I’ve been chewing on a thing for a minute now. When I was getting into the whole #DESIGN thing, I wrote a message to some Telegram groups saying hey y’all, I’m doing web stuff let’s collaborate. A few people responded, we had some back-and-forth but when it came to taking the next step and talking more in person… I bailed.
For the last x weeks I’ve been meaning to reply to these people. The item that I put on my daily todo lists has evolved from reply to telegram ppl through reflect on why I’m not responding to the telegram ppl to give the telegram folks a response, even if it’s no,
I’ve reflected in private several times, but the chats are still as unanswered as they were 2 months ago.
So I come here to process in public, in a hail-mary-attempt to get unstuck and throw this weight off my mind.
I’ve come as far as opening these chats and placing the cursor in the write-something-box. I remember a feeling of weakness and fear overcoming me. Strange how that tiny an action can have such an effect in my body.
They were quite intense sensations: a fear unfurling in my stomach, crawling up to my throat (when I let it). There was heat and tension around my neck and shoulders. I felt stressed.
But the crux of the thing seems to be a sense of being lost. Even after taking time to listen to these feelings, and many a journaling session, I am not clear on what these feelings are telling me and I have little sense of what I want to do.
I can already feel that after I finish writing I’m probably gonna reply to these people (edit: I have). I will apologize for the delay and ask if they’re still interested in meeting. Something in me is sighing. I sat for a while trying to understand, but nothing answered. I’m left not knowing what’s going on with me and my body, feeling the numb distress of a cramp in my solarplexus.
A more fundamental confusion mixed in here: what do I use as a compass, if I can’t read my body?
Addendum: A muddy stuckness
I’ve been here before. The pattern I see so far:
I isolate myself from people, staying in my comfort zone.
optional: I catch myself thinking strange thoughts about the futility of relationships. I wish to retire to a mountain cabin for the foreseeable future.
I start feeling lonely. I get sick of stewing in my own little world. I want to break out.
I reach out and talk to people - old or new.
After the initial wave, I start feeling… overwhelmed? Some kind of discomfort gets the upper hand.
So, doing stuff. I’ve been doing that. Tiny steps, steady pace, balancing myself between projects, necessities and life. This is me living the same day about 5 times a week: getting up at 10, doing the important shit first, making some music in the evening and staying up too late watching X-Files. I feel like I’ve matured.
There is a mix of pain and pleasure, stress and relief that is just about bearable. This morning I’ve been feeling stressed af. I just got my survival-chores done (look for place to live, money to pay for the place) and had 30 minutes before a scheduled call with a recruiter. 30 minutes - a nice little time-window to sit down and process.
Earlier I was feeling the stress, the fear in my stomach and I thought man, no wonder I don’t want to get a job (or do anything involving people) if a simple phonecall can make me feel like this.
It was this moment of understanding: of course I wouldn’t want to feel like this. Of course a big chunk of me wants to avoid feeling this cramped, fearful and flat on a regular basis. Because this is how I’ve felt a lot of the time when it was time to go to school/work/college/the Amt. So, if we want to avoid the feeling, we just have to avoid these things.
I took a break. No coding, designing, writing, talking to people. For a while I did nothing. Not even that - I unplugged from the world of doing. A few weeks ago I felt a jolt of new energy. Since then I’ve been making music, kind of full time, kind of for the first time in my life.
And I’m enjoying it. It feels right. Like what I really want to do. But, man, I’m stressing: things like THE FUTURE and financial security make it hard to focus. I wake up anxious, I feel confused and overwhelmed, even though I’m kind of doing what I really want to do.
And so I’m dipping my toes again into the world of learning marketable skills for fun and profit. At least I have a reason to write, again.
I don’t feel like I want to keep calling this design, tho (at the time of writing, the title of this section is #100DaysOfDesign). It feels too stifling, and at the same time, too vague. Even when I was officially sailing under that flag, my actual work was making abstract art, building an app and researching a lot of web technologies. Not sure any of this qualifies as design. (I feel like for it to be design, I would be finding out what people need, as a starting point.)
So let’s rename this space, so I can talk about whatever I want, in peace. There might be more stuff about mixing, coding and plants coming :). We’ll see.
For now, we can say
goodbye 100 Days of Design,
hello 100 Days of Doing Stuff.
Ok, it’s time. I’ve been meaning to re-evaluate this project for like 2 weeks.
I feel isolated, overwhelmed and this results in a feeling of treading water. I’ve been here before.
Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in stuff, and maintaining this blog - writing the posts, creating the daycards - is like the cherry on top, if the cherry on top was made of tungsten
I feel like I’m not really doing much designing. And what I see others doing and calling design interests me less and less - designing another UI for another app.
I think all of these things had been brewing under the surface for a while now, but they really bubbled up last week, when I read a few big-picture articles about design, especially some of Mike Monteiro’s. (Like this one that reframes designing as a service for the people who are going to be using the product, instead of a service for a client.)
All I can say at this point is smth smth design ethics. I feel my interest in creating nice looking UIs waning. Something older and deeper is on the rise… Could I bring my values into this and make it more than just a job?
This is all very fresh and kind of confused. Abstract even. But things have been stirred up that can’t be unstirred.
And so I gotta ask myself: how much of what I’ve been doing during the first 24 days of this challenge do I want to call designing?
If you’re trying to inspect HTTP cache data, this is not the guide you want. The Size column of the Network Log has the information you’re looking for.
Implemented a Figma-design in my grocery list webapp
Read around the design ecosystem: microinteractions, DailyUI, Dan Saffer
Hm, not much to say, it seems. I’ve been sitting here thinking of stuff with my mouth agape for literal minutes. Can there ever be nothing to say or have I just classified everything that came in this time as not worth saying… (or too spicy for publication)? hm hm
The day has been moderately productive. I’m struck with a feeling of being in a slog tho, like, having been in a slog for weeks. Mb I need a win, something I can say is DONE? Yeah, that rings true. But how to accomplish that when every project is just another rabbit hole that goes deeper and deeper?
I kind of feel suffocated by my worky-designy projects. I haven’t made any music for weeks and I miss it. When I’m finished working in the evening, I just wanna lie down and rest. There’s no screen-energy left in me. No doing-energy, at all, in fact.
I’ve been here before, as well: working on solo projos for weeks at a time, treating them like a 9-5 job, feeling more and more exhausted, like I’m treading water… until I finally collapse 😮💨 and unplug with a feeling of burnout, “ready to reassess” (and never come back to that project again). Mb I secretly don’t want to do these projects? Mb I’m investing the wrong kind of energy into them and exerting myself as a result?
Again, I don’t exactly know. But it does feel like I’m going deeper this time - into the discomfort, if nothing else. I wanna see what’s in there.
About the realization I mentioned yesterday (Day 20): I kind of realized that I don’t really enjoy fiddling with computers/technology at a certain level. And it feels freeing, like a weight off my shoulders. I feel like this in the moments when I accept some sort of limitation about myself: I don’t have to keep trying to see if I like\am\can do this thing - I know that I don’t\am not\can not.
Now I’m a little freer to do the things I might actually enjoy.
