Everything is Coming up Ashley

I have been living in Victoria for over an entire year, and I can safely say that it has been one of the most difficult years of my entire life. However, instead of reflecting on all the terrible things that happened and why most of this year has been an uphill battle, I will instead tell you how the winds have changed.

In the past four months...

I started and finished my thesis, went through the lengthy revision process, had it accepted and signed off on by my thesis committee, and today I received my official letter from the university saying that I am officially graduating!

I told my job here on the island that I needed to be closer to my family, gave my official resignation, and started to make plans to move back home. My last day of work is in three weeks. After that I will then attend my convocation and then I will head back to Winnipeg.

I started to look at potential jobs in Winnipeg, sent off a total of one resume, received an interview, and got a job offer for a marketing position at a publishing company in Winnipeg.

Everything is coming up Ashley and it feels like my hard work and year of misery has paid off.

First Draft Done

It's done! It's submitted! Cue the applause.

Back on Track

As made evident from some of my previous post, I've been struggling a little bit with my mental health and as a result I haven't been as productive academically wise as I would like. Last semester if I was running on schedule I should have completed my thesis. Now it's very normal for people in my program to not finish their thesis in the scheduled one semester, but I didn't even really work on it at all last term. However, I am trying to get things back on track. I'm on a tight deadline if I want to graduate this summer like the majority of my classmates, but I have a timeline that will hopefully result in my success.
In other news, writing a thesis is hard.

I have also started to exercise regularly as a form of self care. It gets me out of the house a few times a week for a reason other than work so that's a positive. I've been enjoying the resistance training but I need to get my cardio level higher because currently it sucks.

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!

A Year of British Columbia

It's hard to believe that I have been living in British Columbia for about a year now. I thought I would take a few moments to reflect on the past year as well as give a bit of an update of what I'm doing and just kind of mind dump some of the thoughts and emotions that have been swirling around inside me.

Vancouver

Almost exactly a year ago I was posting about how scared I was to be living in downtown Vancouver. I was scared about living on the Downtown East side and how radically different it was from where I grew up. I was being confronted by poverty in a way that I never had before and wasn't sure how to deal with it. I had a roommate who was incredibly messy, had no desire to get to know me, and generally annoyed me to no end. The building was a mess, despite being brand new and I was constantly having to contact the residence maintenance; my shower was broken and then my heat was broken and then the sink in the kitchen was broken and then the hot water was broken. Despite all of the issues with my residence apartment I was able to make it feel like home. I decorated it with a rainbow of cranes and I enjoyed sitting by the window with my coffee in the morning watching people in the park below.

My classes were hard but interesting. I felt completely overwhelmed when we first started and was convinced that I was not as smart as my classmates and that I wasn't deserving of being in the program. When I was working on my education degree I was sometimes overworked but I never felt like I couldn't accomplish what was expected of me. With this program I felt like I was playing catch up to meet the minimum standards of the program and that if the professors discovered how far behind I was I would be kicked out. However as we started to get involved in the projects I started to realize that I wasn't an impostor and that I was capable of doing what was asked of me. Not only was I able to complete projects, I was able to do them well and be proud of what I created. I made book trailers for fictional books during our book project (a class where we simulated creating an imprint and publishing 4 new titles) and building a magazine company that focused on arts and crafts as a form of meditation. I left feeling like I learned a lot.

I think one of the hardest things that I dealt with while in Vancouver was feeling lonely. I had started to make friends fairly quickly and I consider some of the people I met while in Vancouver to be very good friends, but at nights the feeling of isolation could sometimes be overwhelming. The feeling of homesickness never truly went away.

Victoria

I haven't actually mentioned on the blog that I am currently living in Victoria. It's been nearly 5 months since I first arrived. Once classes were done I was required to do a professional placement at a publishing (or publishing related) company and in the fall write a project report (like a thesis) about my experiences. I was able to find a paid internship with a publishing company in Victoria, so I packed up my stuff, and headed to the island. I have been involved with a couple of big projects at the company and generally enjoy what I have been doing. The island is beautiful and full of nature. I went whale watching in July and saw a humpback whale breaching! Victoria also has so many amazing locally owned restaurants and coffee shops, so I am never at a loss for yummy food.

My internship officially ended a couple of weeks ago and I have been hired on at the company as a full time permanent employee. Choosing to stay in Victoria was not an easy decision. I truly do enjoy my job but there are many factors that make living on the West Coast very difficult, mainly that the homesickness and isolation I felt in Vancouver seems to have become worse. Instead of getting easier with time I have found that the longer I am away from home and my family the more difficult it becomes. I've been struggling with this because there are not many career opportunities in publishing back home. That's not to say that there are none, but I am worried that in order to live in the city I love with the people I care about, I won't be able to work in the industry I love. For now I am staying in Victoria to work and build up work experience. I'm not sure how long I will stay here or what my next steps will be. I'm honestly just confused and don't know what I want. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon, or come to terms with not always having everything planned out all the time.

Why I Fold Cranes

It's strange to think about how you are going to die with a level of certainty.
To think about what will be the cause for you to take your last breath.
Death is by no means knocking on my door. But the cards are on the table and I feel with a level of certainty that when Death finally does come, he will take the form of cancer.

Cancer is why I fold cranes.

When I was sixteen my grandfather passed away from lymphoma.
My sister started to knit little pins.
I started to fold cranes.

My grandfather is why I fold cranes.

I could tell you about the story of Sadako.
About a young girl growing up in Japan when the atomic bombs were dropped.
A girl who folded cranes and thought of peace while she was sick. A girl who had cancer.
Sadako inspired by medium.
My grandmother gave me reason to fold when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

My grandmother is why I fold cranes.

I have two other grandparents who fought cancer.
Breast Cancer. Prostate cancer.
They're both gone now.
They were very sick and cancer wasn't the only reason they died.
But still. More cancer.

They are why I fold cranes.

Almost a year ago to the day my dad had surgery.
Prostate cancer.
He wasn't able to go to my graduation.

My dad is why I fold cranes.

A few days after my dad we heard about my grandma.
The cancer was back. Stronger.
More deadly. Later stage.
This time in her lungs.
Her third battle with cancer.
The chemo is slowly making her waste away into nothing.

I keep folding my cranes.

Then came the phone call a few days later.
The call I wasn't meant to hear.
The call saying that something had come up in my mom's mammogram.
Surgery. Radiation.

My mom is why I fold cranes.

There are others. Friends. Family. Pets.
Too much cancer.
Too many reasons to fold cranes.

Death is by no means knocking on my door. But the reason I fold cranes is very closely linked to what seems to run in my family.
My genetics are stacked against me and I must play the hand I was dealt.
Cancer taking the people I love is why I fold cranes.