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Thoughts On the Cusp of 30

thisiskrys Leave a comment

If you’re reading this then that means I am officially 30 years old. The past few years have disillusioned me in some ways. I no longer believe that the arcing arm of a clock or the crossing off of calendar squares will create a new chance for miraculous change, and, in fact, given the results of the hellish series of world events that comprised my 29th year all I can see stretching ahead right now is more of the same.

I never thought that this time last year when I was introducing my friends to the wonders of the Street Fighter movie that it would be the last of our birthdays that we would spend together until who knows when and it makes me wish that I had chosen something more cooler or more special.

Not once last spring in the two months I spent working from home, watching the trees burst to life outside my window while I withered from loneliness did I think that when everything slumbered again I would still be separate and alone, that I would be anticipating still being in solitude when the leaves grow in again in a few months. I do live with my mother, but it isn’t the same as being with my friends. The way the salt used to de-ice the roads and clear the way bleaches all color from the road forward isn’t a new sight, but this winter it makes me feel particularly hopeless.

I have an increasingly distinct awareness that by the time this is “over” I will probably wind up losing nearly two years of my life, but even then there’s a chance that it probably will not ever be properly “over” because of all of the currently unknown variables. It’s weird to think that my life now has a very dramatic before and after in it, a sharp fracture between two distinct ways of life.

I know I am lucky to have my job, but I am increasingly resentful about working in an office where some of the attorneys haven’t come into the office since March, but us staff are required to come in like everything is normal, except we’re all wearing masks and using hand sanitizer now. It’s nice to talk to people who aren’t my mom, but I would give it all up for the return of the Saturday nights with my friends, spent the way we used to spend them in the Before Times — dinner out and doing dumb nerd stuff. I do get to do different nerd stuff on Saturday nights now, D&D with a different group of friends, and it’s a nice replacement, but I keenly feel the lack of the people who know me best.

I feel bad for thinking about the things I miss, because it feels trivial to miss them when people are literally dying. Lipstick. Diner food (especially gyros). Walking aimlessly around public places. Having a reason to wear cute outfits. My friend’s cats. And I must be getting really desperate because I even miss taking daytrips to NYC, even though I find the city exhausting and don’t care for it that much overall.

All this said, it will probably come as no surprise that I hardly accomplished any of my goals for 2020. I did wind up with 12 blog posts like I wanted to, but that was only after cramming November and December with extras to make up for the months I didn’t get a post up. My gaming backlog remains mostly unchanged, although I did give my permission to quit World of Final Fantasy because I realized I was dragging myself through something I wasn’t enjoying at all. There’s a cute little adage that goes “last one hired, first one fired” and that combined with the economic instability kept me in my current office, despite my frustrations there. I did not carve out specific time for creative hobbies, but I found myself doing creative writing and doing art more than I have in the past couple of years. Which, well, anything is more than zero, but the fact that I managed to do anything is a victory.

In the face of this largely unaccomplished year it feels a little pointless to consider new/renewed goals, but I feel compelled to for some reason. They fall into two categories: things I’m already making a habit of and want to continue, and things I want to be doing.

Continuations:

  • About a year ago I started taking walks on my lunch breaks (or after work before driving home when it was really hot out in the summer), and I want to continue doing that at least three days a week as weather permits.
  • Please for the love of god let this decade of my life begin with a new job. (As embarrassed as I feel to bring this one back again, I’d like to reaffirm it for myself anyway.)
  • Post one blog each month. I considered making this number larger, but thinking back on how this year went in that regard, 12 posts for the year is what feels the most manageable and consistent.

New Things:

  • I really ought to play more video games that aren’t Red Dead Online (aka my favorite way to escape this hell year for hours on end, just wandering the countryside).
  • Read more of the physical books I own, not just my Kindle at lunchtime.
  • Do my creative hobbies more.
  • Ages of watching Christy Lou’s (now ended) bullet journal YouTube videos made me feel like I could do one despite having little artistic ability, so I’ve made one and I want to see it through to the end of year.
  • Do a better job at keeping in touch with people, a thing which I am historically really shit at. If I don’t see someone, I often reach out, sometimes because I don’t want to be a bother, but often just because I’m awful and get caught up in my dumb little life and just forget to talk to people, and then so much time passes that I’m like “well now it would be weird to try talking to them.” But because of this bad habit, I’ve have spent huge chunks of quarantine feeling desperately lonely. The series of video calls and voice chats I’ve been on this year has reminded me how good it feels to connect with the people I care about and I don’t want to fuck up and go back to dropping the ball on that.

