Sometimes Life Throws You A Tea Towel Soaked in Ice Water

In retrospect, I feel like I should have seen it coming.

I have been melancholy the last couple of months, very melancholy indeed, feeling somewhat lost in the current state of my life. I remember January and February feeling like a real gauntlet run at the office. We were far too short staffed and what had felt like a bearable gig for many months had become downright awful.

I was really thankful for my current contract when it came along, because it meant little loss of income, but part of me was feeling like I needed just a little break to catch my breath, even if that break came at the cost of the usual anxiety that accompanies not working.

As it was, I was right into the next gig and I'm only realizing now how much it threw me for a loop. All of a sudden, all these little routines I had built up were removed wholesale from my day to day experience.

Instead of a quick walk across the street to my office from the parking lot, I was walking to work along a wind swept, frozen Lake Ontario in the carnage of the never ending construction that appears to have become a way of life in the city's south end.

I was in a new building, working with new people, processes and completely new clients in a new culture.

All my regular go to spots for lunches and groceries and errands were gone.

All of these things in and off themselves are really quite benign, but I think collectively, it was a lot to get used to right away. I didn't really have a chance to psych myself up for it all and combined with a never ending winter, I slightly lost my sh*t.

Things culminated last week in my being sicker than I've been in a decade. That's what I mean when I say I should have seen it coming.  All the signs were there: the depression, anxiousness, hating my life, feeling overwhelmed, the dishes piling up and piling up.

I ended up having to take the whole week off work as I battled the viral onslaught of aches, fever and coughing.  And yet despite feeling really lousy [to the point where I sat with a tea towel soaked in ice water around my neck and a wash cloth on my head - it didn't look pretty but damn I felt less feverish] last week gave me something I really needed, which was some mental downtime.  It was truly one of those viruses that makes you so sick, you couldn't care less if the world was about to implode never mind anything work related. I completely disconnected. And once I started to feel better, it was almost as if some mental dust had settled, and things I had been wailing and gnashing about in my head just didn't matter all that much anymore.

I've come to some conclusions about things.

I'm not in love [by a long shot] with my current gig, but it's bearable and I can do it. The most important thing right now is to show up, do good work and keep making money.

I need to get out of freelancing. Although it has a lot of benefits, I'm not able to take advantage of one of its biggest, which is downtime. I just don't have the financial slack to, for example, take a couple of weeks or a month off between gigs. [God I wish!] In fact, it's the opposite. I never get any paid time off and it's starting to wear me down. I want to get established somewhere and not be changing jobs every year.

I've started applying for full time roles elsewhere. I'm going to rework my resume also.  I need to get out advertising and out of project management. I find both of them soul sucking and not liking what I'm doing for a living makes trying times seem worse than they really are. I lose perspective.

I'm going to get some vocational testing to see if there's another kind of day job I can do that will be somewhat fulfilling.

I'm going to keep going to spinning class because it makes me feel really good. Though probably not this week given I'm still getting over being so sick.

I'll keep plugging away on the house and getting it organized.

I have to create a space in my home to write.

In short, I'm going to chip away at what I can because that's basically all I can do at this point. I have to make happen what I can make happen and hope the rest falls into place. I just can't let go of my dreams for myself and maybe what I thought I wanted, isn't what I wanted after all. All I know right now is that there are the things I want to make better.