saturday sneak peek

I rested for most of the morning because I had been on the verge of falling ill the night before. The cat stared at me from the other end of the bed, probably wondering why I was still not up.

When I felt a bit better I tagged along with my parents and sister to check out a garage sale by friends who are moving out. I got myself this pair of ceramic cups which are perfect for holding my pens and highlighters. You can never have too many pens and highlighters.

I was still feeling a bit under the weather but I made myself deal with long-postponed chores that could help ease and release stagnant energies in the house. I finally got around to organizing the bedroom bookshelf.

I also finally got around to clearing and organizing the art corner (which also happens to be the room's love and relationship bagua so maybe something nice will happen in that aspect of our lives). 

I have sideline/dayjob work to do and I just keep telling myself that it will all be done soon enough.

wednesday

Attempts at making sense of too much information. Sitting at a cafe while waiting for a fellow consultant to work together on a project.

Had cinnamon sugar cronut and coffee.  Both very good.

After the meeting I peeked at the secondhand bookstore on the way home and got pulled in and the next thing I knew I have five "new" books. 

clarity in the deep

watercolor, derwent inktense, on 300GSM rough paper

I am standing by my choice three years ago. I thought I could compromise but I couldn't. I have to be certain. I have to be clear.

So life may be a tougher and tighter a little while longer. But I don't mind. I have my books, my writing, and my art. I can feel the love of my family. I can feel the support of true friends.

Inspiration surrounds me everyday. There is so much around me that bring me joy and they don't cost a single centavo. Because they have been mine all along. Or they have been free for the taking all along.

London is still happening. Maybe not in the most obvious way. But it is happening. The Doctor and Sherlock agree on it.

do more happy

Yes, yes, I should be working not sneaking another blog post.

But this particular project I am working on has been triggering all my inner alarms. It has even led me directly into an old Evernote entry where I made a first attempt to craft my Life Purpose according to Jack Canfield's Success Principles plus a host of other inspirational books.

My first attempt was true but trying too hard. It was unwieldy.

This time's attempt is clearer and it gave me that feeling of rightness.

And here it is : MY PURPOSE IS TO USE MY CREATIVITY AND IMAGINATION TO INSPIRE PEOPLE WITH STORIES AND IMAGES IN ORDER TO ENCOURAGE AN AUTHENTIC LIFE LIVED WITH MEANING AND MAGIC.

And you know what, it starts with the very example of my own life. Which brings me back as to why my inner alarms were sounding so loud. The path that I have been considering is not one that makes me feel happy or fulfilled. My logical mind can argue for its financial benefits but not much else. There is admirable leadership within that path but the day-to-day realities that will impact most on myself, my sanity, my purpose, are where the not-too-happy feeling is coming from.

A dear friend called me up from Indonesia the other day and she has given me a lot of good advice to think about. But one important thing she made me realize is appreciation for the amazingness that is my life right now. It may not pass social standards of a typical successful life but it does pass for the many people who have expressed their desire to be able to do what I did -- to take the captain's wheel of my life and navigate it through a temperamental sea. To be willing to throw so many things overboard. To leave the safe harbor.

It has not been an easy journey. I will admit that there were many many times I considered heading back to shore. 

But then every morning there is a beautiful sun that rises from the horizon, turning the water around me into gold.

what i want

But I have had to do a lot of errands and work even over the weekend. I did manage to read and finish Why We Broke Up (third book from top of pile) but felt so horribly guilty and stressed afterwards because I read instead of working. I hated the feeling.

Hence I worked all Sunday, only pausing to celebrate Father's Day with my family, and I secretly envied everyone I saw in the restaurant and in the mall because they did not have to go home to work.

I was feeling so low that I could not even appreciate the books in the book shops, nor was I in the mood for any indulgent snack. The work kept bouncing around in my head and I was busy convincing myself that I would get it done.

I did buy myself a little something to remind me of why I got myself into this bit of a mess in the first place, and at the same time also to remind me of the resolutions I have come to in the past four days. I dug up an old Evernote post and everything was there, all the answers I have been looking for.

"To be 'on purpose' means you're doing what you love to do, doing what you're good at and accomplishing what's important to you. When you truly are on purpose, the people, resources, and opportunities you need naturally gravitate toward you." (Jack Canfield)

"Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." (Steve Jobs)

My dream of London is as big and as strong as ever. But there are many ways and many paths to get there. It does not have to be a sacrifice, or a costly trade-off of time and passion and joy. The obvious most logical choice does not always mean the only way or the best way. There are off-beaten paths. There are paths behind wardrobes. There are possibilities inside blue boxes.

my tiny studio

I am being pretentious by calling it my studio. It really is just a tiny corner where I somehow manage to squeeze in myself, the computer, and my materials.

This is also where I do my dayjob work so sometimes you can't pull me out of it and sometimes I can't wait to get out of it.

