First Month in my New Job & the Return of Life

For the last few months, my life has been going through some changes; hair growing in weird new places, unpredictable outbreaks of emotion, and a new full-time job living up to its name and taking up all my free time.

Getting a new job isn't something particularly unusual in the grand scheme of things, and I'm sure at least 5 or 6 other people on the STEEM blockchain also have jobs, but in my case, it was a lot more dramatic.

You see, my last job was well over a year ago at this point, having first joined Steemit on the tail end of that contract. Ever since then I've been 'working' at home and leeching off my savings. What this inevitably meant was ultimate freedom, a permanent vacation where I could wake up whenever I wanted, sleep at sunrise, go wherever I dreamt to go and do whatever I dreamt to do.

Naturally, what this actually meant in practice was going nowhere and doing nothing for a solid year. Depression became a fairly common theme whether I knew it or not, and the ambivalence of ultimate freedom and supreme boredom became unsustainable.

To make matters worse, China, where I live, decided to mess around once again with all its rules and regulations which meant my visa couldn't get renewed the way it usually was, and my time here was quickly running out. Clearly, this life was not meant to last.

There came a point where I realised I needed to work. I needed that human interaction, that reason to get out of bed, but at the same time I had the lazy-instilled dilemma of 'what's the point?' festering in my brain, so I was hardly rushing to get back into the grind.

Eventually, however, I took the plunge into the Google Search Engine and found 2 jobs I liked the sound of, and I got interviewed for both - neither of which ended up being what I had hoped, though both had offered me a position (the job market is pretty healthy for foreigners here...)

After leaving the building of the second interview, knowing it was your typical deceptive job opening, I remembered something. Many moons ago, I had applied to an international school to be a music teacher. I had a friend who already worked there so I figured it couldn't be all that bad. At the time they gave me an interview, demo class etc etc and it all went well until they, like these other two offers, told me that they didn't actually have a position for a music teacher at this time, this position would actually come a whole semester later and instead they wanted me to be some kindergarten/ESL teacher or whatever. Naturally, I walked and that was the end of that.

Until I found myself walking out of a job again, roughly one semester later. So, I got on the Chinese chat app WeChat and got in touch with the school again. 'lo and behold, they confirmed a position for a high school music teacher was ready and waiting, so I went in for another interview, which largely consisted of them asking if I could cover ESL classes for them, which I humbly declined, skipped the demo and all the other deets, and found myself with a new job, officially.

From this point, the passive stress my life had been enduring evolved into active stress, and the extremely convoluted visa process was to begin. I don't have the mental energy to go into how that went down but let's just say it involved a lot of people, 12 years of history, and the process is still ongoing, months later.

The first three weeks of this job was what shut down my presence on Steemit, conveniently around the time everybody else was starting to bail from Steem, too. My body had to completely transform, from a slob waking up at 2pm, lying in bed until 5am when I would then sleep in bed until 2pm, to a workhorse waking up at the crack of dawn - alarms set at 7:00am - and coming home at 6:30pm.

The first week was devastating to my health, with some kind of week-long jet-lag demon coursing through my veins, screaming for me to stop messing me around, threatening to shut down entirely if I didn't. By Friday, the exorcism had reached peak levels and I found my limbs strapped to the bedposts, with an almost flu-like suffering and mental despair. Allergies had come back with a vengeance after having been mostly absent due to comfortable sleep and waking up well-rested every day, and the whole weekend was just the extraction of a years' worth of lazy.

By the following Monday, I felt pretty great. This was fortunate because soon the wake-up time was about to shift to a 5:50am alarm. As daunting as that seemed, it was actually pretty easy at this point. My body had been purified, jet-lag reset.

But I still didn't have the kind of energy I once had to sit down and dig into research for the kind of posts I do here ono Steemit. So I continued to stay abandoned. I've been ever-present on the SteemSTEM discord as we move things forward in ways you couldn't possibly imagine, but when it comes to creating a post that I can be proud of, I couldn't commit and would rather just go without entirely.

To this day, my job cycle is a 12-hour one, 3 of those hours being daily commuting, and the idea of coming home and knuckling down on a highly scrutinous pseudoscience post or a deep dive into phylogenetics, well, it just seems far off.

However

I don't think this is a permanent situation. My new job is now properly set with a schedule and routine, and frankly, it's a light workload. Sure, the hours are long, but now the essence of the grind is being fully weaved into my very being, I'm feeling the drive to be constructive greater than I have in a long time.

Previously I was writing posts frequently purely because I had so much raw time, an ultimate void of infinity and only a few droplets of saliva to fill it with. Now, my time is scarce, and that scarcity makes it valuable and I want to make the most of it. Clearly, mental health has been on the rise since starting this job.

The light workload and scarce time have demonstrably improved my way of life. I've re-started my Chinese-learning engine and advanced to a level slightly higher than ever before, I've returned to the piano and become better than ever before, I've picked up the clarinet and Ukulele, I've been motivated to get out there and see more of this country I have yet to explore in 4+ years.

I've changed my eating, drinking and exercise habits to the point that I've basically lost no weight whatsoever (although I get frequently tricked by scales that claim I'm 4kg lighter at 2pm than I am at 5pm the same day), but everything feels better. 10,000 steps per day are expected now (compared to about 300 before as I walked back and forth to the bathroom) and my stomach has clearly shrunk to a size where I can't even finish the usual kind of McDonald's-esque meals I had been living off for so long. My body somehow craves salads now, and looks at Cherry Coke like it's WD-40 (it probably is in China, tbh).

To top it off, the job itself is inspiring, and it has taken me back to my roots in music, where a lifetime of passion resides. But even more, I get to teach more or less what I want to teach: Composition. This is incredibly invigorating for me and drives me to better myself alongside the students. I also get the opportunity to teach a course in music history & world music, which feeds my love of more STEM-like subjects, delving into the innate psychology and historical evolution of human culture and the intrinsically entwined dance between music and politics over thousands of years.

What I'm saying is, it's taken me a while to return as a functioning member of society, but the results have been amazing and I have of course been prioritizing this growth over my desire to post on Steem. Thankfully the timing was pretty good as the economy broke down and the active userbase declined to roughly 17 people, the majority of which being bots. But I don't personally care about this now.

I unfortunately had to take out a fat chunk of Steem to pay for things before my first paycheck came in, but now I'm hoping to get that all back - but I don't know when.

It's likely I'll post something more typical of my Steem career in the coming days, but as I've said with everyone else, I don't want to promise myself such a thing. My real life is taking priority at the moment and it will take time for that pendulum to swing back the other way and find balance.

This is starting to sound like I'm some kind of famous YouTuber on their second channel explaining how they had a hard time with a relationship but are finally back! Only to stop posting again for 6 months/ever. But:

A) Nobody actually cares whether or not I post, including myself

I thought I had a B) but I forgot. Oh well.

Anyway, Expect to see more of me, if any of my followers are still actually active here, but don't get your hopes up. I know I'm great and all, but you can survive without me, I promise.

Over and Out for today!