It feels like easy mode to have made so many low ball goals and goals that are continuations of what I’m already doing. But it does feel good in a way to sit down and formally commit myself to these things. I am far better at keeping bad habits than I am at sticking to productive ones, so we’ll see how all of this goes. It’s not exactly turning over a new leaf for my new decade, but it’s something!

Happy birthday to me!

Goals for 2020

thisiskrys 1 Comment

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My first selfie of the year!

I typically don’t like to set annual goals/resolutions for myself because I have a tendency to not complete them and then a tendency to really beat myself up about that. It’s not like I was in the habit of setting crazy goals — for the most part I picked things that I thought were attainable. And…then…still managed to not make them happen either through the universe conspiring against me (hello, years of saying “I’m gonna get a new job this year” and sending out resumes that no one responded to) or via my own lack of discipline (see: any time I said “I’m gonna do creative thing X more!”). 

So generally, I’ve found that it’s better for my relationship with myself to not even bother, even though I know that setting goals and making efforts to reach them is a way of growth, even if I do not ultimately succeed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ve never been able to set my mind on any big concrete lifetime goals. I have multiple friends that want to be published authors and others that want to improve at art while maybe getting to make money from it. I have two friends that aimed to be teachers, and now they’re doing it, which is awesome! 

I have two goals in life, neither of which are particularly concrete:

  • to be able to fully support myself financially; and
  • to be at least mostly content in my day to day life (because I know it is horrifically unrealistic to expect 100% happiness).

The second one I tend to do reasonably well at usually, which I am thankful for. The first one? Well, I’m currently typing this from my bedroom in my mother’s house, so, uh, there’s that. I can say, however, that even though I can’t afford to put a roof over my head, I don’t have to ask my family for money with help with my personal bills. And I will get closer to having the finances to move out when I finish off my college loans later this year!!!

But lately I’ve been thinking that having such vague goals is probably to my detriment. I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis where it occasionally hits me that I do the same set of things every day and will probably be doing them over and over with slight variations until I die. My life feels really really pointless to me. The closest analogy I can think of is when you reach the endgame in an MMO, you’ve maxed out your level, and you’re stuck doing the same few dungeons over and over, just because you’ve put so much time in that you can’t give up on playing.

I am a person who loves having a routine and finds comfort in it. But I feel I am getting to a point where the repetition is starting to drive me a little mad. The path I’m on leads nowhere and in some ways I wish I didn’t have to continue on it. (But don’t worry, I will continue because there are good things in my life!)

So I’ve set myself two goals for this year, which I feel are highly, highly doable.:

  • Write at least one blog post a month. (I enjoy writing, but my lack of discipline the real challenge.)
  • Finally clear up some of my gaming backlog, starting with World of Final Fantasy, which I’ve been chipping away at for two years or more. (Too many games that I want to play have been coming out in the past few years and I tend to dip in and out of them, and not get around to finishing any of them, which is what keeps happening with WoFF. It’s cute and I’ll play it in long spurts and then abandon it for equally long spurts. I thiiink I’m reasonably close to the end, but I don’t want spoilers so I haven’t looked at a guide.)

There is a third goal I have in mind for the second half of the year, which is to get a new job (for real this time, I swear, guys). I’m holding off because I have some travel coming up in the spring and don’t want to start off a new job with “sorry, but I need to take these 7 days off scattered across the next few months” especially when many jobs do not start you off with any paid leave. My sixth anniversary at my current job is in May and I have once and for all finally fully come to terms with the fact that they will never pay me a living wage for our area there, despite telling me repeatedly what an asset I am to the office. That coupled with a ton of bullshit that happened in 2019 (not to me personally for the most part, but just things I witnessed) has me feeling very “fuck you guys, I’m done.” 

Besides all of that I think I really do need to get some kind of hobby that I need to work at and set time for me to do it on a regular basis. Because I enjoy video games, but at the end of the day they don’t go anywhere once the story is done. I’m not putting huge pressure on this for myself, but maybe I would feel better about myself if I could say “okay, maybe no one is willing to hire me, but look how much better I’ve gotten at watercolors.” Or maybe I could take up the guitar again. Or even if I just would read more books, and not only just cram in reading on my Kindle during lunch, I would feel like I was making progress at something. Doing more reading would also give a bit of a break to my hands, which have been feeling increasingly terrible since I was promoted to a position where I type a lot of dicatations a year and a half ago. 

Is this stupid? I don’t know. All I know is that this is the last year of my 20s (my 29th birthday is 1/31) and ever since the tenth anniversary of my high school graduation in June a part of my mind has been fixated on the notion of “ten years have gone by and I have nothing to show for it.” Which logically I know is very wrong, and I also know I’m not alone in this feeling, but I find it difficult to quiet the part of my brain that feels like I hasn’t lived up to my potential so here we are.