Gird Your Loins–– I'm Basically Working Again

I walked into my fine local purveyor of lattes this morning and the barista asked "how's the sabbatical going?"

I give him a sort of glazed donut thousand yard stare.  "Well, it's sort of... over?"

His eyebrows raise. "So, sounds like you didn't take the whole year, then?

I SMASH THE LATTE ON THE GROUND AND SAY "THAT'S NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS, PETER." (No, I didn't. But he did call my ass out before I've even had my coffee.)

To be fair, I wouldn't say I'm a 9-5-er yet, but I am working on a new video. Taking things slow, researching (Louise is back helping me as well. That whole post she wrote saying goodbye forever? Yeah, the lie detector test determined that was a lie.)

The new video is not even close to the most ambitious thing I've ever made– I'm not even traveling on location for it. It is an important ongoing story on which I have a lot to say, but I think it's progress to realize that I don't have to "earn" my sabbatical by coming back with a seven-part documentary series on Viking death practices that I spent a month in Norway for (psstt, I do want to do this someday though.)

I'll continue working on Mystery Video #1 through the holiday season, and if it feels right I will send the lil'cutie out into the world.

Here's the rub, especially the last few weeks. Shoutout to Hanna, who just left a lovely comment on my last post (I read all of your comments, by the way, they've been such a source of joy and support through this process.) Hanna was talking about LUST vs. MUST in finding your drive to work– leaning into the LUST of your passions, fighting back against the MUST of societal and internal pressures.

Before I went on sabbatical, I was burnt out and working on about 25% LUST and 75% MUST. I genuinely love working and my advocacy, so 25% LUST is still pretty high even in my darkest moments.  But now, almost six months later (can you see I'm really trying to prove to my barista I've taken a reasonable-length sabbatical?) I'd say those numbers are flipped!  75% LUST and 25% MUST, baby!  I'm working on projects I only have full passion for!

Nuthin' I HAVE to do, this is me:

But the problem is the little MUST voice in my head. She is very strong and eldritch and witchy and buried deep in there. I used to call her my superpower.  I always considered my success to be a combo of my genuine fiery-hot passion for death reform and what I called my ability to "drag the carcass across the finish line" (aka the MUST voice.)

Now that I'm tiptoeing back into work, I would prefer that the MUST voice shut the F-up a little. She's been silent for the last few months and the silence was CHILL AND NICE. 25% for the MUST voice seems a little too loud after the quiet. I'm working on the video, and the MUST voice is like "oh you didn't finish this section today? You read your little book for some other project? You said you were going to finish this today, you even wrote it in your to-do notebook, guess we won't be crossing that off." And I'm like "why are you being so mean, girl? We said we were going to take this video slow. STOP YELLING AT ME."

I'm telling you this basically to hold myself accountable to containing the MUST voice moving forward. This is what I want the MUST voice to look like, less cruel bog witch, more:

That's it for me, going to go wrestle my MUST witch to the ground and make her sit by the fire and drink an oat latte. xoxo

Caitlin