Morning Pages: July 29th, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

Ahh he can climb sideways!

I think this morning I'm feeling tired. I slept too late yesterday, and I woke up automatically, nervous around the whole starting a new job thing. I think it's a healthy change, I've been slacking off way too much recently, and I think the job will give me some runway and some structure around my life. Maybe it's natural in order to work for some period of time in an office. At least, working feels natural to me.

I think about the past few months and the amount of effort I've spent trying to get somewhere, anywhere really. I still need to start working on my habit tracker. I still need to work on getting a digital Rolodex up and running and populated. I still need to create a password autorotation tool (where none currently exists, likely because not every client has an API and because Bitwarden smartly doesn't expose an API for user data like that). I still need to create the realtime data layer for event-driven clients. And I still need to make my database-backed spreadsheet app. All things I need to do.

I also look at all the places I've failed at. I'm looking at my jobs spreadsheet and realized that out of 30 or so jobs I've applied to, only one is currently still active in the hiring process, otherwise I've been rejected out of hand or ghosted without the courtesy of a response. It makes me wonder what the correlation is between skill and success, and whether there is any. I kind of always knew that where I'd end up and how well I'd do would be dependent on my BATNA, and that companies look more for impact rather than raw intellect, but I thought I'd be able to get somewhere with my sabbatical.

Then I remember I'm still incredibly lucky to be where I am. The job I'm starting pays well and looks attractive from a skills learning standpoint. My coworkers seem nice and considerate. The company was polite enough to put my one-off requests in writing. Where else would I be able to have that kind of flexibility?

No, I'm not bitter, I'm grateful. I have to be grateful. It's up to me to prove I'm worth it.