The word of the week is waiting.
NOTE: This week's entry will be a bit larger than usual, but not as large as some of my other updates over the years. It's been a long time coming, so that works out rather
well, I think!
New Beginnings:
New Beginnings:
Celebrating Ten Years In Beautiful
British Columbia THIS week!
Read on, and thank-you for sticking
along with me on this wacky ride...
 |
| 1.3 million words later... |
Oct 30 & 31st - Treating Tricks
Not much to say: limping at work,
resting at home.
I do miss going out for Halloween as
a kid, but in thinking about it, the best part was showing off my costume each
year door-to-door... and now that cosplay's become a regular part of modern
culture, the opportunity is always there when attending local events or
conventions or even just chatting with people online who share the same
passions.
One more plus the Internet has going for it.
I have several boxes full of costume
bits, most of it medieval-knight-ish in nature, so this year I just decided to
go with something simple( as above )since I'm limited in my mobility due
to needing a cane( again - sigh
): Incredibly frustrating, given that I'd been doing so well the last
few months, what with proper stretching morning and night, getting back to
swimming with an eye on biking again in the spring... but whatever. I'm used to
starting over again, and again, until I get back on my feet, and in this case
it's literally that.
I don't even miss the Halloween candy
any more. Well, maybe the Peanut Butter Cups... but I can still have them now
and then, in moderation.
Much like anything in life, really.
Nov 1 – A Decade of Thought
What can I say? Ten years ago today,
I set foot in BC - for good, it turned out.
Leading up to this week's entry was
several months of preparation, but I made little headway in deciding what I
wanted to say until only a few days ago. At first, I pondered making a "List Of Good
/ Bad Things" but that didn't really appeal to me as a
comparative, and I'd be weighing in on whether or not my time here spent in BC
has been worthwhile.
It has, but not in ways that I'd
imagined prior to, or even after, I arrived.
What, then, could I say about my early 2007 decision to move here, and all the things that have happened
in my life since then?
I believe I did the right thing,
leaving Ontario and heading Westward. As the title of this blog states, this
was to be a series of New Beginnings for me, though not in ways that I imagined
when I thought about what my life would be like in my mid-40's. I'm not where I
thought I'd be ten, or even five years ago.
What about twenty years ago?
Then, I'd been out of university( but hadn't finished )for a few years, not doing much save working
a low-paying office-supply job and getting my head around the fact that my life was
messy, unlike anything I'd anticipated for myself as living in my 20's, and that I had a lot of
learning and growing to do to come to grips with it all. Depression, financial hardship, family strain, a lack of any meaningful romance... there was quite a list I was dealing with, yet I did my very best to stay true to myself and my hopes.
Fast-forward almost a decade later,
and I was working at a dead-end job at MMart in Ontario, wishing with all my
heart to be somewhere else, with no desire whatsoever to advance up the
corporate ladder by selling large chunks of my soul. At least by then I'd discovered some of what I knew was important in my life, including the realization that I wasn't willing to
mortgage the most vital parts of myself for material gain.
In the year leading up to my move, I
took stock of myself: single, doing the same things every week in and week out,
existing but not living, learning slowly but not growing. My writing ability
had lain dormant for so long that I barely strung words together more often than once or twice a year, and that seemed a tragedy to me, given the passion I've had for sci-fi
and fantasy ever since I was a kid.
It was time for a change.
As it happened, this time period in 2007 coincided with
my parent's desire to move out of Ontario completely to preserve their health,
and British Columbia was their destination of choice. As I didn't have anything really tying me down in Ontario, it made perfect sense for me to move out there along
with them to get them settled and then see what I could do with a fresh
start. Being able to transfer to a BC branch of MMart seemed to support the whole plan...
Things didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped: MMart in BC was even worse
than ON, despite my being promoted( read: suckered into )to manager, and I struggled to adjust to the rising stress levels. Eventually, I came to the realization in 2011 that I needed to
make a clean break with the company that I’d worked for for almost a dozen
years in order to preserve my sanity and health, both of which were declining
sharply.
