#‘I don’t feel like me’

[whentherewerebicycles]

friends I am experiencing an early-onset midlife crisis and it is time to get my shit together and figure out what I’m going to do about it. my job is fine but it is not sustainable to spend every week swinging wildly from chanting “I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine” into feeling like I’m in the depths of despair about wasting my one human life. it is just not sustainable and I NEED to honor my own gut feelings even if many people around me are telling me this situation is ideal. maybe they are right! but consider this: maybe they aren’t! or maybe this situation would be ideal for them but it’s certainly not ideal for me and I am the one who has to live in my own life!!!! I need an escape plan because I can already feel my confidence as a professional & a human atrophying the longer I stay in this role. so no more wallowing. I am going to set short-and long-term goals for myself and establish a clear timeline for my exit strategy. 

here are my thoughts right now:

L&D work may or may not be for me, but I can tell this job isn’t for me. it’s not utilizing any of my skills. the institution’s understanding of workplace learning seems pretty baked in. leadership’s approach is so micromanage-y it’s hard to see them giving our team the creative/intellectual freedom to define and implement a more exciting vision plan that might actually address some of the org’s challenges. I spend my days copying text into canva and creating shitty graphics, which is just not a good use of anyone’s time. I feel like the job was sliiiiightly misrepresented to me in the hiring process and it’s hard to see any of these things changing anytime soon.

I need to get something out of this job. I need to make a list of my professional dev goals (classes I can get them to pay for, books I can read, topics I want to gain greater expertise in, etc). I also need to make a separate list of the work projects I’d like to drive forward over the next couple months, so that when I’m interviewing for jobs next time around I can actually say I did something semi-useful here. I think the fact that I don’t want to be in this role long term will actually free me up to be a bit more assertive in claiming projects, taking initiative, and asking directly for what I need. I want to spend time this week working on those lists and creating a timeline for myself.

I want to kick it into high gear in terms of finishing projects early and well. I’ve been doing a decent job (getting lots of positive feedback etc and finishing things quickly) but I’m giving this job 5-10% of what I’m able to do any given week. but I honestly find it more depressing to underachieve or just do the bare minimum because it makes me feel so pointless and adrift. starting this week, I’m going to make a commitment to myself to actually perform at the level I am capable of performing at. I might feel meh about my job but I derive a great deal of meaning and self-worth from the feeling of working hard and excelling at something. I have this one side project everyone seems to think will take me a couple months. I’d like to finish 80% of it this week. I want to see if working hard makes a difference in how I feel about the work itself.

I need to be realistic about money. I want to stay in the seattle area and I want to have a kid very soon. plus I need to rebuild my savings after almost cleaning myself out to make this cross-country move. I can’t take another low-paying university job no matter how much I might want to. but I can find something that is a better fit, ideally where I am getting to use more of my people skills. I need to sit down and do some realistic calculations about how long I need to stay in this job to get my savings back up, how much I need to make annually to support myself and a kid on a single income, and what I am and am not willing to compromise on in a job. having a clear sense of my financial needs will help me decide on a timeline + exit strategy.

I enjoy the freedom of remote work but I’m not cut out for being remote in the long term. I think ideally I want a hybrid schedule with some flexibility about which days I’m in/out. I am going to start scouring job boards again with this in mind. in reading job descriptions I’m also going to start paying very close attention to what different postings are asking for. this will help me develop and refine my list of the skills, experiences, projects etc I want to pursue in my time at my current job.

I can do this. I feel really adrift but I know why: too much unstructured time, too much aloneness during the week, too much performing below the level I know I’m capable of performing at, too much not listening to my gut & trying to drown out my feelings of despair by spending money and time on house projects. I ONLY GET ONE LIFE. I ONLY GET ONE LIFE!!!!!!! I know what personal happiness + professional fulfillment looks and feels like for me. I was very lucky to have lived in that professional headspace for a few years, because it’s given me a baseline I can measure my current situation against. I don’t have to passively accept feeling the way I do right now. I don’t know how I’m going to get back to feeling more like myself but I know I am smart enough and resourceful enough to figure it out. onwards!!!!!!!

[mumblesplash]

i know it’s like years old at this point but i love that one collab mumbo and grian did with tommyinnit bc it’s like the single most concentrated example i’ve seen of mumbo’s Chaos Nullification Powers

you get to see a bit of it on hermitcraft, mostly via his interactions with grian, but until seeing that collab it didn’t really hit me just how completely mumbo can no-sell other people’s attempts to control a situation. tommyinnit is possibly the single shoutiest, most chaotic minecraft youtuber out there, and in most videos i’ve seen he pretty much overwhelms everyone else and sets the tone for interactions because of this. but mumbo just. doesn’t let him. no matter how much tommy escalates in intensity, mumbo reacts with *exactly* the same energy he always does. grian largely comes across in the whole video as annoyed and reluctant to engage with the whole thing, but mumbo’s not even affected. he just rolls with anything he finds funny and basically ignores anything he disapproves of, only seeming more and more unflappable the harder anyone tries to get a rise out of him.

