Week One as a Full-Time Creative Jaguar

I’ve completed my first week as a full-time artist/writer! And I thought you all might want to know about it, since you are part of what made that happen. So far it is about what I expected. I wasn’t really concerned about not getting enough work done, and that wasn’t a problem; even not pushing, I got more done in the week than I get done while timesharing with a Day Hobby of any kind. I spent the week cautiously exploring what other issues I might have to surmount to settle into a comfortable routine. I don't have all of those things figured out yet, but these are my observations from the week:

My schedule suddenly has lots of loose time in it. 

This is weird. It’s also weird that I haven’t plastered my nose to the grindstone and sanded it off in my desperate eagerness to fill in all the spaces. So far my natural pattern has been ‘walk daughter to summer camp, make breakfast, work a while, take a break to nap or exercise, make lunch, work some more, walk over to get daughter from summer camp, come home and work a little more, exercise, then do dinner/not-work things.’ I do a surprising amount of napping, or lying still. I get a lot of teasing for this, but sitting with my eyes closed in the round chair, whether I’m asleep or not, lets me reset my brain. I notice that I often don’t sleep, I just… stop thinking. I listen to the noises outside, the noises inside, they float through my brain and out again, and eventually I just breathe in and out and drift.

I think this is meditation, or counts as it. Whatever it is, it keeps my brain from overheating, so I do it when I feel like I’m starting to vibrate too much.

The other temptation is to fill my new spare time with fluff. While working day hobbies, I almost invariably had some kind of ‘time-wasting’ site up (for the past five years, it’s been Flight Rising; pixel dragons have kept my attention for a long time!). The first rule I made when I went into last week was ‘don’t leave the time-wasting windows open.’ This is not just to keep myself from time-wasting, but also because I noticed that I need activities I associate with winding-down, and when I use fun sites as breaks during my work-day, when I use them at night I feel like I’m taking a break from work and I tense up again. 

Reserving things like Flight Rising for ‘the end of the work day’ is reconditioning me to think of that time as winding down time, which is important, because otherwise I can’t sleep. I know some people can go straight from working to unconscious, but if I try that I’m up two or three hours, twitching and staring at the ceiling and doing checklists and making mental notes of things I need to do. *sweatdrop*

So, I am slightly hopeful that I’m not going to burn myself out leaping into this, and I’m also not going to stop working and become a layabout. Yay for the middle path? Yay!

My workspace is not optimized for the tasks I want to accomplish.

I set up my office to serve someone who’s only using it part-time. Working at it all the time has made me aware of a lot of points of friction. I haven’t even started deciding how to fix this problem, because I haven’t completely identified it. I know that I can’t paint, because the desk is dedicated to the computer now that I have a Surface instead of a desktop that sits under the desk. I also notice I don’t have enough storage space, something I’ve started to ameliorate by organizing my closet and moving some of the stuff in my office into storage. But I can tell that this part of my process is going to take experimentation and a lot of elbow grease.

Related, my storage issues are enormous. Again, I’m not sure how I’m going to tackle this one, but it’s something I've noticed in the past but didn’t have to deal with because I wasn’t home very often. Part of this is because I don’t have a dedicated room to myself; I’m borrowing a ‘half-room’ that extends off the kitchen and is intended, on the floorplan, as a dining room. Nice and narrow, without doors and with only two walls, it’s perfect for a table. It’s not perfect for… just about anything else. Particularly things involving shelves and desks and tables…! But it’s what I’ve got to work with, so I’m thinking about how to rearrange it to serve my needs better. I don't expect this to be done anytime soon. I like to think for a long time about things.

I don’t drive as much, and I don’t miss it.

…which is totally not a surprise to anyone who knows me, because I despise driving. However, I also eat out less, which is surprising, because I do like eating out. Making my own food for breakfast and lunch has been a nice time-out from my schedule. I’ve always found the ‘calming ritual’ aspects of preparing your own meals pleasant, but now that I’m doing it more often, I recognize that the ‘calming’ part for me has to do with not being rushed, and my old life didn’t really give me a lot of space for not rushing. The ‘leisurely meal prep’ thing does not relax you if you’re constantly glancing at the clock and thinking, ‘okay, I’ve got another twenty minutes to do this WHICH IS PLENTY OF TIME AND YET I HAVE A DEADLINE so I’d better be done digesting by then because I have to stop relaxing IN TWENTY MINUTES.’

This is, I suspect, the root of why cooking for myself has failed a lot in the past. Even when I was done with the work day and ostensibly ‘off-duty’ at home, I wasn’t, because I was still trying to cram in all the stuff I wanted to do in the last hours of the day. I still have issues with group cooking, relating to how hard it is to find a recipe my entire family can eat, but I’m actually beginning to think that might be a fun challenge, rather than anime-sweating because even contemplating the time and brain it would take to research and prepare such a meal was stressful.

I’m not sure yet if this lifestyle is healthier.

I am pretty sure I’m eating less, and simpler, but that’s not always an easy thing to figure out if, for instance, you have a bunch of chocolate chips for a snack between breakfast and lunch and you’re not counting how many you eat. I’m also not sure I’m exercising more, because at day hobby I would spend a couple of hours strolling on my work treadmill, and I don’t do that anymore. But when I say strolling, I mean ‘at .6 miles per hour.’ Whereas I only spend 15-20 minutes on my treadmill now, but I do it uphill at 2.5 miles an hour or higher. Which is better for me? I have no idea. I guess I’m going to have to examine the evidence after a few weeks. Maintaining my physical health is of major importance to me, because I have long since passed out of the years where my body bounces back from casual disregard, and I am aware that the choices I’m making now are going to shape my quality of life in twenty or thirty years. As much as I can control it, I want to have a vital elderly period, and go out, like Michelangelo, still carving at 90.

But it may be that after a month or two of this, I’ll have the emotional and physical energy to resume a sport. And maybe the money. I am not eager to spend too much money. Which brings us to the last thing:

I resent spending money.

I now feel like every dollar I spend might end up sending me back to a day job and I don’t want to go back. This is an emotional and irrational fear, not a factual one; intellectually, I know I’m doing all right and I don’t need to be afraid that I’m going to have to scamper back to a cubicle. But the feels are not reasonable. >.>

I suspect putting some time in at this job will settle those fears a bit, and I’ll stop looking at every dollar that leaves my head with a jaundiced eye.

There are other challenges ahead, I think, but these were the ones I noticed in the first week. I'd say 'I'll see where I'm at after a month' but this month is... already not normal and not likely to stay normal, so. Maybe after July. *more sweatdrops*

Anyway! I thought y'all would be interested in hearing this thought process, same as you've been interested in all my other business processes. Questions and comments welcome. Suggestions too. :)