I'm back

Long story short:

I can't separate myself from my job. My life is a long "To Do" list, and while I make an active effort to keep my life balanced, my career takes up over half of my time, and I like it that way.

Or I did.

About a year ago I discovered that the little start up business that I had poured my guts into for six years was going to be sold, and that my cut of the sale was going to be about 3%. You have to keep in mind that I had worked full-time for the company longer than the owner. I won the first government contract for the company, and I did it on my first try. I eventually grew that into a million dollar project that became the life support of the company during the recession, when almost all of our other work dried up.

So... that was all kinds of devastating. On top of the fact that I already had misgivings about the direction I had taken career-wise, I was now being told that the work that I had done wasn't valued. It took awhile for that to sink in, but if you look at my posting frequency, you can see that I became increasingly withdrawn, and then in May, I just stopped writing. At all.

Hmm... this seems to be more "long story" than "short."

So, if we just jump to the end... I resigned from my job and started my own business. I'm loving it. I wake up in the morning and bounce to my computer to get to work. My life and my work are all tangled up again, but I find myself smiling and singing at frequent intervals.

That being said, I'm still delicately managing a debilitating run-in with clinical depression. As luck would have it, I recently happened to catch an interview with Shawn Achor on the Groks Science Show (broadcast out of University of Chicago these days!) about his new book The Happiness Advantage, and I decided that I would like to implement one of his behavior modification exercises on the blog, partly to get me writing, and partly to do something that might make other people happy.

So every day for the next month I am going to post three things that are making me happy. I've done this intermittently before, but this is going to be a concerted effort. If anybody else wants to play along in the comments section, I would be thrilled and honored.

Thing #1: Feathered frost on my bedroom window.

This pattern of frost completely covered my window one morning. This kind of self-replicating braided pattern could probably be modeled using cellular automata, but I still just want to call it "magic."

Thing #2: Domestic partnership health insurance in New York.

Thing #3: Friends like you.

An Important Milestone

Today I told some kids to get off my lawn.

This means I am officially old—more so than the grinding in my knees, the graying (and thinning) of my once-lustrous mane, and the fact that I have been home for two days because of lower back pain. (OK, the "kids" were in their twenties, but the fact that I refer to twenty-somethings as "kids" just makes matters worse.)

An Unpleasant Personal Revelation

I just finished watching the Who Killed Amanda Palmer DVD. Tucked at the end are a couple of concert videos. Here, is the video for "Have to Drive."


The ending of the video tore me up even more than the "Sound of Music" video I shared back in April. I was absolutely bawling.

And I have to ask myself, "Why does that happen?"

I don't cry much. It's not a "tough guy" thing. I cry if I feel like it. The thing is, I rarely feel like it, and the instances that do make me cry are generally beautiful rather than tragic. I speculated before that beauty makes me cry because in general, the universe is just not a beautiful place.

Upon further reflection, I've come to a radically different conclusion.

Guilt.

I look at people bringing joy to total strangers, and it stabs me in the heart. It makes me say, "What the fuck am I doing with my life?"

And the answer to that question is not pleasant.

I make better bombs.

When the hell did that happen?

How the hell did that happen?

I never thought I would be the sort of person who would question the direction of his life, because I've been judicious in how I've spent it. If life is a path, then at every fork in the road, I picked the steeper ascent. My assumption has been that "up" is an intrinsically good direction.

But I'm beginning to sense a dissonance between my values and myself, and, at the age of 37, I'm looking down at the four decades I spent clambering to this summit and aside from the vertigo, I'm concerned that maybe, just maybe, I climbed the wrong mountain.