Right now that's a whole pile of dayjob work on the right side of the desk.

My cat often curls up on the rug beneath the table so I sometimes end up with a footwarmer.

The light is good though. I get lots of morning sunshine.

apple morning

I got some gala apples from the grocery yesterday. I have been craving for fresh fruits but I am flabbergasted by how expensive they are. I got a few apples and a couple of grapefruits.

I had strange dreams last night of moving into a new office that looked like a house. People had typewriters instead of computers.

It really depends on the apple... but I would love a David Tennant doctor anytime.

What am I up to today? Surprisingly, maybe because I took time to wake up slowly, and then made myself breakfast without rushing, and then I made time for taking photos (all photos taken with my digital SLR), I am actually feeling benevolent about working. I have lined up my frogs and it will be a rather long day.

But on the side I promised myself I will 1) read 2) draw or paint in my small notebook 3) write at least one scene for the novel - there is a character who has been hovering in my head trying to catch my attention.

monday meanderings

I really should not be meandering. I am up to my eyeballs in to-dos and I have been having bouts of hyperventilation since this morning from sheer stress over work.

Taking power naps help to calm me down, as well as eating. Then there's sneaking in a few chapters from a book and stealing a few minutes to paint.

For the rest of June, my work schedule will be rather tricky. Three projects overlapping. I know I mentioned sometime ago that I would not even attempt doing TWO simultaneous projects and now I have three. What can I say? The bills have to be paid and one of those three projects has proven to be a profit loss for me so I have to make up for that loss by stuffing in two other projects.

Bills and day-jobs can really be major killjoys sometimes.

a sunday cat, and some sunday thoughts

I have been trying to get myself to work since this morning. So far I have ended up writing pieces that had nothing to do with work, and watching the last episode of Downton Abbey, and reading a book.

It is impossible to work on a Sunday. One can feel the holiday-ness of it. Even the sun is a certain shade of gold that meant Rest and Play.

I thought I have not made any art for weeks so I took out my little Moleskine plain notebook and made this:

I was hoping it would get me energized to work. It didn't. Why do I even bother to try to work in the first place? I think I feel guilty for being sick last Friday and not being able to work at all.

I also do not trust my immense capacity to:

Work pains me. At least the kind of work that takes me away from the writing I want to do and the art I want to make. It would not have been so bad if it were simple work, nothing that taxed me to the point of exhaustion. But the nature of my day-job demands a lot of mental effort, and mental effort is exhausting. I also have to exert extra effort to make up for my lukewarm heart.

I am reading this book on the science of success and I can understand perfectly what it is trying to say but as simple as it sounds, it is very difficult to practice. My mind is a noisy babble of anxiety and impatience that possibly slows me down towards the life I want.

I must not be distracted. The day-job is a means to an end. I must be careful not to get trapped as if it is an end in itself. I was in that cage once. I must never get caught again.

"Play your roles, but KNOW that they are NOT YOU." - Joseph Campbell

sick day and introverted musings

I have been under the weather all day yesterday. I suspect an intense stress and anxiety attack as the main cause. Things at work are rather stirred up at the moment and important decisions have to be made.

In the middle of all this I found myself thinking about a bit of a revamp for this blog. Maybe it's my way of coping with all the other matters that demanded for my time and attention. I am also feeling that familiar itch to lock myself up in a room for days and write my books without interruption.

It is Saturday and I will have to get some work tasks done. Then tonight I might be stepping out a bit to visit a friend whose father had just died. If events unfold as planned I might also end up telling another person how much I had been hurt by his behavior weeks ago and for which I have hardly forgiven him.

Yes, it is most likely too much anxiety and stress that is getting me all sick and tired in every sense of the words.

I am reading this book :

It is written by Sophia Dembling and it caught my attention while I was browsing in the bookstore last Thursday.  It is easy to read and very uplifting for an introvert like me.

I like the chapter that discusses friendship:

"What is a friend? We probably all have out own definitions. For me, it's someone I don't feel alone with. Who doesn't bore me. Whose life I connect with and who takes reciprocal interest in my life. It's someone I feel comfortable turning to when I need to be talked off the ledge, and for whom I am glad to return the favor."

"Once we start investing in a friendship, we start weighing what we get back. It's a make-or-break time. And for introverts, the investment can feel costly in terms of energy expended. It's the points when we start asking, 'why bother?' --- a legitimate question, as long as it's treated as a question rather than a blow off. Is this person willing to see you, and fun to be with, one-on-one? Does the conversation flow? Is it satisfying? Do you feel energized or depleted after time with this person? I love friendships where the conversation is so interesting, you can't end it even when the visit is supposed to be over."

