Hey, everyone. It’s been a while, and that’s completely my fault. This last year has been a struggle, mostly with myself, as I try to find some kind of balance in my life that I’m satisfied with.
Let me lay it out…I’m going to be 37 this year, and with that, there’s been a lot of baggage on my mind. The big one is that my father and his brother both died in their mid-40s due to heart disease, so I’m wondering if that’s my fate as well. Also, I am really disliking my current job. I’ve been there for about 13 years now, and this last year has really gotten to me. I can’t focus on my duties like I used to; I just keep feeling like I’m always wanting to be somewhere else, to say nothing of how much I’m dispising my immediate boss these days. But, I’ve still got a truck to finish paying off, not to mention some pretty steep medical bills, so I really need to stay there at least another year. The benefits are amazing, certainly, but the office environment has soured over the years.
I’ve certainly noticed some changes with myself in the last year or two as well. I’ve struggled since my early teens to get my diabetes in check, and with this last year, I’ve made some of the best progress I ever have, thanks to some new medications, a new dieting plan, and regular exercise. However, with that comes the constant struggle of keeping my sugar low while chained to a desk 8+ hours a day, five days a week. I’ve never wanted to be out and about more than I have this past year. I’ve been hiking to more places in Kentucky than I’ve ever been to before, and I’ve gone out exploring locally to places I’ve only ever heard of. Plus, I’ve really gotten into photography since last May, absorbing everything I can learn, and have even purchased my second DSLR. I’ve gone so much into it that I’ve really cut back my model building to about one kit a month if that.
Plus, I’ve been trying to find the energy to get back to writing regularly. In the evenings, I come home and feel so mentally drained that I can barely stay awake most of the time; pretty much every evening I’ll wind up falling asleep in my desk chair for at least half an hour or so, or so near to sleep that I may as well be. It’s frustrating to have to deal with that every evening but to complicate matters more, I still haven’t managed to kick my Youtube habit. Might as well consider it an addiction… I can go a day or two without watching something, but always wind up falling back into the pattern of watching it all evening after I’ve recovered from my low energy period. When I think of how much time I’ve wasted over the past decade on Youtube when I could have been writing, it saddens me.
To that end, I’ve been trying to replace Youtube with what I used to do before it came around: reading. I’ve bought more books the past year than I have in a long time, probably since before high school, and have read several of them, just nowhere near as many as I wanted to. I feel better when I read, my mind actually comes up with new ideas after I read some inspiring scene or take in a new setting. I just don’t know why I can’t focus there and have to keep going back to that damn video stream… I can block that stuff, sure, but I’m so familiar with doing this kind of thing thanks to my IT job that I can just as easily undo it, so it’s not exactly the best solution. There are options like the “Cold Turkey” blocker, but I’m not sure if that’d be any better than me just blocking it through my router/hosts file. It might be a bit harder to get around, I suppose…
It just seems like there are so many different directions I’m wanting to go with my life right now that I can’t focus on any one direction for more than a handful of minutes at a time. I have good days with writing, getting whole chapters done, but those are few and far between. Likewise, when I read, it’s a chapter or two a night, but sometimes I’ll manage to get through half the book in a day; it just depends on how well I’m feeling after that mind-numbing, depressing day at the office. I suppose it really comes down to dealing with that first, but finding another job in eastern Kentucky can be difficult, to say nothing of even trying to decide what it is I’d actually like to do. Sure, writing full time is always going to be the ultimate dream, but realistically, there’s no way I could manage that right now and hope to make ends meet.
There is a word for what I need, though…discipline. I need to crack down on myself in other areas and make myself do what I really want, Youtube dopamine addiction be damned.
Knowing what to do, and actually doing it, though, are vastly different things, of course. Just another of life’s little challenges…
Thanks for taking the time to read my random thoughts. If nothing else this is the most I’ve written all week, so I suppose I am making a little progress on the writing front. I hope to actually make this a place where I can write regularly, whatever it may be, whether it’s my thoughts, snippets of fiction, worldbuilding, rants, whatever. One of the most important things in writing is keeping yourself writing, so if I can just manage that…I’ll be off to a better than average start.
