I seem to be attracting more and more work opportunities these days, which has been really nice. I’ve talked before about feeling really career oriented pretty much my whole adult life, and some of my teen years also. But it’s been interesting, because often I had to rely on other bizarre jobs to get by, or welfare or disability. And it’s starting to get to the point where I don’t need to do unrelated work or welfare/disability. And it’s pretty awesome. I just got offered a job directing a doc episode as part of a series, and this morning someone offered a writing job to me. And I have a lot of other work this year I have to do besides that. Like two short videos and this feature script (which is getting worked on today!). If I stop and think about the work I have to do this year I get super overwhelmed, which was kind of a feeling I was getting last year too. BUT ALSO I think I am doing okay with it. And I think it’s gonna be a fun year. And there are ways to get through this heavy workload if I am careful and do a lot of preplanning.

This afternoon is my writing time. I’m on a deadline again for the script, so I’m trying to devote a few hours every afternoon to working on it. It’s been going…. interestingly. Like it stalled for a couple weeks while I sweated out my thoughts about it. Then the other day it just started coming and was flowing really well. Then my laptop broke because of a dumb thing I did trying to get dirt out from under a key. Now it’s in the shop, and I have a week with my OLD laptop. Oddly enough it’s easier to use the old laptop, because I was trying to make do with my external keyboard on the new broken Macbook and the surface area is smaller and the keyboard was touching the touchbar and either way I couldn’t just rest it overtop the internal keyboard. So I had the screen FAR away and squinted my way through writing. Ugh pain. I’m gonna get my Macbook back on Tuesday or Wednesday. So in the meantime it’s gonna be limping along with this. I’m looking forward to having the new one back. This one has some laggy issues, the beachball shows up a lot, I did a software update but sometimes it’s just so slow and unhappy. I also deleted some stuff off here that I don’t need because it’s on another hard drive.

Ha ha boring work talk.

But really it makes me think I might actually be able to carve out the kind of life I want for myself. I’ve poured over two decades into my practice, and two degrees, and I sometimes felt really frustrated and held back by forces I didn’t understand. And my health issues in my 20’s kind of kicked me back down the ladder for a while. I took years to come back from my first hospitalization. I think it’s also though, just a question of being in the right place. For whatever reason Toronto seems to be the right place for me. I feel pretty involved in the community, I’m doing a lot of volunteer work with some media orgs on boards and in collectives. Which is nice, I always liked feeling involved in my community. I did some of that in Vancouver, not so much in Saskatoon, but here it seems like a good place to get involved. I’m also kind of lucky that I have done such a variety of work in my field, because I know stuff about docs and about narratives and have an experimental aesthetic and also write all the time. Like even my days off I am writing something. Maybe it’s just a diary entry about my feelings, but I feel like I’ve written thousands of pages even just in the last few years and although volume doesn’t equal quality, it is also way easier to write the more you do it.

Anyway ha ha omg I should probably go do my writing job right now and work on my script. Maybe someday I will start being able to write love letters to someone again. That would be nice.