The Struggle Is Real

For the past few years I have been struggling with a level of unhappiness. I've been making progress to correct this unhappiness but it currently feels like it's been getting worse before it gets better. If I'm on my hero's journey I'm still in the rising action and approaching the climax with the final boss but I kind of want to turn around to run back to the village where I was first given my mission and say "Sorry, someone else needs to rescue the princess. I'm done." As usual my blog is a place for me to vent and to put my thoughts into words so that I can get them off my chest. So let's dive in to how I got to level three unhappiness, and to do that I need to start at the beginning.

Level One
My journey started when I was working on my Education degree. I had just finished the first semester of my degree, was feeling a bit burnt out and hopelessly lost as I started to realize I wasn't enjoying teaching. It was actually visiting with family during the holidays and when people would ask me what I was up to I was so unenthusiastic about my answer. I was far more excited to tell friends and family what other people were up to than to talk about what felt like would be my forever boring existence. I had serious considerations of dropping out of university those first couple of weeks of classes in second semester. I didn't know what I wanted but it hit me like a ton of bricks that it clearly wasn't this, and I was scared.

I was able to work through my level one unhappiness as I started to reflect on what I wanted out of a a career and what I was passionate about. The answer soon became clear. I loved children's literature and books and publishing seemed like the obvious path. Which brings us too...

Level Two
I moved to Vancouver to study publishing. This was the first time I was living on my own. I was stressed with school and initially felt like I had far less experience than my classmates. I was living with a roommate that was the biggest slob and who never talked to me. I missed my family, I missed my friends, I missed my boyfriend, I missed my dog. Everything had changed so quickly, I wasn't sure I was cut out for this, and I was worried I would go broke and fall on my face. What made this whole experience harder was the fact that my family's health kind of exploded just before I left. My dad was having surgery for cancer and my mom and grandma had just been diagnosed with cancer and were to start treatment after I left.

Again though I was able to work through these issues. I made friends in my program. I had a few friends that moved to Vancouver at the same time. I had an aunt and uncle and cousins in the city who were amazing. I built myself a little support system. It wasn't the same as the support system I had at home but it helped. I found places in Vancouver that I enjoyed frequenting, I grew to love the apartment I was living in, and I managed to find my stride in my classes. Once classes were done I left Vancouver for my internship which brought me to Victoria and to...

Level Three
It feels like with each move I'm slowly stripping away more and more things. When I moved to Vancouver I still had friends. I had friends who had moved there at the same time and I quickly made friends in a classroom context. I felt isolated in Vancouver but in Victoria I'm at an whole other level of isolation. In Vancouver I enjoyed a level of freedom and independence, which I both loved and was scared of. My living situation in Victoria is both suffocating but also relatively devoid of companionship. I get along well with my coworkers but I hardly interact with them outside of work. I spend a lot of my free time alone. I know I need to make more of an effort to meet people but this is slightly complicated by the people that I'm living with.

I moved to British Columbia to start a career in publishing. I've accomplished that. But it seems to be at the cost of everything else that I enjoyed in life. I do really enjoy my job but at the same time everything else has turned to shit. I'm not currently thriving, I'm surviving. If I'm truly on my hero's journey, I hope that I am reaching that peak of the rising action and I'm close to the happily ever after, but I'm also worried that my next step won't lead me to that but instead to Level Four.

Stuck on Stickers

So one thing you maybe know about me is that I am a total sucker for stationary. I love pretty notebooks and nice pens and decorative sticky notes. Seriously, stationary stores are dangerous for me to go in to because I will want to buy everything. Not that I need it, but it's pretty and I often justify the purchases to myself with the idea that it will somehow make me more organized or if I just had the little panda page flags it would someone drastically improve my productivity. Now what is even worse than stationary for me is my obsession with planners. I currently use a personal sized 6 ring day planner and I use it to write down important dates and my to-do lists. Without my day planner I become lost. In the new year I plan to upgrade to an A5 sized planner so I have more space to write things down. Now this doesn't sound totally crazy on it's own, but when I start to tell you about the stickers, that's when it gets a little nuts.

So for years now I have watched YouTube videos of people buying sticker kits off of Etsy and putting them into their planners as a bit of a mixture between planning and scrapbooking. This has always struck me as an expensive but really interesting hobby. Not something I could ever justify doing (at least not to the level that these people did it) because spending that much on stickers seemed a little crazy. I've watched these videos for years and find them surprisingly relaxing but had never purchased any sticker kits. Until now.

It started off innocently enough. I bought a sticker kit that had Tigger on it. I love Tigger so I was very excited about this kit. Then I joined a facebook group for the YouTube channel and etsy shop that introduced me to the idea of sticker planning. I started to see more pictures of stickers than I had previously. All the new stickers that this etsy shop was producing were pretty but I resisted. But then they created a Halloweentown kit and I decided what was the harm in buying 1 more kit. It's just 2 kits. That's not bad. That's rather reasonable and they're both for things that I love. Other people have more kits than they know what to do with. Then I found out in the facebook group that the etsy shop was having a massive sale. 30% off everything! It was such a good deal so what was the harm in ordering a few more kits? I'm saving money because of the sale. Right? And before I knew it, I had become a sticker person. 

It started off with 1 kit, how did it end up like this? It was only 1 kit, it was only 1 kit!