today's assignment

I'm stuck.

I have no idea what to do with myself. I have ideas of course (teaching, software development, tech writing...) and have been perusing local ads for various jobs that might suit, once the kids are all in school next fall. I keep smacking up against my lack of qualifications on one hand, and my utter resistance to going back to school on the other.

The fact is, I'm fairly certain I'll need another round of surgery in the fall, in spite of my endocrinologist's encouragements. So I have to work around that possibility, which includes an entire month of not being able to drive. That brings me round again, for the umpteenth time, to really working on my writing -- and back to stuck, again.

For most of my life, I've struggled off and on with imposter syndrome. In some bizarre variant of bi-polar disorder, I swing from feeling competent and capable to utterly helpless and hopeless. By any objective measure, I'm doing fine. By my own internal metrics, my accomplishments range from admirable and respect-worthy, to merely OK, to negligible. Let me be clear: on any given day, an accomplishment I was once proud of can be reduced to "nothing special." Twenty-two columns? One day, they're quite good, another, they're lame.

I know it's stupid. I feel paralyzed these days, unable to do anything because of a certainty of failure. Funny how I can't recall ever really failing anything (OK, there was that one test in finance back in '85), especially something I really put my heart into. So why is it that I'm hesitating?

Now is not a good time, I say to myself. (And it really isn't, since all three kids are home on spring break this week, crying out for entertainment or supervision, or at the very least, snacks!) But when will there be a good time? I'm tired of being stuck. Clearly, I need a plan, which brings me back to the inertia again: why make plans when they just get blown out of the water? What's the point?

Well, in this case, if I don't do something, these bad feelings will only get worse. Even if the plan sucks, it will still be better than nothing.