It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Compared to this time last year are you happier or sadder?

At the end of this month it will have been exactly two and a half years since I left that stable job and set out on an adventure of random and self employment. Two. And a half. Years.

It was a story of burnout and change and balance and adventure. It is strange however, how I always seem pin that transition back to personal happiness—even now, a quarter of a decade later. 

Last December I was quasi-employed at one of my side-gig adventures. I can’t tell you if I was happy precisely. The job was great on paper, shitty in reality. The people were interesting and fun, but the relationships were fleeting and shallow. The hours were trash, but I simultaneously had a lot of free time to write and code and a kind of routine of stability and hope that it was going somewhere.

A year later I’ve left that place behind, been through a professional training program, started my own corporation, earned money doing technology things, and seem to have found a bit of professional balance (even if the pay is still pretty sickly.) 

Happier was inevitable, I think.

If that is the only measure, though, I don’t think it paints a fulsome picture.

I am healthier, too. I seem to have solved (at least diagnosed) the problem behind this chronic cough I’ve had for a couple years. 

I am sleeping better. Or, at least I feel less tired than in a long time and—well, you know how it feels like you had a good sleep because you wake up alert and remembering these vast and rolling narrative dreams that fill your head and heart with a blur of “what was that all about?” vibes. Yeah. That.

My kid is doing well. My dog is cuddlier. I have good friends.

The weather is still meh, but apart from moving across the ocean there is not much hope to fixing that part of my life besides embracing the winter.

What else can I say, I suppose? I started posting here again in the interim between of those two points in time, this time last year and now, so perhaps the very act of routinely writing and posting and feeling like I can articulate the very notion of this passage of time and in doing so step back and look at it with even a bit of objectivity? Maybe that helps. Maybe seeing those notches of my year all lined up and progress being made, tracking the adventure of this thing untethered from some kind of vague professional virtue signalling, maybe that’s the thing that sets the tone of everything else. 

I dunno. Ask me again next year.