lay out my Life Plan

I’ve moved out of the cottage and in with friends, and so far it is pretty awesome. Organizing everything as it is unpacked is proving to be quite the challenge. I have been slogging through my various project deadlines—maybe overextending myself a little bit since I’m so relieved to be feeling better on my new meds. so there haven’t been too many updates as of late. Still learning how to balance. More soon…

So, it looks like my plans are going to be accelerated slightly. I’m getting shoved out of my job, and now have to deal with the added complications of being sick. Rather than move out of the Bay Area immediately, I have an offer of reduced-cost sanctuary for a while here. Thus begins my sudden and ungainly transition into Phase II.

• I have saved up enough money to survive unemployed for a year. Unfortunately, I will be using it starting next year.

• no more details about moving.

• still organizing the inventory I’ve acquired from all the fire sales this year. Durable goods are worth it if you don’t plan on moving too much. At least now I have no choice but to get organized, because I’m moving all this stuff out.

• I haven’t completely lost it yet. Go me!

• working on script for comic, still not done with character designs, but ask me about this again in March after the more pressing projects are done. I’ll have plenty of time to work on these after next year anyhow.

• illustration projects have been replaced by craft ones. More on this later.

‘Character designs’, and ‘organize cottage’ are still kind of up in the air. A lot of other things have changed over the past year, but I think it’s time to talk about Phase II now that I am pretty sure I know what it is going to be:

I’m getting out of the Bay Area eventually. Probably within the next five years. My salary here is higher than it would be in most other parts of the country for a comparable job, and so the key is to not spend it all here, but save as much as possible for a move to somewhere else, temporary or perhaps even permanent. I was born and raised in SF, something for which I will forever be grateful on so many levels, but after I came back from college the place had changed. It’s becoming a caricature of its former self. I’m going to move out of state once I have enough money saved to scrape by on residual income, and then I will take a break from work and spend at least a year doing nothing but my real life’s work. This will be a badly needed sabbatical, but also an experiment which hopefully will be my stepping stone to entrepreneurship and a completely different way of living.

All of my life I’ve been working towards a life trapped in the corporate cycle: applications to the most prestigious high school to pad my applications to get into a prestigious college; summer school and work during the breaks to pad my college transcript and resume; three years without a vacation to prove to a corporation that they should finally hire me full-time. And what of it if I continue down this path? Get a raise, maybe a promotion, get a car, get a house, get married. Mortgage payments, car payments, bills for the therapy and Prozac and the yoga classes so I feel less stressed and unhappy about ignoring who I am—and just pray that I can make it to retirement without being laid off just before they hand out the gold watch (and believe me, that totally does happen. It’s happened at my company and others too. There is no such thing as job security anywhere anymore).

The real luxury of money is independence. It is what it enables you to do, rather than what it enables you to have. So, this is my goal for what I want it to do for me.

Allllrighty, let’s go through the list:

• I now have my $10k and I also have a 401(k) and a real, actual, permanent (as far as you can have such in an occasionally volatile industry) job. I also have my formerly embattled Charles Schwab investment account. I’m not going to fuck with that for a while, but in the not so distant future I will be more serious about investing.

• I’m… slacking. I really hope he’s done with coming after me. I’m hosting a birthday party for a friend and opening my home up to people again as opposed to just hiding out in some kind of hidey-hole. It feels good.

• my cottage is a leeeeetle cleaner. Not what I want it to be yet, but I love this place so much I’m really considering looking at organizing for a long-term stay here.

• sanity is still here. At my worst I find that the following help (in this order): 1. write angst-ridden essays 2. have a substantial nightcap 3. fall asleep listening to Ravi Shankar.

• HAHAHAHAha… nope.

• well, I haven’t totally stopped drawing. Clearly I need some improvement in this area.

• I am halfway to my goal of saving 10k. I suppose it’s about time for me to think about what I want to do when I actually get 10k. I think things are still shaky enough that I need to keep my assets liquid, alas. I’d like to start investing that money eventually, when it’s no longer likely that it will be used for my own survival.

• crazy stalker-ex seems to have stopped being a crazy stalker-ex. There’s still possible liability issues, but at least word seems to have filtered back to him that I’ve found someone else and all hope of getting back together with me is lost. Either that, or he’s dead, I suppose.

