It’s been a while since I updated this blog, and I’m grateful to the solstice for giving me a nucleation point, since I checked in on myself last time the sun was at its apex, and now I have some writing to reflect on.

My memory of last year’s solstice was that of a mighty burst of energy and willpower, centered around an ambitious workout plan, that immediately fizzled out but nevertheless provided a feeling of forward motion at the time. I was prepared to contrast that to my present feeling of extreme lethargy and burnout. There’s a number of factors at play: I am in the long tail of caffeine withdrawal, I’ve started to walk more after my Apple Watch told me I’m so sedentary it can’t tell if I have a medical condition, and this go around I’ve added an actual company to the chainsaws I’ve been juggling. After multiple nights of 9+ hours of sleep, Luree checked my hair for tick bites, but I think my lifestyle of extreme householding is just catching up to me.

A typical workday for me now is some combination of carting kid to her various babysitters and activities, finding a loud coffeeshop to settle in for a few hours of work, attending my jobby job meetings, trying to use any surplus time to work on web sites for the job I want to be doing, and despairing at how fast the clock moves when I finally get in the groove. Before I know it I’m pulled back out to attend to an obligation and the cycle repeats. Rapid context switching is something my brain refers to as “bad”, and so it’s no surprise that it needs more rest than usual. Unfortunately that rest sometimes happens when I really need it to be doing something productive instead, bringing my velocity down to a snail’s crawl.

This is extremely demoralizing, and last year’s writing touches familiar themes: my struggle to take care of my body, feeling “too busy” to properly rest and relax and practice, a never-ending battle against The Morning. A lot of the struggles look the same.

But what I forgot completely about was the tail end of my post, where I note two things related to my work:

First, I stop trying to tie my professional identity to the boring financial services infrastructure clusterfuck that cuts my paychecks, since it sucks and saddens my soul proportionally to how long I spend thinking about it. I was coming to realize how the enterprise-sized inefficiencies in org structure and team dynamics created a golden opportunity for time theft, and how much better I felt after I stopped trying to make myself a willing participant in that system.

But then, look at this shit:

I am also speaking aloud a dream I’ve kept safe for some time: one day I want to own my own software consultancy. There’s one of those brick suburban office buildings like 6 doors down from me and I want to rent a space there and then walk 50 feet to work. I want to be able to take on a gig for a lot of money, or turn it down and do nothing. I want to own my work, and be proud of it.

I completely forgot that I had formed this intention, and am delighted to have Law Of Attraction’d my way into exactly the circumstances that I dared to dream. Tiger Pajamas is not (yet) a load-bearing income source, and due to a legendarily shitty job market I am stuck DevOpsing for the foreseeable future, stealing bits of time to chip away at my dream, but seeing where I was a year ago puts the journey into perspective. Last summer solstice all I could do was form an intention, and 365 days later my name is on registration papers for an LLC and real money from a real job that we completed is sitting in my bank account, and every day, in between meetings and code spelunking and worries that I’m not doing enough, I’m ideating with my colleagues with wild abandon, forming the intentions that, for all we know, may just pop out of the universe, fully formed, directly into our laps.

Let’s see what the next year brings.