work diligently on my goals till 9:30pm Monday to Thursday and allow myself time to relax after this, or I'm gonna crack the hell up and end up in hospital

..in the spirit of Kaisen: plan, do, check, review.

This goal is unworkable for me, I haven’t stuck to it, my lifestyle has changed, and I want to reassess the way I work best. I now know that this isn’t the way to do it.

You know what? I want to be a life coach. It’s what I want to do. While finding a permanent job might seem like the most obvious and urgent thing to do, if it’s detracting from my main aim it’s not serving my purpose.

I can manage on what I earn here. It’s a pittance, seriously. But if I’m careful and mindful, I can manage. I have faith that when this job ends – in March, probably – something else will come along. Because the universe provides.

But for now my main focuses need to be working towards this qualification – which includes self-development – and taking care of myself so I stay mentally and physically strong. So I’m going to hang fire on the job hunt and let my brain relax fully into doing what it’s meant to do – learn and grow and guide me.

I feel better already knowing I’m working towards this, and even better knowing that I don’t need to be constantly thinking I’m missing job opportunities. I am creating my own job opportunity.

Thanks, everyone, for listening to me stress, for your kind words, empathy and advice, and special thanks to Paperfaerie, Lucyann2, Headapollo and dwlt for going above and beyond the call of duty. Gee, I love you guys.

I think what I lack and really need is discipline. Discipline to stick at one task and do it properly to the end. I was doing some life coaching homework a little while ago and found myself rushing it in an attempt to get it done because I have so many other things to do too tonight. What’s the point in doing crap work? I want to do this for a living. How will I do that if I don’t learn it properly?

I am torn between two options:

1. Continuing to work as a temp for very little, coasting on the money I have saved and trying to spend as little as possible, while taking the pressure off finding a permanent job, so that I can concentrate more fully on my studies.

1. Continuing to work as a temp for very little, trying to spend as little as possible, while studying and looking for a permanent job in an attempt to a) get some proper money coming in and b) get my career back on some kind of track as fast as possible.

I don’t know what to do. I am scared I’m going to burn out again. It seems inevitable, especially with option two. But option one holds risk. I am petrified of getting into financial trouble. I’m scared of losing what I have. And I hate having no money to spend.

I know I’m going to continue my voluntary work. I’m starting to find mentoring rewarding, after a shaky start. And I need to build my CV to look less corporate and more like I give a damn.

I would like to get a permanent job that will help steer my CV more towards the sector I want to work in.

But what is the sector I want to work in?

I have a woolly idea of this. I want to be a life coach. But I don’t know how feasible it is to do this full time, so I’m also trying to work towards a career in the voluntary and charity sector.

Is this idea too woolly? Someone said to me the other day that unless I decide firmly one way or the other, I won’t get either. I hope that’s not true.

I don’t feel very life coachy at the moment. I can barely live my own life, let alone help others to live theirs.

I am sure about so few things in my life right now.

..extraordinarily badly.

While I did get a bit of homework done, though no job searching, I’ve spent half the evening composing an email to my mum attempting to explain for the hundredth time why BT Yahoo is not her browser, why the statement “it signed me out of the BT Yahoo browser” means nothing, and why it doesn’t matter whether she clicks on the BT Yahoo desktop icon or the one that says Internet Explorer, it connects in exactly the same way. All so that she can get a Flickr account and make me jealous with her sodding holiday photos to remind me of places I would go if I wasn’t too poor and busy trying not to be so poor.

As Rebecca would say, facepalm.

Why have I wound up wasting one of the few clear evenings I have this week giving IT support to someone who should be perfectly capable of working this out for themselves? She’s an intelligent woman, FFS. I have told her time and time again to go on a computer course – she’s retired, it’s not like she’s got anything else to do. She tells me that she did. Then laughs about it being back in the days when screens came in green and black. Then she goes on to tell me that computers have changed a lot since then, ha ha ha.

I know! So doesn’t that, combined with the fact that you’re constantly having to get IT support from me, tell you something? Like that you should go on the effing course already, update your knowledge, and stop bugging me with stupid questions like “How do I download a picture from the internet onto my computer?” And stop bandying around the words you’ve picked up and don’t understand, throwing them randomly, like decorative scatter cushions, into your sentences, in an attempt to sound like you know what you’re doing, because you’re confusing yourself further and making it far more difficult for me to help you, not least because it makes me so riled.

This world contains too many time-drains and not enough time. It takes me all the spare time I have just to organise the things I need to do, then there’s no time left to do them. This shit does not help. And if I hadn’t replied tonight, I know damn well tomorrow would bring another email or a phone call: “Did you get my email? You didn’t answer.”

Gah!

I’m going to bed.