• my cottage has just been rearranged in a major way. I am about to 5S my tools like a mofo. Hopefully I will come up with a system that will prevent messes from getting this bad in the future. I think I have an idea for what I need to do, now.

• sanity is still (mostly) here.

• still fiddling with character designs…

• so TOTALLY NEED to start cranking out drawings. I’ve just started getting back into drawing-ness (thank you Doc for kicking my butt on that).

You are not your job. You are not how much you have in the bank. You are not the contents of your wallet. You are not your khakis.—Fight Club

I took a long nap this afternoon and I have to be up in 2.5 hours for weekend rotation anyhow, and I’m procrastinating on my silversmithing project :3 so I tohught I’d put somewhere for the record what exactly it is that I’ll be doing with my life:

In college, I majored in biology. My parents wanted me to become a doctor; I felt myself sliding inexorably towards a research/academia track; in my heart I knew I loved writing poetry and short fiction, drawing, making things with my hands, composing and performing music. I wanted to become a writer; then I wanted to go to med school; then I wanted to go to grad school; then I wanted to go to art school; then I wanted to become a biological illustrator; then I wanted to crawl into a hole and die because I thought I’d never be able to find a job where I was totally happy.

Shortly after graduating from college I read Po Bronson’s book “What Should I Do with My Life?” at the behest of my then-boyfriend. I realized the reason why I’d been struggling with The Answer was because I’d misread The Question. The Question is not “what kind of job should I have?”. It is “what is really, truly important to me, and how can I go about making sure it gets included in my life?”

I made a list of all the things that I was interested in and reasons why. It was pretty long. Looking at the list, I asked myself, “is there anything these items have in common?”. There were lots of reasons that overlapped. Taking those reasons, I distilled things down and eventually formed a List of Essential Things About Me, as follows:

1. I am a strongly creative soul with a degree of natural artistic talent and I want to further refine my ability to express myself through several media.
2. I have one specific story I’ve been wanting to tell for over a decade, and if I don’t get it out of my head and publish it, I will explode.
3. In spite of not being a people person, want to find my own ways to share my hope and enthusiasm for life and its wonders with others.
4. I am curious about and fascinated by how things work, especially living organisms. I want to stay curious, and be a lifelong learner.

And that’s more or less in order of priority. In a nutshell, that is what I want to do with my life. The rest is details on how to go about it.

Circumstances after college ultimately forced me to take the first job offer I got, which turned out to be temping for a biotech company. Further pressing circumstances for the past year and a half have prevented me from doing much more than just surviving, but it confirmed for me that those four things are still important to me, and that I will always be happier if I choose the path that takes me closer to them. And now that things are starting to even out, it’s time to test whether my current short-term plans are truly in alignment with my long-term goals. If they ultimately prove not to be, I know where to start looking when/if I have to come up with a new plan.

Well, I’m inching towards that savings goal, and slowly my craft supplies are getting organized. I’m probably still going to be crafting in chaos while I try to meet my hard deadlines for projects due before November, but after that, I have absolutely got to figure an organizing system out before I go crazy!

Mem. to self: for Phase II I’m going to have to include something about deciding on and outlining my plan for integrating my creative abilities with my desire to help people. I think it’s important for me to give back to the world in a way that uses what I’m good at. Because it’s what I love, I’ll be more willing to put myself into it, and it will give me an external reason to develop my skills, which I hope will help me overcome some of my hangups about using my muse.

Another meta-goal.

Phase I: wrap up all loose ends from that disaster a year ago. This includes:

• saving enough money to survive up to six months unemployed (see “Save $10,000”)

• protect myself from further stalking

• organize my craft supplies

• keep sanity, at all costs

• finalize character designs for comic (see “draw comics” goal)

• start cranking out illustrations (see “rebuild my portfolio” goal)

Due to my job situation (the never-ending hell that is) the top priority is having that savings lump so that I can maintain my independence—but also to make sure that all this money-focus doesn’t do anything evil to me while it figures prominently in my mind. Close second is stalking-prevention. I’ll admit I’m not as vigilant as I should be because things have been on the wane, and it hurts to be reminded. Not that either of those are a excuse because while I know a little of how his mind works, one really never knows.