My Year of Strength and Stability

I have always been one to have many goals and dreams. I have a million and one hobbies and a dream for every single one. From writing and reading to painting and drawing to pole-dancing and gymming to baking and volunteering, I have so many interests and passions that it's hard to keep track. And the dreams: I have a dream to hang a painting in an art exhibit, to publish a novel and to finally figure out how to bake scones (the last hold out) without burning them.

This goes for my career too. I have many goals and aspirations for my career. To work my way up. To continue to learn and grow. And again for my personal life. I want to be a parent. I want to have a family. I want to own a house. One of those is feeling much less attainable than the others at the moment.

In every area of my life, I have goals and commitments and lists and ideas, even sticky notes with plans written neatly on them but piled haphazardly in the back of a drawer somewhere that I'll surely find in 6 months. But as life has gotten busier, it's been increasingly more difficult to keep up with all of my hobbies, passions and goals.

I've struggled to maintain good routines in day-to-day life. I've struggled to maintain friendships. And I've struggled to do all the things that I want to do in the time I want to do them.

A few years ago, I started writing a book. I did finish writing the first draft but have never gotten around to editing and proofreading. Instead, I've moved on to other projects. Painting a piece to enter into an open art exhibition. Picking up photography as a hobby. Speaking a new language. Reading a new book. Researching stand-up paddle boarding to see if that's something else I would like to try. Burning more scones.

In 2023 especially, it felt as though I would rather move between twenty different projects than finish a single one. It was too much. Finishing and ending things felt like a chore. But starting them was easy, fun, motivating and exciting.

That was something that I really craved throughout last year, something that I really needed to keep me going and being positive. My work had taken a turn for the worst. I was working in a position where it felt like there was no out. There was no way that I could keep up with the workload, no way I could finish everything that needed to be finished, and every time I tried to communicate this, I felt as though I was causing trouble. I felt as though I was the one at fault.

My coworkers could do the work, why couldn't I? Why was it taking me longer? It didn't seem to matter to anyone that I had different regulations on my position or that I was an intern with an off-site supervisor who had to sign off on everything. Why was I slow? Why was it too much for me?

If we go back even further, at the end of 2022, I completely burned out (in the same job) and I was still struggling with that in 2023. I was still having difficulties from that time. The supervision itself was a financial strain on me. Everything was difficult to balance and, in 2022, the financial stakes were not as dire as in 2023. So everything was culminating into one big mess of anxiety and missed deadlines and questions.

My hobbies, which I'd always loved so much before, were reflecting back the same things as well. I couldn't find enough time to finish them before I was on to the next idea. I couldn't get off the couch in the afternoons to do something that I liked, even if I had wanted to or felt like I could do anything more. My days ended with my workday and I struggled to rest enough to feel well enough for the next day.

Pole-dancing, thankfully, was a good escape because I could go there and do the class and leave and come home and there was no end goal I needed to achieve. But finishing a painting to enter into an exhibit or competition had an end goal and time and was a project to be completed and was therefore a chore. Finishing a writing project was a chore. Finishing reading a book, when I had already guessed the ending, was a nightmare, but anything more high-stakes than a fluffy romance made me cry.

It is my hope that a lot will have changed this year. I looks promising. Now I have a job in a new workplace. I have my friend of 14 years moving to the area I live in. My partner and I are beginning to look at wedding venues. My internship will end. I have a support system that has shown me that what I went through isn't the norm in the industry I chose to make a career in.

But I'm disheartened and weary about my future in this career and I'm looking to my hobbies to help me recover from burnout. I'm thinking that I need to be the one to make the biggest changes in my life, and not just in my environment and my routine. I need to push myself to maintain and be consistent. But, in the same token, I need to stop and slow down. I need to recover. I need to find that balance that I've never had before.

All I wish for in 2024 is that I can be consistent. I can write consistently, post to Vocal consistently. I can paint and pole-dance and gym consistently. I can maintain my friendships and be more consistent in general.

But even this kind of thinking where I have to “do, do, do” is the kind of thinking that led me to burnout anyway. I feel like I can't trust it. Like I can't lean into it fully and that relaxing might be the way to go. But then that feels so unnatural to me. In this way, I've been talking myself into circles that bewilder me for the last nearly two years. Though I have found the reflection helpful in many ways.

I've broken it down whichever way I can and what I really want, more than anything, is simply this: I want to be consistent. If I read a book weekly at the beginning of the year, I want to still be doing that at the end of the year. If I enter every competition with Vocal at the beginning of the year or I write a story every week or month then I want to be doing exactly that at the end of the year. If I bake and burn scones every week, I want to be doing that right up until the end of the year, hopefully minus the burning by the end of it. But if I only paint once a month, then that's ok, I can consistently do that. If I don't feel like ever drawing for the first 6 months of the year then I can probably take the other 6 months off this year and start up again next year.

I once read an article claiming that the current generation wouldn't have a mid-life crisis, that a mid-life crisis was the result of feeling like one hadn't done enough with their lives and was their way to ‘shake things up’. According to the article, this generation is too stressed for a mid-life crisis and doesn't want to be ‘shaken up’ anymore. At the time, I thought that was silly. Of course, everyone should have a mid-life crisis, it was a part of growing up. That's not the case now.

I don't want to always feel like I'm running out of time and like I'm pushing myself. This year, 2024, is a year of recovery and consistency. Stability. Reflection.

What better way to reflect than write? And what better place to write, for me at the moment, than on Vocal?

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