NB: This entry is really ill-placed. It should probably be in “post randomly”. But at least it’s kind of illustrative of the kind of thing that distracts me from what I should be doing.

I had an entry for this goal half-written and never finished last night. It went as follows.

“I’m serious, if I don’t change the way I’m living I’m gonna wind up in either the nuthouse or suffering from some sort of stress-induced ‘80s-style yuppie flu type thingy, laid out flat for weeks and unable to do anything at all. I’m already getting eczema round my eyes, which is always my body’s way of telling me to sloooooow down, and frankly I’m really worried about my head state.

This entry here gives you some idea of the life I’m living at the moment. It’s not fun. My body is a wreck, I can’t form rational thoughts, think in an ordered way, and socialising is, frankly, beyond my capabilities. I know it’s just a temporary blip in the fantastic life of Absnasm, and things will be back on track – nay, vastly improved – soon, or eventually, at least. But none of that will matter, or even happen, if I ain’t got my health, and right now, I ain’t got my health, especially not mentally, and I need to give it some thought. I need to allow my brain recovery time.

So the plan is this.

Monday to Thursday, I will come home, eat, do some chores, and debrief as described in the post linked above. After dinner I will come to my room and spend a maximum of half an hour replying to personal emails. Then I will work on my career goals/college work. At 10pm I will stop. If it is agreeable to us both, I will Skype my man, but only until 11pm, and then, for the sake of our sleep patterns, we will hang up.

At 11pm I will switch off the computer and do something to relax my mind for at least half an hour. Listen quietly to music or one of my hypnosis CDs, read a book, stroke one of my cats… maybe even look into meditation as suggested by Penelopita. Learning how to relax my mind and body is something I have to do before my brain splits.

However, over the course of last night, I completely lost it. Unable to stop my brain spinning or to unscrunch my tense, tense body, I listened to my sleep hypnosis Mp3 three times all the way through without nodding off fully. I remember seeing 4am but I may have still been awake later.

This morning, at 7am, I awoke exhausted. I thought about calling into work and taking the morning off to catch a few more hours.

But I couldn’t get back to sleep. I ran through my Mp3 once more, deep breathing as best I could. No sleep. Brainspin. Thinkthinkthinkthinkscrunch.

At 8:15, I gave up trying to sleep, burst into tears and called Headapollo who sympathised and empathised as best one can on a crowded bus, told me (rightfully, again) that I needed to take a break and that I should go to the doctor. A quick trip to Lucyann2’s room for a snotty cuddle and an outpouring of emotion consolidated this idea, so I rang the doctor.

I got back a while ago. I’ve been diagnosed with stress and instructed not to go back to work till a week on Monday, and to get some rest and some (ugh) exercise. He says that the stress of the car crash Paperfaerie and I were in a couple of weeks back has probably knocked my already-overloaded coping mechanism sideways and off balance, and brought the last few months’ stresses and strains all down on me at once, and I’m not surprised, frankly. I’m to scale back the timescale of my job search and activities further – to 9:30, the doc says – to give my mind space and allow it to function more efficiently in the time I am using it for important stuff. I’m to do some stuff I enjoy, to remind myself how it feels to have a nice time and to show my brain it doesn’t have to work overtime, all the time. If I want to, I can work on goals not related to the more stressful ones. But I must relax and have fun. He recommended that I watch comedy before I go to bed. He was quite adamant that I should get some exercise, though. I don’t know how the hell I’m going to do that with my shoe collection. I hope a brisk stroll round the park once a day will count. This afternoon I’m going to march down to Tesco to recycle the carrier bags, and back up again, probably with some shopping.

So, that’s that. I feel a lot better, oddly, knowing that I’m not just going a bit mental. Having the idea of my brain overload officially sanctioned by a doctor has made me feel a little more justified and a little less like a complete pussy. I don’t want to totally fall behind on my goals, because I do need to find a permanent job – mortgage to pay, cheese habit to fund – but it’s not so urgent that I need to run myself into the ground doing it, especially when my life is in upheaval in other areas. Thinking about it, I’ve been through the mill in the last few months – I lost my job and, with it, some of my financial security; my income levels have changed drastically and I’m spending hours and hours looking for a permanent job; I’ve taken on time-consuming voluntary activities in my efforts to create the life I want; I’ve fallen in love and embarked on a whirlwind long-distance romance (wonderful but stressful and time consuming in itself, though worth every second); my relationships with my friends have mutated as we all grow and change… It’s been all change, really. I’m not surprised I’m a bit of a mess. It’ll take time to grow into the new me, and while I’m adaptable, I’m not so adaptable as to be able to change everything at the drop of a hat, and expect immediate results, which is, in effect, what I did and have been doing for months.

::breathes::