Midyear Muddle

Photo by Michael Wave on Unsplash

I had hoped for it to be a midyear restart, recalibration, refresh, revolution.

But as I type this I am on negative energy levels, living off the energy of two weeks ahead, pretty much like my finances which is living at least a year ahead on borrowed money I don't know if I can ever afford to pay off.

I am training and growing new people in the team at work and most of them show promise. But then of course I am in that transition period of everything quadrupled because I both have to oversee and to do. Because despite delegations there are still details to watch out for, making sure things don't fall in-between tasks and deadlines, and then there's the constant mentorship, debriefs, post-mortems. My daily reminders have quintipled. And even more projects are pouring in. And more projects that push at the boundaries of my skills, turning me overnight into an expert via bootcamp masterclasses of read-throughs/ skim-throughs of reference decks and then playing it all by ear and intuition and heart.

And somehow I keep on making it, to my perpetual surprise. And gratitude, of course. Even now I keep discovering aptitudes I didn't know or never thought I'd have.

Yet all of that is not enough, still. Logically I should and I could move to another bigger agency with higher pay. I know it will actually be easy.

But I cannot give up that particular peace of mind when I wake up on a Monday morning. I may be always exhausted but there is a certain sense of safety that I get with the agency I am in now. Not a complacent safety. A safety that lets me push at my own comfort zones and know that if I fail I can try again.

To be honest, I am good with work despite the challenge of the salary (which is a factor of the company's size compared to the others I could move into for higher pay). I have never grown as much into my line of work as I did in the past three years (even after a decade of going freelance). I can even see myself still having a future of some kind in this work. (Although if money were not an issue I would be a full-time artist in a heartbeat.)

A glaring expense: 20 rescue cats. But I would hazard to say that this is still infinitely less costly than actual children. Not that I ever wanted any children. But I do want that relationship of caring for and nurturing and being unconditionally loved in return, and I have loved cats since I was a child. Cats have been significant helpers for my mental health, including refraining from thoughts of self-harm. They have been unconditional comfort during the worst days. Even my dad's mental wellbeing is helped by them. So, no, the solution is not to give up any of the cats.

A deeper root cause of all these difficulties: a late-recognized narcissistic parent who squandered the whole household's future for their own pleasure and benefit, who only married in the hopes of living a princess's life except that life was, well, life. And so I was parentified early, and learned things I should have learned as a child when I was already an adult, by teaching myself. And now I am still cleaning up all the mess and devastations that the narcissist parent has wreaked into this so-called family. Still making up for all that is lacking, still patching up too many broken things, still covering for all the neglect.

I am in a very small and tight corner now. With the floor and the ceiling slowly pressing together. From living day to day I am now living hour to hour.

I pick up a pencil, freshly sharpened.

Maybe I can draw an escape door. Maybe there will be magic, somehow, and it opens...