Gather and Spark

This dog is me. I am this dog. This dog’s face encapsulates me in so many ways right now. I wish I could add “in a good way” but unfortunately I just can’t

In April 2024 I decided I needed to take some serious action to try to rescue my life from corporate destruction. For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t go destroying things as a career… but my career has been destroying my life. I’ll happily talk about it at some point but for brevity, I got promoted a lot (yay!) but have constantly been down a person in my management team (boo) and those I’m working with are either new and/or don’t have the specialist experience that I do which ultimately means I’m doing my new job, my old job and supervising other people’s work a lot. Things are also a little precarious right now with the spotlight on our performance so I feel personally responsible for keeping us afloat. This all means that I’m working stupid hours and burning myself out. I’ve been working late into the evening most days and my social life has been… well… lacking any life?

I stayed home over the Easter bank holiday weekend. Normally I’d travel 4 hours up to visit my Mum but this year I just had the long weekend to rest and recharge. It was needed. I had the time and space to think about things, ponder on my life, what I wanted and how I might achieve it. I realised I have no life. None. Nada. I see my friends very infrequently. My bestie is very good at making sure we carve out time to see each other, and I see my sister fairly regularly, but beyond that things are patchy to say the least. I feel like Im being a bad friend to everyone else but I’m so burned out that even making plans has felt like too much. I’ve been single for over 2 years now and this is exclusively due to work. I don’t have time to date. I barely have time to eat and/or shower lately.

So I made a plan. It was a good plan. I committed two evenings a week to doing fun stuff that I thought I’d enjoy. I paid money to attend, thinking it would push me to go even if I felt like I didn’t want to. I planned to document it to build accountability for myself, to add an extra angle of reflection into and to maybe inspire other people who are also feeling a little bit lost.

My planning was great. My execution was…. not great. Both on the doing and the documenting. Yup. I’m the dog in the picture.

I feel like I’ve failed. Not a great way to start a blog I’ll admit. But it’s brutal honesty. Ok, that was hyperbolic and yes, I could be more brutal but I won’t be. I’ve toyed with what I should do next.

I could abandon this endeavour entirely and give up. I could continue to spend my life shuffling digital paper. I could let the sense of shame and disappointment at my lack of progress scare me into hiding away from the world and going full ostrich. Or I could give myself a pep talk and start all over again. No shame. Shameless. Kindness. Be kind to myself for not getting where I wanted to be. Appreciating that not reaching my goals isn’t a sign of laziness or failure per se… the plan was full of things I wanted to do… fun things… and the reason I haven’t been able to achieve what I wanted to was mostly work being crazy. And I don’t need to worry about what the world thinks because the world isn’t watching. No one but me is even likely to read this blog. People don’t even read blogs anymore. That’s so… 1998?? Even with social media updates… I have always treated it as an accountability crutch. My TikTok is purposefully anonymous and I’ve set it to undiscoverable by contacts so that no one that I know will see it. It’s just me yelling into the void. Promising a bunch of faceless strangers that I will do something, that I will live a different way, that I’ll be better. If I say I’m going to do something and then I don’t I feel like a failure and it’s that sort of motivation that often helps me to push on through.

So here I am. Failing first. No clue what I’m doing. But willing to throw myself at it anyway. Again.

Join me on my journey. Keep me honest. Accountability for the win.