works of wanderlust

Tag: professional

  • actually right

    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…

    What was your biggest achievement of the last year?

    Here it is again.

    I find I’m often getting tired of writing about my professional pursuits. And after all, sitting here penning out another post telling you all about them and how great it is going with the tech jobs is the so-called “right” answer. I’m supposed to have a shiny perfect resume. I’m supposed to have academic achievements under my belt. I’m supposed to rack up contract wins and be out her bragging about other business-type successes. At least… that’s what I’ve been railroaded to believing my whole damn life. Make lots of money. Have the perfect LinkedIn profile. Nine to five with benefits, right?

    Yet, I’m so very much realizing that I’m not that person. Not anymore, at least. Or, maybe it’s that I’ve never been him. It’s almost as tho I’m faking it most of the time, doing a solid enough job being a guy who can get shit done in technology or all the related bits and bobs in which I’ve worked for most of my life. I’m not half bad, and that might just be twenty five years of tallied up hours in that field playing out as raw experience, yet… it’s all a mask.

    See I left that world two and a half years ago… even tho the gravitational pull of it almost daily makes it seem like I will never fully escape. I walked away from “The Career” and tried to be something else, and after two and a half years I feel like I’m still explaining that to everyone, even myself.

    I panicked in my transition and I took a University program in Business Analysis last spring, finishing it up as the summer arrived. It looks nice on the resume, but until I actually lock a job in it it doesn’t mean much more than that I passed some tests and did well on some assignments. And I never really knew if it is actually what I wanted to do, but it seemed… again… like the “right” thing to do. 

    I started a small business, too, and most people in that position would be exclusively occupied with making that work and finding new customers and building and growing and on and on. I do work but it’s more just like a part time job I have, sitting over here on the desk, that makes me feel less disconnected from the world in which I was mired for multiple decades. It felt like the next “right” step in whatever this adventure was, but now it’s just there taunting me.

    But then what did I accomplish this year? Actually.

    I didn’t sell any art.

    I didn’t finish my novel.

    I didn’t complete the code for my game.

    I could give you a very unsatisfactory answer to all this tho and it goes as such: this year I’ve broken down the problem even further and revealed the raw skin under the lifetime of metaphorical wounds. I am starting to get it. I am starting to actually understand myself and the purpose of where I need to go, what I need to do, and who I need to be: it’s more than the “right” answer of a professional such and such or a guy in this or that job. It’s bigger, at least for me from my perspective it is. It may mean almost nothing to anyone else, but then everyone has their own to worry about don’t they. But I am figuring out mine… which has never been entirely clear even though I’ve always been told what the “right” answer is.  But then the right answer was never a very good answer, and figuring that bit out might just be my biggest achievement of the last year.

  • ask me again next year

    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.

  • fear of stupid

    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…

    What do you wish you’d done less of this past year?

    I have a terrible case of something I’m going to call FOGWI… or fear of giving the wrong impression. It is awkward to admit it, but I really find that I (often subconsciously) make stupid choices about even the most mundane choices because I over-think the impression it could have (but almost definitely does not have) on others. I do this in particular in reference to what I consider to be my professional persona. 

    I know, I know… we probably all do this to an extent but let me use an example to make it more clear.

    Imagine you are waiting for a phone call about a job interview. You applied for something you think you’d like to get, you know the deadlines of the application and the approximate timelines for their HR department to get back to you. So for a span of about a week you live in this cloud of knowing that (a) the phone might ring at any moment during work hours about said job and (b) you want to answer it when it rings and make a good impression… or at least not the wrong impression.

    YOU might turn the ringer on your phone and (rationally so) go about your life.

    I probably would turn the ringer on and (irrationally so) overthink everything I do for the next week. Should I go out for a walk because I don’t want to ever be out of good cell service range? I definitely shouldn’t run or go to the pool. Should I drive to the store because I would feel weird having that conversation on the speakerphone in my vehicle. Or in the grocery store aisle. Or sitting in the mall food court! Hell, should I even leave the house, get distracted by a video game, have a shower, or mow the lawn because what if I get THAT call just then and in doing so I give the wrong impression, buff the opportunity and ruin my life forever, GAH!

    I know, I know… it’s one hundred percent irrational. But in moments of vulnerability any of us is at risk of making stupid choices to reduce the perceptual imbalance of the circumstances. And rationally, I know it is all silly. I should just get on with my life, do what I need to do, and deal with the hypothetical phone call in a more existential, take it as it comes sort of way.

    And to make all this worse, the multiple times I have got calls from various HR departments or potential contracting customers can you guess what they did? Yeah, they emailed me or texted me a “can we chat at such and such a time” message and we set up an appointment.

    I did too much of that irrational overthinking and FOGWI this past year. And honestly, when I caught myself doing it I worked to correct it. But I definitely wish I did it less. Maybe I would have gone for more walks, logged more klicks on the running trails, or focussed my energies on other more productive and creative tasks. Or maybe I would have just played more video games. Either way, any of that beats pacing around the kitchen thinking the phone might ring, huh?

  • lucid professionalism

    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…

    What made your job
    interesting in 2025?

    Some people may incorrectly tell you that technically I don’t have a job.

    They are wrong.

    I am not traditionally employed these days, true, but I do in a very real sense work for myself… which is a huge job and a lot of work.