By 2012, I'd quit my job at MMart, with no immediate
employment prospects, and it'd be another year before I landed a minimum-wage job, to start the slow climb upwards again.
In the meantime, I was determined to
make the most of my newfound 'freedom' of unemployment, and dove into writing
my first novel, unleashing years of creative energy. By the end of that year, I'd finished
the first draft, and felt elation unlike anything else I'd yet experienced:
that of creating something unique and entirely my own. Little did I suspect
there'd be so many sideways steps, stumbles and awkward detours afterwards, as
I struggled to complete the next few drafts while trying to secure gainful
employment.
Which I did; again, Canada's economic circumstances
meant that the only job I could find was minimum wage, but I made it work
despite the persistent injury to my arms from a move gone bad in 2012, and otherwise my
health was excellent from bicycling to and from work every day for two years. The job had its share of stress, but I was earning my keep, though at the pay level it meant my slide financially hadn't stopped, only slowed a bit. Yet I made some good friends at that job who are still with me, and kept writing all the while.
I
thought that getting a permanent government position in 2014 would help
me start to make headway financially, but my years spent in heavy debt meant
that I just couldn't get ahead of my payments, though my income was now comparable to my earnings at MMart's last few years.
After all that, ten years after
moving to BC - where's it put me now?
I feel like I'm... waiting, still,
for positive forward movement, professionally and financially. Little's changed
from my life in the 90's, in those regards, sad to say. Writing my book's been
an incredible experience and I've made huge strides in bettering my wordsmith
skills... but my novel's doing zilch for me unpublished. The slow push towards that goal has been wearing, especially as my health issues have robbed
me so often of the physical and mental energy to write of a day.
Personally though, I've hit a home
run: moving to BC let me meet the woman of my dreams, someone whom I quite
frankly thought didn't exist on this planet, especially given my decades of being rejected by the fairer sex. That rejection on its own led to positive personal development, albeit derived from intense soul-searching, depression,
anxiety and painful self-discovery for those same many years. I'm not unique in that regard, though in my case, I think the long timeframe without any sort of romantic relationship was fairly uncommon.
Anyway: I couldn't be happier on the subject of romance in my life now.
My lady said something to me today
made perfect sense: you have to count your wins, and I agree: it's the wins
that count, and they light your way in the darker days we have.
It's the wins that you look back on,
and use to push yourself through, over or around the many obstacles that you
keep finding in your path towards your goals - however nebulous and vague those
might seem sometimes, or often.
It's easy to remember the nasty things that tangles your path, but it's far healthier to make the effort to remember the good: the kindness, and the generosity, as those things are less rare, and
far better for your mental stability to recall.
Looking back, I can say that I've had many wins in my life, and if
I'm guilty of anything, it's not paying enough attention to how they came
about, or just plain appreciating them for what they were - don't take good
things for granted: appreciate them at the time.
Count the wins.
Sure, there's losses, but they're
part of the process, and we can't let a stubbed toe stop us from continuing to
move towards our goals. As I posted last week, we have to keep moving: walk,
jog, crawl... it's all the same. If you stop, then you'll lose momentum, and
I've seen the effects of that in my own life too many times.
Where does that leave me now?
I'm on the cusp of Big Things: my
novel, my new home business, even the possibility of a better government position
that will edge me away from the financial precipice that I've been dangling
over for too many years now. All of that takes hard work, and to be honest most
days I've barely got things together enough physically to make it work; the
frustration of having my body sometimes fail support me in even the most basic day-to-day
activities can't be overstated, but I've had to learn to adjust and take action
however I can to mitigate my health shortcomings in the face of what needs
doing. Supporting my family has thankfully taken more of a backseat the last
three years; though they're not exactly all that much better off than I am,
there's not an immediacy of need that's pulling on my own resources as much
now.
Which is good, as I too often feel
things stretching too close to the breaking point. Having to put off reaching
my home business and writing goals from 2016 and 2017, both years when I
thought I'd be just rolling along, has been hard to take. But I persevere.
