Cracking the lid

Several weeks on and the train has hardly left the station, but at least it's moving.

After some serious thought, I applied for reduced hours at work. I wanted a 4-day week but would be happy with a 9-day fortnight if 4 days was beyond the limits of what would be accepted. After a 3-week wait, I got a flat refusal. Not even an attempt at a compromise. I was told to my face that I am highly valued in a way that made me feel pretty poorly valued. Special. So all my plans for more creative time, exercise and generally having a better balanced life were dashed and I was pretty devastated.

So I've had to think about how to remodel my activities to still achieve the same goals, and also how not to get so wound up at work.

The former has had one new development, in meeting Stando, a great singer/songwriter who is currently recording an album and want horns on it. WooT! This has got me practising again, as I will need some better stamina for a decent recording sesh. We had a jam on Saturday night which was great fun. I'm looking forward to working on some stuff. Plus my jam buddy Adrian is back from his travels so we return to our regular routine this week and can continue on the path of doing some writing and getting some material polished for gigging. I also want to pursue the mixing path but I'm trying to go easy on myself lately as I've been having a bit of a hard time from a few quarters. Plus I need a free Saturday to go looking at controllers.

The work stuff is a bit trickier. I've been getting extremely frustrated and emotional at work quite a lot over the last few months. It's really exhausting and massively annoying to not be able to control my emotions in a professional scenario. Intellectually, I realise that I can't control the things that are upsetting me and I just need to care less about it, but I can't detach my emotions. I've been having some coaching with an HR rep and sessions with a psychologist and one of the things that have come out of these is that the conflict is partly due to a mismatch of core values between myself and some other people I work with.

So I think my challenge is to not expect my worldview to manifest in the people around me. I can't change other people but I can change myself. So, for instance, I'm pretty attracted to efficiency in all forms so I guess it's a core value. I like to build efficient systems to make things easier for myself and the people around me. But not everyone is big on efficiency. They value other things ahead of efficiency. If I'm frustrated by their inefficiency, it's because I'm expecting them to be like me, but they're not (and I can't make them, dammit! ;o)) So there's no point wanting other people to be efficient if it's not in their nature. It's defective thinking. I haven't got the thinking right yet but I can see the things that are making me so frustrated, and recognise that I don't have to feel that way. I'll keep working on it.

The idea of staying and learning from it is interesting food for thought. I work in a system that is broken. I can leave it to its own devices or I can be a positive force, seizing opportunities to do good things when I find them. In the words of Scroobius Pip: "You see a mousetrap, I see free cheese and a fucking challenge". The last time I had a serious challenge at work, I eventually left without another job to go to - I was that desperate to get out. I probably could have won a constructive dismissal case but I had no energy left to fight.

But why should I let someone else dictate that choice for me? I enjoy most of the work I do and most of my colleagues. I'm not sure that running away is teaching me anything. Although I am looking at other jobs, I am kind of only half-arsed about it. I guess part of me wants out but another part is willing to use it as an incredibly valuable (albeit terrifying and knackering) learning experience. I guess in the end it will come down to how much energy I can muster.

Becoming Boring

Today I got my haircut for the first time in ages. My haircut routine over the last couple of years is to subject myself to the whim of student hairdressers at the local Biba academy. It's cheap and has worked out pretty well so far. My spiel is that I like a cut that is a bit avant-garde and different, I like asymmetrical, I don't mind very short cuts and long/short combinations but am happy with whatever. I'm pretty open to whatever they throw at me and have had some great cuts as a result. I thought I would get a haircut as a springboard to getting off my arse and changing my life. I figured that if I look the part, it will help to give me that little push in the right direction.

But today's haircut was different. I gave the hairdresser my standard brief but I got a really boring cut. It's a very slightly asymmetrical layered bob which looks incredibly bog standard ordinary, beige if you will. I usually can't visualise what hairdressers describe. I just go along with whatever they suggest and it seems to work out, but this is not what I was expecting at all. I didn't have the heart to tell her. I didn't know how to ask her to make it better so I just feigned approval and got out of there.

I can't help but wonder if I came across as a boring person and she's given me a haircut to match. I certainly feel like more of a boring person lately but didn't expect it to show so much to others. Granted, I haven't been dressing as creatively as I normally do, but I didn't realise it had come to this. I have begun to feel bored of myself. I seem to always be tired from work, I can't motivate myself to exercise, I want to play more music but don't get around to it very much, I start but then abandon job hunting, songwriting, mixing, sewing and craft projects... I'm good at keeping the house tidy, reading books and pissing around on the net but where's the fun in that? Urgh! What a boring person I've become! It's like I've entered a spiral of boring that is slowly sucking me in and turning me beige. Is this what's called 'letting yourself go'?

I've been giving this quite a bit of thought and think that a factor may be lack of time to pursue these things so I have decided to ask for more flexible working arrangements, equivalent to about a 9-day fortnight. Hopefully my boss will approve it. I shall cross my fingers and toes and maybe the funny walk I will do as a result will counteract this dull haircut.

Beginnings

I've come to the realisation that I need to make some changes in my life to restore balance. To help make sense of what, why and how, I have decided to blog this journey. Because it needs to be a journey and perhaps keeping a blog will help remind me of that and push me forward.

Today's moment of clarity came from a recent trip to Chiang Mai and reading this article: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/30/the-busy-trap/?src=me&ref=general

I have gotten sucked into being busy with things that do not satisfy my own interests. I have prioritised wanting to both do good things for the world and earn a decent income to facilitate longer-term goals over just enjoying the ride and allowing myself time to do things I enjoy.

Until 10 years ago I was a music teacher. I loved it but there was a culture of almost competitive commitment. I fell into this trap and was always so busy I struggled to find time to pursue my own interests. The combination of wanting to be good at what I did and the inability to say no to people who wanted my time for ancillary stuff, led me to rapidly approach burnout within 6 years. My one 'hobby' of playing music, was only pursued when I was needed for something and thus reduced to just feeling like work. Also, kids can be bigger arseholes to teachers than I was anticipating and I felt poorly equipped and supported to deal with them.

Now I have a totally different career but seem to have fallen into the same trap I was attempting to avoid. I thought that if I did something I wasn't so passionate about, that I could leave my job at the door each day, not take any work home with me and focus on my own life interests more fully. This worked for a while, but my current job is really sapping my energy and I have slowly withdrawn further away from where I want to be. I have recently realised this and recognise that I need to rethink my approach to finding the right balance.

There are so many opportunities on the table at the moment to collaborate with people in creative ways, all of which I want to pursue. Now is the time to pull my finger out n come up with a strategy. Wish me luck!