After a brief interlude we’re back on the retro train over here! It’s almost annual reflection season, which I’m sure will figure prominently in future retros, but for now I’m hoping to just build a habit again. Thanks for being here to read these.
Here’s some stuff that has happened in the past few weeks.
I actually had a nice few months! I had almost five weeks off after leaving my last job, and now I’m coming up on three months at the new gig. This job came with much less pressure and none of the other stressors. However, now I’m moving from “onboarding and bug tickets” into real meaty work like scoping bigger technical solutions, and that’s where the real tough stuff begins. I was probably burnt out for years, thinking it was just my own failings causing me to struggle so badly, and that isn’t going to magically heal after a vacation and a few months at a lower-pressure job (mods???). It’s going to be tough sledding for a bit, and I will be doubting my abilities and probably getting unnecessarily stressed about all kinds of minor things, and I just hope that being in a better spot will help soften that.
I got a lot of nice feedback about my Blue Jays post, thank you. (A good friend called it an “essay” which makes it sound so legitimate and polished! They’re not wrong, I just hadn’t expected such terminology for my sad blog posts.)
I actually found the process of writing it incredibly frustrating. I used to write blog posts regularly, and I wrote about baseball off and on, but I stopped at some point. After that, all of my writing has mostly been for myself in journals, short-form thoughts on Twitter and Bluesky, or in PR descriptions and Slack messages. Many of these involve excising all unnecessary words so that I can convey a concept as clearly and concisely as possible (either because of a word count limit or for business communication), which completely destroys any inklings of style. Now when I try to write anything it’s flat, literal, lackluster. It’s doing a job, but that job isn’t “evoking feelings”.
Contrast this with something I read recently:
[…]in my late teens and early twenties I felt, selfishly, that the worst parts of the world existed only in the small radius of my various heartbreaks. And, to the credit of those heartbreaks, some of them were worthy of that lie. What I love about the heart is that it’s capable of breaking in infinite ways; may we never live long enough to experience all of them, but may we live long enough to experience the ways the heart can repair itself for subsequent breakings. The cycle of rupture and repair is a requirement of living, a cost of surviving, something that goes hand in hand with another reality of survival: that, throughout your life, you may not only lose people but also gain them.
Now… yeah, I know. I know. I’m never going to be Hanif Abdurraqib, or even a fraction of him. But do you catch how that prose is crackling and moving and carrying you along in its current? It’s really hard to do anything like that when you’ve been practicing the opposite (and, again, when you are not Hanif Abdurraqib, but stick with me).
I do blame some of this on the way social media, in particular, lets you skim the surface of everything, reacting and commenting but not really digging in. I am very susceptible to this as a short-form-textual-media enjoyer. I’ve seen so many posts about something, but have I read about and formed opinions on and engaged with that thing? Unlikely. In the end, it means most of my thoughts are also surface-level and not very complex. That comes out in the writing.
I guess what I’m saying is I appreciate the craft in a way I haven’t allowed myself to do for awhile, and I’m going to work harder on both thinking and writing about that thinking, just to build the muscles again.