Life Updates

Her Name is Maxie and I Love Her

I’m sitting at my beloved cafe, noshing on a pastry and trying to hydrate the summer angst away. It’s 5pm and I’ve been home since 2. I now have a car that allows me to feel like an adult and a job that reminds me of the sacrifices I have to make to feel comfortable.

While so much has changed, so many things remain the same. I stopped being an overworked CBO middle management worker and became an overworked union worker - same school but in a different corner of hell.

I don’t even know where to begin with updates because the same situations I want to change are the ones I’ve enabled for so long that freedom and ease seem unattainable without medication.

I continue to say yes when I should say no but now I have a cute little speedy car to at least give the illusion of independence.

I am in a loop of relaunching without having the strategy I’m so known for having. What I’m learning about burnout is the sporadic bouts of fatigue that spring up whenever I get the slightest bit of mojo to work on my website. It’s almost like a trauma response to working beyond my emotional and mental capacity. The more I want to enjoy leisure time, the guiltier I feel about not grinding myself to exhaustion.

We don’t really escape who we are and I’m on a mission to change my stripes before I can show the world my new vision.

I’ve decided to turn this substack diary into a book, with a more structured flow of navigating nuance in life and career. I’ve been holding back on what I’ve experienced working in education and I have a major grudge to unleash about my crazy ex-supervisor who I still have to co-exist with at work…until I don’t. Let’s see who leaves first. (very likely me)

I’m also 2 quarters away from my master’s degree, hopefully. And I’ve got health issues that I neglected due to a toxic attachment I have with work and a secret crush that started to crush my spirit. Add in a new puppy and cancer for a 96 year old grandmother and you’re almost completely caught up of where my life stands (or falls), depending on your perspective.

I now get to spend 2.5 hours in a car internally talking to myself instead of walking around the rats at the 59th street station so my snarky voice, although rusty, is not completely gone.

What is gone is my patience, my desire to chase people, and my complacency with accepting mediocre reciprocity - with my work and people.

Reinvention doesn’t happen in a neatly packaged storytelling journey. It comes from the painful messy middle. It comes with breaking yourself in order to realize a new version of who you can be, when given the time to go through it.

Once all is ready for a formal reintroduction, you’ll be the first to claim dibs on my new digital presence. I’ll be opening comments here so y’all can share what’s good (or bad) with you and we can figure all of this shit out together, from the comforts of wherever you call home.