    Living the dream… or maybe the nightmare. It really does depend on the perspective and the day of the week… and how much sleep I got last night.

    This state of existence is very much a privileged position emerging from a stable household income, a lack of consumer or property debt, and probably most importantly (I’m not even kidding) living a frugal lifestyle… at least relatively speaking. If anyone seriously asks looking for a serious answer I usually just tell them that we simply don’t buy anything we don’t actually need. We’re shitty consumers. We eat groceries not commercially prepared food.  We travel for adventure and experience, not for luxury or clout. We shop to replace, repair and maintain, not to own more stuff. 

    But I digress. 

    This state of privilege has allowed me to spin up a sole-employee, self-owned small corporation and do bit contract work as a means to keep my skills sharp and my days structured, while still leaving a tremendous amount of free time to do everything from write fiction, dabble in side projects, make art, and hang out with the dog.

    In the two and a half years since jumping ship on my last full-time gig, I have written extensively (mostly in private journals that will never be published) about the transition from salaryman middle-manager in a municipal government job to bumbling self-employed creative eking out a pittance of a living doing gigs. And as it turns out both roles are stressful, but in unique and different ways. The government work was the stress of deep accountability at multiple levels, accountability to a demanding public, to a corporate hierarchy, to direct reports, to technical fidelity, to process and security, to vendor contract fairness and a long list of other deep and abiding struggles that kept me awake into the wee hours of the night. The contractor work is the stress of building reputation, honest effort, uncertainty of next week, and the dark spectre of knowing that I am every role in my own company and no one is there to prop up any shortcomings if I forget to do something important.

    And yet in my lucid and rational moments, as much as I occasionally get that grass-is-greener mentality looking across the gap from present to past self, I am definitely happier and healthier where I am now. 

    The daily variety of living this type of professional existence is both humbling and exciting. 

    Yesterday I was reflecting on this same notion from the perspective of perspective itself: what part of this transition am I leaving behind, and in effect giving myself permission to pull down the metaphorical scaffolding of this professional notion I hold of myself as fixedly capable, instead looking to the broader variety of both gig and term jobs I could take on. Why? Because a year ago I was in a very different place as a guy (temporarily) working part-time day-by-day for a small company job that I had stepped into to fill the void of structure and a paycheque. And it turns out those are the two exactly wrong pieces that drive what makes this stage of my professional life interesting. Sure, I need to get paid… who the hell doesn’t? And sure, having something to do when I wake up each morning is important. But both of those things are somehow right now, in this privileged moment secondary to the adventure of dabbling and learning and contributing to interesting work efforts that I would never have encountered as a middle manager in government.

    It is a bit of a dream, after all. A bit surreal. A bit hard to explain clearly to anyone not experiencing it. And something that I know I will need to awake from …and then return to reality. But it sure as hell has been interesting, if nothing else.

  • cheap-ish therapy

    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…

    Who or what are you
    leaving behind in 2025?

    I was reading over old posts. I mean, half the reason I write this damn blog is that, as they say, writing is cheaper than therapy. That is to say… these words are mostly for me. It is a public journal of a sort, after all, with the key part of that being the notion of a journal.

    Four years ago (to the day) I wrote a post called “Another Life Reset” in which in my first year of writing these reflective posts I lamented on the state of my life as a bureaucratic pencil-pushing middle manager staring down the barrel of another decade or two in government IT work. It was the middle of a pandemic, after all, and my life had become something of a chaos train of salaryman red tape and taking on the stress and angst of a team full of web nerds who were spinning through a time of societal change and whathaveyou. I was deeply burnt out. Charred from the inside core and right out to the part where I was a bit of a zombie. It would take me another year or so, but I manifested that “life reset” and left that job for an open-ended pursuit. 

    It has not been a simple reset. 

    I have rolled through a small collection of random work, a laundry list of job interviews, re-training programs, and kick-starting my own small business.  And oddly enough, in the middle of so much risk and change and idealism it has been the spirit of the reset that has been the one thing pushed off to the side.

    I might even admit I’ve panicked a little bit.

    It is the thing to do, after all, when facing uncertainty. In the what-will-be two and a half years since I left my (un)comfortable stable income as a municipal employee I have found myself drifting back to the idea of that stability as a core tenant of my search rather than the reset that it was supposed to have articulated in my life. That is to say, I’ve been interviewing and pursuing familiar jobs that would literally reboot my currently reset life back into the same program.

    Not that it has worked.

    And I mean, look—the world is a crazy complex place right now.  It’s an employers market. I’m now less than a year away from fifty, and the whole notion of so-called career is as fuzzy as my chin on a Saturday morning. I kinda need to reset from the reset: to rethink the whole approach.

    I tell myself that over and over, but honestly it comes down to personal expectations and this lingering thought that I need a kind of self-granted permission to do something crazy.

    So that’s what I’m leaving behind. I’ve been thinking about it for a few months now, actually. My expectation for what this all looks like if and when it ever reboots needs to have a secondary reset. A purge of expectations. It is a leaving behind of mental frameworks for my professional self and looking ahead to a job that does more than “keep me busy” but rather gives back to the world in a meaningful way that counterbalances the whole drudgery of employment.

    I’ve set the pieces in place in 2025. Now it is time to pull down the scaffolding of my old concept of professional self and reveal what is possible. How’s that for some cheap therapy online, huh?