Screw the dailies

I’m going to pull the plug on the dailies. I’ve been writing sloppily just to try and hit them. The more I’ve churned out some evenings, the more I’ve avoided sitting down and actual doing it in a way I get any satisfaction out of it. In short: kudos to those who can, I couldn’t, I shouldn’t, back to the regular programming.

The best thing is that I can continue, rather then cutting to another post for metric’s sake. Hence, the long form:

It’s been a very… eventful? interesting? couple of months. And I mean interesting in the “may you live in interesting times” way. I’ve taken quite a few thing on the chin. I’ve been confronted with some major demon in the first person, ones I have dealt with in the second person a while back. Being really pissed to have go through that twice when most people get to be blissfully ignorant of.

Getting rejected from job interviews. Not the ones I where I got rejected out of hand, which I usually had coming. Fair enough, don’t care, move on. But about two or three times it really came down to the wire. Where a single person could flip the verdict either way. And, every time, it flipped the wrong way. For which I have strong reasons to believe are arbitrary reasons. It sounds self indulgent, but in each instance I’ve had people in the process reach out to me privately (which is very unorthodox) to tell me how unfair/random my rejection was. And, once again, I could probably take one or two of those on stride. Not all of them.

Last week, it came down to the wire yet again. Once again the anxiety. Refreshing inboxes. Sitting on decisions, kicking it a million ways in search of solutions, chewing over those solutions tens of times. Smooth sailing until a part of the process I didn’t know mattered. Overanalyzing every word of every sentence of every email. A very tense week or two, especially with the previous experiences, wondering if 10 years of experience were arbitrary, or actually amount to a directed progression. As a good friend of mine said: “It’s not always impostor syndrome. Sometimes they’re genuinely terrible”.

The wire. Once again. And, somehow, it worked. There was a hard blocker that threatened to throw everything in jeopardy. I’m not sure yet why, and I’m definitely going to confirm if my hypothesis is right. But they had a demand I couldn’t fulfill in any satisfactory form. In the moment I came up with a solution that I think payed off, a very honest one. I counted on some previous relations, and made with tentative confidence of good will on both sides.

It worked. I have a job offer, and I’m going to take it. It’s professionally very interesting, and my gut feeling is that the atmosphere in the office will be pleasant. I’m moving to a new country (that I’m a bit unsure of). I’ll have to become a lot more advanced on a lot of skills that are either dusty, or even rudimentary. I have been procrastinating a lot of personal development by conveniently classifying the last couple of years as temporary. And that might very well be a bigger challenge than the professional ones.

I really f****ng hope that it doesn’t come down to the wire. So sick and tired of that thing. I’m hoping to to build a sandbox. Someplace where I can experiment, and can fail without feeling it might jeopardize my entire future. I don’t want to feel it can go either way. I really hope I can start building, rather that shoring up what I have. Throwing dice and curing another one. There’s no real reason for me to have a lot of disparate positive things (I have a great group of friends, a lot of positive memories to offset the negatives, a good amount of raw talent for some pursuits). I want to have it all connected, to not have to wonder which way I should, or it will, end up going.

Wish me luck!