2018 has to be the year that things
come together for me; I can't wait much longer to find success, and it's
certainly not going to find me if I just sit around, starting at the
shorter support pillars of a smaller life than I know I'm capable of. When the
where I am now after 10 years of effort is disappointing in some ways, but I'm
better off in so many others that on the whole, I think things balance out: I
have love, life, and liberty.
All the rest will come, and I'll deal
with it as I can, each day as I have for the last decade I've spent in BC:
making New Beginnings.
Nov 2 & 3 – Sight
Who would've thought that I'd have
three pairs of glasses, or that they have lasted three years already without a
prescription change?
I guess it makes sense, in that I use
each pair for specific tasks( A = closeup/reading books, B = daily work at a
computer / desk and C = driving / walking around / general tasks )so I'm
not straining my eyes. I also take special care not to switch to quickly
between each type, giving my eyes time to adjust without difficulty to a new
focal distance. I hope not to need bifocals for decades yet...
One interesting thing about getting
older and my eyes losing their up close focus, is that I no longer notice small
bits of dirt or smaller smudges on my glasses. Those things used to really bug
me up to only a few years ago and I was constantly cleaning my glasses to
ensure my vision was completely clear, but now I just do it morning and night
for each pair, and that's more than sufficient.
I'm hoping that I won't have to get
three new pairs of glasses for at least another year, as I managed to get all three
of my current pairs for about $400 CAN total, which was an incredible price( I
ordered them from Zenni Optical in the USA, when the exchange rate was
only a 10% difference! ). Now that the rates have swung back to around
30%, it's no longer a good deal to order from the states.
I'll have to 'see' how things go in
2018.
Nov 4 & 5 – Steady On
As you may have noticed, this week's
blog entry is rather me-centric... but I hope you'll forgive me, as I've been
on my mind much of late, with this week's anniversary of moving to BC.
Thusly: I'm continuing to apply for
jobs, and work on my writing and my health.
The government job application
process continues to be an elusive thing for me to grasp, coming from the
public sector. Unlike retail jobs, where a concise two-page resume is usually
required, government resumes can be five or even 10 pages long, listing in
detail your accomplishments, skills and experience as relating to the position
that you're applying for. This is a lot of work if you're applying for multiple
positions each month, as I've been doing, and as my last application's
rejection showed, small things can knock you out of the running and make you feel like
you're making no headway whatsoever for all of your hard efforts.
Writing-wise, I'm plugging away at my
edits on draft 4.5 of my first novel, and I'm almost at the point where I'll be
digging into the 10K of excellent feedback I received a few weeks ago. That
will take another 1-2 months to implement, by my estimate, working a few hours
every other day at the very least. Since I typically wake up around 6 AM, there's
at least an hour to be have there before work, and I'm usually good for about
three solid productive hours of an evening after dinner, considering that my
day job isn't all that taxing mentally or physically.
Health-wise, though I've had a
setback with my left foot( oh, the jokes... )these last few weeks, it's
improving and I hope to get back to swimming again by mid-November to once more
began the climb back towards normal health. On the bright side, my
chest pains have almost completely disappeared, due to a combination of
Hawthorne extract and glutamine-L in my daily diet. Same goes for my abdominals: almost back to regular operations. I'm also waking up and going to
bed perfectly on-time and easily, meaning I'm getting the rest that I need
without issue, as Upstairs Lady follows much the same schedule as I do. I just
need to get some aerobic exercise going, now that my abdominals / core muscles
seem to have solidified back into their proper supporting roles and I can sit
up or twist without stabbing agonies distracting me all the time.
I guess I'm just a work in progress -
aren't we all?
Thanks for sticking around with me for the last decade; in writing my weekly blogs( which will continue! )it's been a HUGE comfort to know there's people out there listening, checking back on what I've written on a weekly basis. Friends and family are vitally important to me, and this blog's for you as much as it is for me... so, onwards!
