discipline, making a plan and sticking to it, something I consistently failed to do despite plenty of inner promises. It also means chilling out, and doing lower priority work. From Day 1 without a job, I’ve only done urgent tasks, nothing nonessential, and this attitude has incredible drawbacks when held for more than like, a day.

Most importantly, it means remembering why I’m even doing this. Once I started feeling bad, I could only conceive of doing freelance work while in the same poor spirits—I couldn’t remember how it felt to feel good anymore, and so I lost interest in doing much at all. By the end, I wasn’t even looking forward to this week’s work, the work that ended up restoring my sanity.

All right, I have to sleep and leave for the airport in less than 4 hours. I’ve learned a lot about myself under stress these last couple weeks, and I’ll put it to good use. For one, I will definitely be writing more here in the days to come. I am looking forward to rejoining the land of the living.