Seems like I do this every couple of years, or perhaps it is more often, but it seems like a long-scale cycle.
My mind is always awhirl, thinking, thinking about writing, thinking about ideas to share. Thinking about a way to make money from my writing about things I want to write about. I know that I could freelance. This isn’t about that. This is about identity, changing technology, and fear of success.
I put all my writings on this site, well most of the blog writings, a few years back. I was happy with this. Reason Creek is where the my personal logic flowed. Then while working a temp job to evade the demons that pecked at my brain constantly as my brother Roger was dying and for a while after his death, I listened to hundreds of audio books as I proofed digital versions of old theses for the local university library. During that time I found there was a spot in my brain where Interesting Things which could be filed under the heading of Women’s Legacy Project were found. I purchased the domain and began pulling things out of my brain with which to organize the site. Let’s see… this would have been in March 2015. A year later, this past March, the site was doing well enough to attract a diverse group of women to tell stories on WLP about women who had changed their own lives.
Then… somewhere along the path in the last six months… I’ve stumbled off my productive path and into a patch of rumination brambles. It is now September and I am looking at all these things/aspects over which I’ve stumbled:
So I came over here to Reason Creek to vent and create an image of what is going on in my scattered brain. (I created the Mind-map image with Scapple.) I now think I see the problem I am having, in addition to the shading non shading of certain items; the items in red at the bottom of the mind map exist in two different roles and at two different levels in my way of seeing the world. I either need to become comfortable with the status overlap in two areas of my life or rearrange something.
Nothing is solved. But I feel better. My world is both expanding as a business person, and this requires shifting my identity as a writer out of a very comfortable spot into a place that is risk-based, and this is happening as my daughter prepares to officially change her primary status from daughter to wife. Her status change does not change my mother role and how I will see her, but it will change how I behave towards a woman with her own household in her own right.
Word of advice: don’t change your business model when rearranging your personal life. Needless to say, I do not take my own advice.
Reorganizing Everything
I've been in such a funk lately that I decided to spend the day organizing…
Household Organization
First I bought a new shower curtain
to coordinate with my old brick wall
in the master bath.
This helped me get out of my recent doldrums a bit. This didn't really help me organize anything, but having a room look nice makes me want to work in it, so this will help me organize the master suite that contains my hubby's office, though I may steal it soon, as well as our bedroom, bath, and closet, and laundry. If our suite had a kitchen it could serve as a small studio apartment, which is why we designed it the way we did. We could add a kitchenette and rent it out in our old age. We could also live in it and rent out the rest of the house.
Computer Organization
Then I rewarded myself with a desktop image change on my desktop computer after I organized the 100 plus files that were scattered on the desktop and filed them or threw them out. I have always loved Hopper. I visit Night Hawks every time I visit the AIC, or visit Chicago for that matter. There is something that he captured that reminds me visiting my grandparents' house in the rural remnants of a 19th Century village in the very late 1950s and early 1960s.
This helped me feel like I had accomplished something that will help me get more accomplished and reminded me of all the stuff I've written and created as back-story to the significant amount of stuff I've put on line in the last couple of months. This made me feel less like a slug.
Mental Organization
Then I built a mind map of my current work related projects.
I used Mind Note Lite to create the mind map of my current projects. This serves as my app recommendation of the week. Mind mapping really helps me visualize all the disparate things going on in my mind.
I thought about using project management software, but I find that as an individual who works for herself that project management software isn't as useful to me as is mind mapping software. Since I tend to work by myself unless I outsource a project component, I find that mind-mapping helps me organize the overall structure of what I'm doing better than project management. This more curvilinear representation helps me get a handle on what I'm doing better than a spreadsheet or list would. Once I have a handle on what is actually going on, then I can prioritize. I always have 15 different projects running, I can get so spread out that I become completely dysfunctional. This helps tremendously and doesn't stress me out the way the pointed linear boxes of a spreadsheet would. This last point I made could be a blog post in and of itself so I will save it for later… for now just allow me to say that women and curves go together!
Finally, I put the Holiday Touch on this blog by changing the header. This is a psychological point of seasonal organization.
So I guess I am back at it. And thanks to taking today to organize and review, I know what it is.