Sometimes I feel I could use a couple more people who could be real friends. I could relate when my sister moans her lack of a girlfriend posse. We both dream of a constant group of four to five girls sharing the same values and overlapping some interests. The values are important. We could like totally different music but having the same values mean we agree on the things that matter -- in our case those would include compassion for animals and care for nature, reciprocity and responsiveness in relationships, respect for religious beliefs, just to name a few.

I am an introvert who is rather pained by the fact that I have to survive in the world of advertising. I am writing myself a whole notebook on the subject to sort it out and maybe find something that could ease me through until the time that I could fully focus on my book-writing and art-making. I don't want t spend days of my life just gritting my teeth through "shoulds" and "musts" until I could literally afford to be simply a writer and an artist.

Sometimes I feel like the effort will kill me. Pushing myself to be the kind of person everyone expects and then be the kind of person I really am. It's a tightrope walk without a net.

I promise to be brighter soon.

snapshots

Bills to pay loom every month. I have to keep working to keep paying. I wish there was a better alternative to all this.

I badly want to make art but I am struggling with work.

A little bit made for someone whom I really like and admire so much and who has been inspiring me no end for the past eight years.

My NaNoWriMo novel is getting some good treatment in between heavy loads of work. 

Recovering old titles I had and loved and sold years before to raise funds for a trip.

Discovered and loving Snapeee, a photo app.

What I hope to do more consistently every single day.

For now I just need to survive Wednesday

I bit off more than I can chew when I tried to do two projects simultaneously. I keep kidding myself that I could still do midnight/ all-night work marathons. But I can't anymore. Not only because I am no longer twenty with endless energy but also because it is very clear to me what I want to do and it is not slaving away over a report. What I want to do is write books and make art.

But bills have to paid. And I do have considerable skills when it comes to the work I have to do. And going to London will cost a lot.

So here I am, cramming once again. It is very unfortunate that those so-called energy drinks do not work on me. The only thing with any slight effect to keeping me awake for an extra few hours is the brewed coffee from McDonald's. And that only means I can stay up until about 3AM. Then I start feeling really cranky and nauseous.

On a good note, I figured out a better way of doing my reports which I will use on the next report. For the current report (the one due on Wednesday) I had to restart and re-do everything to save time -- I know that sounds odd but it worked somehow. I am keeping my fingers and toes crossed that I will finish in time and be able to sleep by tomorrow night.

Please send wakeful energies along my way.

A Working Weekend

It is no use fighting it. I must work really hard from today until Tuesday.

The most I can do to help myself is to have a clear and clean desk, energy drinks stocked in the fridge, food ready and easy to prepare, no interruptions and distractions.

Break activity options are: reading one short story, Twitter, Instagram, or a power nap.

It's amazing how our lives can look so interesting with a few filters and careful curation.

On the other hand, seeing my daily life this way reminds me of what really matters to me. I am also steered towards the more positive side of things. Appreciation for the little things that would otherwise go unnoticed or be overwhelmed by the not-so-good things which we always tend to magnify.

Keep Calm and Buy Books

Keep calm and buy books. Secondhand so you can buy three for the price of a brand new one. Then count the days (6) until you can start reading to restore the wreck you have become after juggling two big projects in an effort to raise funds for monthly bills and dreams of travel (still not enough).

The past few days have been sprinkled with delays and time snarls. In the next few days the repercussions of those delays will be fully felt and I will most likely be a zombie by Tuesday evening.

Still, the work I did this week is not without its hidden nuggets of inspiration. And help does come in some form when you absolutely need it. And there is always my health and my skills to be grateful for. And there is always Sherlock and the Doctor and Neil Gaiman.  

up before the sun

Starting on a new schedule today. Last night I went to bed at 9AM. Up at 3AM today. Will do this for the next couple of weeks and see how it goes. The energy left at the end of the day is just not enough to let me do things. So I figure I'd call it an early night and get up before everybody else does and then do my own thing.

It's a different kind of feeling to check off your to-do list before the sun has even woken up.

Out of the Blue

I'm an Advil girl. But I've run out of the nice blue capsules so I have these red ones by Medicol. They're on standby in case the migraine hits sometime along the very long hours I will be spending working and cramming.

Doctor Who and Torchwood keep me sane and awake and optimistic. There is no other way but through this monstrous pile of data and out the end of it. Will it help if I think of it as saving the world from aliens?

I had a nightmare last night.

So today I will be deliberately seeking out positive and pleasant thoughts and things.

I would have much preferred dreaming about the Weeping Angels than what I actually dreamed. Which was standing in front of my clients about to start on a presentation and realizing at the last minute that the presentation was only halfway done because I had a false memory that it was already done. And all the time I thought it was happening for real. And it stretched on for a while, very long minutes of trying to figure out how to fix everything and not being able to come up with a good enough idea to save myself. Being whisked away by the Tardis would have been perfect then but I did not know it was a dream. It felt like the end of days, the end of a world, and it was so frustrating.