AND imo, this is the key to my favorite interpretation of him as a character

see, when the people around him are being more reasonable/calm, i think mumbo often comes across as anxious and a bit easily overwhelmed. the thing is, his nervous wet cat vibes do not scale. he has one setting. his responses to the last life ‘ah-ha!’ jokes and to hermitcraft 8 starting to crumble to pieces under a falling moon are almost identical.

mumbo jumbo is inexorably and eternally Just Some Guy, but that gets stranger and stranger the weirder his surroundings become. the giggly incredulousness that makes him an easy target for goofy puns looks Very different when it’s also his reaction to the impending end of the world.

[fallahifag]

palestinians don’t owe you anything

[identitty-dickruption]

one of the worst things in the world is that feeling unloveable can (and will) make you act in ways that reinforces itself. I feel unloveable so I don’t respond to messages so people reach out less so I feel unloveable. one of the hardest things in the world is fighting back the brain demons long enough to break the cycle

[stuckinapril]

I love Tumblr because nothing matters here truly. There are no influencers. Having followers doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a site where people post their sporadic thoughts and rb pretty pictures. Anyone who thinks any of this matters is woefully missing the point

[tragedykery]

the best characters are ones that suffer from a chronic case of Dramatic Cunt Syndrome

[romijuli]

It’s not that I don’t LIKE the Fandom Popular Pairings, it’s that I find the assumption that everyone ships them and the general all-consuming nature of said pairings to be kinda exhausting,

[white-weasel]

Funniest bit of the dnd movie is Xenk clearly being an NPC the DM introduced for lore and plot purposes who’s a competent fighter because of course he is, his reputation and backstory require it. But whoopsies the DM made him too powerful, the whole party likes him, and now they want him to come with to fight the BBEG which will completely and utterly fuck up the encounter balance

So instead of there being any actual plot reason he can’t join Xenk just says “I can’t. This is something only you can do.” And then walks off, never to interact with the party again because the DM just knows those little shits will find a way to use their OP creation against them

[danggerine]

going insane thinking about the harrow and palamedes friendship. harrow, who has never met another necromancer her age forming a bizarro 3D chess rivalry while pal worries about her safety at every possible turn. harrow, who is up to her eyebrows in paranoia and secrecy, trusting the sixth house with gideon unconscious and hurt, letting them into the ninth house quarters unsupervised. if “i cannot conceive of a universe without you in it” is goth for i love you, “death first to vultures and scavengers” has got to be goth for i love you (platonic). pal’s first reaction when harrow comes into his bubble in the river is to scoop her up in a hug, and at this point she doesn’t remember anything about him because cutting out all her memories of gideon is impossible without cutting out memories of the sixth, but she still makes him a skelehand to inhabit anyway. when harrow’s memories are finally whole, she tells dulcinea she couldn’t face pal knowing that his pen pal girlfriend died on her account, but the next time she “faces” him, palamades’s soul is in someone else’s body and harrow’s body is full of nona’s soul. he spends six months protecting and caring for harrow’s body (and nona obv), believing in the possibility of bringing her back to it the same way cam believed in him. “god, do you know i miss harrow terribly.” and by the time harrow comes back to her body at the very end of ntn, pal is gone forever, fully pauled. the last time harrow and palamades see each other as their complete selves is in canaan house, alive and unlyctored. two of the smartest and loneliest people in the solar system meet each other in the worst of circumstances and spend the rest of the story dancing around each other as fragments of themselves, trying to care about each other in the interim but never fully meeting like they did the first time. a friendship made almost entirely of missing the other person. “do you know i miss harrow terribly.” god. i need to lie down

[la-esmerqlda]

I would like to thank Elon Musk for breaking the stereotype that “high functioning” autistic people are geniuses, because he’s genuinely so fucking dumb I can hardly even fathom it.

[a-polite-melody]

“But if a trans man wasn’t trans would he—”

SHUT THE FUCK UP

He is trans.

You don’t get to separate the trans and the man because it’s convenient for you. Trans men are men because they are trans. Trans men are trans because they are men. You can’t just separate trans men’s identities out like this to say they’re oppressed for being trans and not men because THOSE ARE THE SAME THING and separating them to categorize how trans + man interact in a mathematical version of identity politics flies directly in the face of intersectionality and I’m so tired of pretending it doesn’t.

[housecow]

Without showing your face, could you share a full body photo? Like, I know you’re big, yet somehow, I think my mind’s eye is underselling just how big.

does this help? me abt 5lbs ago :))

[stuckinapril]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[puppyeared]

Wyrm on a string

[slutifer]

mc: oh brother-

Mammon: which one?

mc: …what?

Mammon: which brother?

mc:…

mc: uhh, you?

Mammon: that’s right baby

[saintaviator]

something something gman tommy something something gordon in stasis. you know how it is.