2018 Jul3 – Day 4 of free agent life: 

I went to bed at about 230am last night. I was somewhat disappointed in myself – I hadn’t gotten any word vomits written (though I did do a bunch of tweeting). I haven’t hit the gym yet. Today is the 4th day of my free agent life, and the 2nd day that I’m not at work. It’s 850am – I woke up naturally, without any alarm. I feel a pretty strong impulse to check Twitter (because I know there are surely notifications waiting for me), but I’m trying to make sure that I write and finish this vomit first before I start checking on those things.

Here’s a worry I had – I had written a bunch of essay ideas on my whiteboard a few days (weeks?) ago. I took pictures of them so that I would be able to follow up on them as necessary. I hoped that each one would be able to be written as a word vomit. When I looked at them a couple of days ago, however, I found myself feeling a little trapped. I felt like many of those essays would have required reading and research, and I didn’t quite feel up to it at the time. And I worried, just for a moment, that maybe I’m not a writer. 

What a silly, cursed thought. There is truth in that experience, but it isn’t in the conclusion. What it reveals to me is that there’s some writing that flows very naturally without any sort of research or reading, and there’s some writing that needs to be grounded in research – because I’m writing about things that I don’t completely understand, things that require facts and context that I don’t have readily available in my head. 

I have developed a pretty good mechanism for writing about that sort of thing: the twitter thread. There’s something about the 280characters + 4 pictures per tweet format that forces me to write in a way that’s practical, sensible, digestible. (Aaaand this was where I hopped over to Twitter and spent about an hour there, probably. Now it’s 1020am.)

So. Where was I. Yes. I want to write lots of word vomits. But I don’t want to repeat the same thing over and over again. That said, there’s a limited range of things that I can talk about at length without having to pause over and over again. So what do I do?

First of all, I think doing status updates – I’m talking about emotional states, psychological states – is something that would be useful and somewhat novel since I haven’t done these in a while. 

Actually, what I’m seeing myself say here is that I should just write about all of my feelings as much as I can. Because that’s one thing that I haven’t spent a lot of time with, and it’s something that I can talk about at length. Maybe I should go through each emotion one by one – I talked about sadness recently. What about all the others? Yes. I want to do that! I want to get to know myself better. I want to feel all the feelings, and catalogue them, and make sense of them. I also want to clear out all my notes and todo list items. I will work on that after publishing this vomit.

Let’s take a moment to recap what I’m trying to do here. I can write off the past couple of days as a transition period, as a relaxation and recovery phase. (I’m also helping to cat-sit for a friend, which is proving to be quite… tedious) 

I want to practice meditation, improve my posture, breathe easier and live more freely.

I want to hit the squat rack, start getting stronger again.

I want to tidy up my house and get rid of all the junk I have lying around. This is so I can feel more comfortable, cosy, replenished by my immediate environment, and feel like it represents who I a

I want to improve my living conditions to better serve my daily routines and practices.

I want to go through all of my notebooks and simplify them, reduce the overall footprint and replace them with something more coherent. 

____

NEET life / taking a break

So it’s been about a month and a few days since my last day of work. The absolute best thing has been not having to worry about a daily commute. Not having to leave the house and get on the train. Not having to worry about work emails and work messages. Those were all things that were just a chronic part of my life

___

A fun thing about being a free agent is I get to discover which of my personal issues are contextual and which are intrinsic. This was kinda supposed to be a funny tweet but actually there’s a lot to chew on here…

✱

Free agent life

I left my job at ReferralCandy, where I had been working since February 2013. It was probably the single most enriching and transformative experience of my life. I tweeted about that here: https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1012504508012744705

since then, I’ve been a free agent. I’ve been gloriously lazy and unproductive, staying up late playing video games, eating junk food, hanging out at home with my wife and cats, and generally allowing myself space to just “be”, like I was during long lull periods as a teenager between schools, before and after military conscription.

But I think this sort of bumming state can only last for about a month before it starts being costly in its own way. I’ve seen and heard firsthand from friends about how their extended breaks led them to feeling listless, disconnected and depressed – and I want to make sure I avoid that.

I got myself a new laptop a few days ago, and I’ve been “going through my notes”. This was something I did periodically when I was a salaryman too, but at the time it always felt like something I could never properly sink my teeth into.

I feel this way about some of the conversations I’ve been having with my wife too – like there are some things that you can’t really do in bits and pieces; you need large chunks of time to get them done. This can seem like a bit of an excuse to avoid doing work – and maybe it is – but I’ve definitely also noticed the difference since I’ve gotten more space. I can set aside an entire day to do something.