The rekindling of one of my passions came at an unexpectedly tumultuous time in my life. Just as I was building Citizen Eye News, preparing posts for it and studying the current state of independent journalism, I was laid off from my job. My energy was diverted to finding a new job and came along with a lot of fear of failure. Fortunately I found two new potential jobs within two weeks of getting laid off. I choose one of those jobs and am now fortunately employed again. In my haste to find a new job I did not pay attention to how much energy it would require me to become oriented with my new position. Especially at the type of company I have never worked at before. Despite my job title remaining the same, the position is much different than what I am used to. I am basically helping build an interactive (web) division of a marketing company. It is requiring much more of my attention and energy than I had initially hoped for a new job.
Everyday after work I am left feeling exhausted when I get home from work and that leaves little motivation to post to my newly launched independent journalism site. This is a depressing realization because I was excited about this project and fear it will be awhile until I feel comfortable at this new job to relax and spare myself some battery power for when I get home to work on my own projects.
What is strange about the amount of energy a person has to dedicate to the different parts of their lives is partly a matter of just sitting down and taking action despite the feeling of exhaustion. So I am able to sit down and scroll through the feeds and re-post a couple of related stories to my Twitter account daily. Beyond that it is hard for me to come up with new ideas and full fledged articles for my site. I can sit down and start typing and occasionally bust through that hump, but for the past few days I have let my exhaustion win out and have been sleeping and recreating with friends in an attempt to recharge. I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing, I am just frustrated that I don’t have enough energy to do everything I want.
My main worry is that I am stuck in an endless loop of working a 9 to 6 job, not having enough energy to do the things that I am truly passionate about, and spending far too much of my life on the things I don’t really care about and not enough time on the things I do care about. I think there is real danger of that without recognizing the possibility of becoming addicted to comfort and forgetting who I really am and what I really want to do with my life.
So I post this for no other reason than to remind myself that how I am spending most of my time is not completely in line with my desires at the moment, and a warning to my future self that I am stuck in a bit of a rut and want to make sure that I find a way to become unstuck.
In the meantime, I would love to try to keep the flywheel spinning on citizeneyenews.com. If you have any posts that you would like to write for the site, please let me know and I will give you admin access and you can post away. I would also be willing to share access to my Twitter account in order to keep it fresh and the follower count growing. I am starting to come up with some guidelines for the contributors to the site, and would be willing to share them with anyone who is interested in posting.