Needless to say I woke up feeling not well-rested. :(

So today I will endeavor to make that particular nightmare not come true and to layer it over with bright happy things.

I could use some cheering and cheering up.

Looking back, when this month was just beginning...

I was in a hotel somewhere down south of the country, about to begin fieldwork for a project that I am currently eyeball-deep in and trying to craft a report for.

N Hotel, Kauswagan, Cagayan de Oro City, Philippines

Even then I was already a bit behind with organizing my data. What with my disk drive dying on me and respondents suddenly deciding to be difficult.

Yesterday, in an almost desperate effort to improve the pace of my work I tried out something new. I tried using Scrivener, an app that I use for writing my books, to write my report and to organize my data.

And guess what, it seems to be working! Nothing as dramatic as getting the report done by end of the week but at the very least I can hope for a finished rough draft that I can polish next week (simultaneous with the start of fieldwork for another project). I will write a full separate post on the wonders of Scrivener after it has taken me through the Finish Line for both projects (that would mean a bit of a wait though, like, around July).

Meanwhile I bear the pain of not being able to read the books I got on sale from Cagayan de Oro City -- Less than Php500 for all of these:

 
Doctor Who keeps me company on the very late nights that I force myself to stay up. But it gets more difficult each day, trying to trick myself to do the same amount of crazy work I used to do when I was in my early twenties. There are more important things for me to do now than work. My body knows it. My heart knows it. My spirit knows it. They have all gotten wiser to the tricks I make to make them work too hard or too long.

I bear it all for a chance to be in London.

Deep Working

1-inch thick single-spaced, font size 10, data documents for reading and interpretation

I have been a hardworking girl for most of yesterday. Got a good amount of work done and making progress even though I am well aware that time has not been on my side. I have barely a week to complete a report before another fieldwork begins and the report for that queues up on my Urgent To Do's.

post-it + pen + highlighters = manual mind-mapping. still so much better than any app.

Hence I declare this week as a full working week, no disturbances or interruptions allowed. No meetings or sneak-aways.

No rewards until I have passed the halfway mark, and then the best rewards saved for last. One of these is the last episode of Sherlock which I haven't watched : Reichenbach Falls.

How do you motivate yourself to keep on moving forward on a must-do task?

Sunday Morning

April is not my best month. It started off with two trips out of town for fieldwork (for me that means visiting households to conduct two-hour interviews with consumers) which left me too exhausted to write or make art. Then it has been a mad rush to get things done before another wave of fieldwork comes in at the end of the month. This cycle will last until early July and I have been struggling with finding the time and the energy to write and make art. It is rather frustrating, and it reminds even more strongly of how work can eat up so much of myself.

There was a ray of hope sometime at the end of the second week when I got to talk with a dear friend from years back who is now top boss at an ad agency and was asking me if I would be interested in rejoining the workforce as part of their team. I had half a week to think about it. When time was up I told her I was interested in exploring the possibility further.

So what does it mean? It means leaving the home-based work setup I have had for the past three years. It also means faster savings for London which is the most important and biggest dream I have right now. It means funds for self-publishing my books. It means funds for setting up an art exhibit. (With my old self, money would simply mean retail therapy.)

But more than the money, I found myself looking forward to a new social group. The one I was hoping to bond with in the past three years has proved to be very disappointing. I had thought they were my long lost tribe but I was wrong. It was just like high school all over again with all the cliches and givens and templates. I was an outsider in high school. You get the picture. Heck, I could not even expect a decent reply to a text message. Few things smack of being totally ignored and unimportant as a totally unacknowledged text message.

There is also the advantage of learning new things, and a change of scenery.

However, it must not be misinterpreted that I am bored. I am never bored. And I don't miss agency life. It is more like I see now that it may be time to step back into the old fray as a whole person compared to what I was before and to go into it with my priorities clear and my goals clear. Maybe this time it will finally work with me instead of against me.

I have tried many times in the past three years to consider exploring re-employment but each time the answer from my heart and my core had been a resounding No. This time it feels different, so I finally said Yes. Maybe the lessons have been finally learned. It is Time.

I still don't know how it will all turn out, or whether it will even push through with this agency or another, or when it will happen. But it will happen. I know that now. I will flow back into the system but I will be different. I come from my personal hero's journey, a Wanderer who needed to define herself, and now getting ready to shift into a Warrior, someone with a context and a cause and a purpose. (References from The Hero Within by Carol Pearson - a great enlightening book!)

So these are my thoughts on this Sunday morning as I prepare for some deep working (delving into analysis and interpretation of data) to make progress with the project. I am hoping that having written this blog post I will be able to do some writing with my Camp NaNo stories -- I am way behind and in danger of not completing as I have only written a bit over two thousand words out of forty thousand.

And maybe I can sketch something during my fifteen minute breaks.

How is your Sunday going?