Category Archives: to do

Working towards happiness

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happiness-road-sign“We need to always be working towards something in order to feel useful and have a sense of purpose.”

I read this quote today on another blog. It’s true and most of us know it. I know it, yet that doesn’t stop me from getting stuck or sometimes I forget what it is I actually want!

Sometimes I check out Maslow’s hierarchy of needs  to remind myself what humans need most and what my priorities should be. It would seem I need to work towards acquiring:

  1. Employment / Money
  2. Love and Sexual intimacy
  3. Self Esteem / Confidence

I never know if I should be chasing the Employment which will result in self esteem through sense of achievement or if I should be chasing Self Esteem so that I am able to function within Employment? I suppose most people get their self esteem without even thinking about it- they do what is expected of themselves: finish school, then go to work, then find a partner, then settle down and so on. Through this process self esteem usually finds them, rather than them needing to find it.

I guess then, employment, a career and money should be my top priorities for now. As mentioned in my previous post, I have been trying with this one. I suppose now that I’ve identified nailing the whole work/ money thing as being most important I should focus most on that.

I will also continue to keep my other goals and activities ticking along in the background. I’ll attempt to carry on with 3 weekly workouts, keeping an eye out for potential girlfriends (I have a date tomorrow in fact), maintaining a small daily blog (separate from this one) and attempt to get some enjoyment from the occasional game, cinema trip, friend meet up, tv show, internet browsing session.

Until I have money or can move out on my own, there’s no point expecting anything new or fun trips out and doing new things every other day.

Making money

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hard-workOne part of my life I need to turn around is my career. Or lack of! My worrying question is this:

What do you do when you’re a 30 year old with no in-demand skills, a lack of confidence, little motivation and a resume consisting of just 3 or 4 irrelevant jobs over the last decade with each one mostly lasing no more than a matter of months?

It’s pretty true what they say about the 30 year milestone in one’s life = a time to reflect and assess. I am a fully qualified adult now! Or at least I should be. In reality I’m in the same financial situation I was after just leaving school. How the hell did this happen? 

Being in employment has never been easy for me and I’m sure anyone who has a long history of anxiety, avpd, depression and so on can relate. I STILL don’t know if there is a job out there or some way of working I can do and feel comfortable with. My preferred option has been the idea of working for myself, being a freelancer and entrepreneur. I get to escape the constraints of working to someone else’s rules or working with people I hate BUT then I lack the self motivation and real world knowledge to make a success of things.

So far as going it alone, I have tried:

  • Spending several months creating a personal portfolio and promotional website for myself from the ground up. It’s allowed certain customers to find me, but now only generates a dozen or so hits per day and next to no substantial work. I don’t know how I can substantially promote it. With insufficient knowledge and resources I find myself spending weeks just to get a dozen or so crappy back-links in place.
  • Spending months promoting myself via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Deviant Art, Youtube, Blogger, Squidoo, Forums, Google adwords. I followed the advice I was given by creating decent content on these sites but couldn’t figure out why I would get next to no traffic to these sites, let alone be able to funnel that traffic to my personal portfolio and then convert into real money-earning business opportunities.
  • Entering several art and design competitions. I’d win or place in small $20 prize pool competitions, but it’s hardly worth entering if each takes an average 20 hours of work. For substantial competitions I realize my work is often just not near being good enough to place. There was one exception where I won a $5000 prize.
  • Selling stuff online. Over the course of 5 years on and off I made nearly $18,000 profit selling video games until the competition muscled me out business.
  • Creating two Zazzle Stores. One with 500 products, the other housing over 3000 products. I must have pumped like 500 hundreds of hours into this project, but so far it’s only generated $250 or so!
  • Creating a line of greetings cards and pitching these along with my own design services to over 50 card companies. Unfortunately with no success.
  • Asking over 30 illustration agencies to represent me / find me work. No takers
  • Asking several fine art galleries and art agents to represent me and my work. No takers
  •  Taking art and design commissions via Devintart and Crowdsourcing sites like Freelancer.com. I got several very small jobs, but in the end they’d typically work out at like $2 an hour! Not enough to bother with.
  • Creating custom Tshirt designs for Designbyhumans. My submissions were not ranked high enough to be made, so no luck there.
  • Sent dozens of self promo letters out to potential online stores and businesses, but these generated no work or even replies!
  • Sent several letters to design agencies asking to work with them on a freelance basis, but these generated no work or even replies!
  • Spending 3 months on creating a high quality, professional 10 page mock-up art manual book for a book project and pitched it a Publisher I knew, but with no success.
  • Tattooing! I bought $2500 worth of equipment and tried teaching myself on and off over the course of 2 years. I earned enough to pay off the cost of equipment but could not get the hang of it enough to start charging anywhere near what a professional would. I spent weeks visiting and writing to over 40 tattoo shops in the area in an attempt to get an apprenticeship, but had no luck.
  • Attending several networking meetings to promote myself. I talked to people who couldn’t really find a use for my skills and ended up with no leads from this.
  • I found a semi-regular paying client! I freelanced for a company I was employed with for a short time as a web designer, they only helped to generate me $3000 of income over the course of 3 years.
  • Spending months applying for about 100 employed roles as a designer. A few interviews, but no job. Not sure I would want to work in that capacity anyway?

I give myself credit for making an effort despite my problems and no one else to help me. I had a few prestigious one-off freelance jobs. One with a very high profile client. It only lasted 3 days, but earned nearly $1000 a day! If only I could get that every day! And I worked with another client for 18 months which earned me around $70,000. I’m happy about this, but after 10 years I would have liked to have earned a fair $500,000 total, like many of my peers. The actual real figure is closer to $150,000. I’m now at a stage where I don’t have my own place and not even earning enough to run my car. I don’t know how to earn a decent wage. I’ve mostly worked for myself and relied on luck to get by, but I want more than to just exist while living with my parents. I’d like to be financially free to move out, support myself and a family one day. I’m 30 now and it’s about time I considered how I’m going to do this.

Living with Stress and Anxiety

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panic-anxietyI feel anxious every day from the moment I wake up.

It’s a constant level of anxiety which has a big impact on the quality of my life. I feel scared at the thought of doing most things and fearful towards my future. It’s a truly horrible ailment and as far as I know there is no cure.

I’ve tried curing myself with several different courses Anti-depressants. However these have an equally negative impact on my life via side effects so feel I can’t rely on these. Benzodiazepines such as Diazepam helps me relax and sleep, but I lose my sharpness, alertness and feel tired if I take these plus they are not a long term solution due to potential for addiction. I wonder if there is a drug which will make a significant reduction to these feelings of worry and persistent tenseness in my stomach?

So far doctors I’ve seen have been pretty useless. When I ask for alternative treatments I often just get a “I don’t know what to suggest. I guess you have to just live with it” response. CBT and conventional therapy isn’t an answer for me and I think once that and 4 or 5 ADs fail, there doesn’t seem to be much help.

I might see if a diet or life routine change could effect how I feel? The only thing that comes to mind which I should probably change is reducing sugar and perhaps fat in my diet. I don’t eat a massive excess of bad foods, but feel I could do more to eat healthier. I’ll also continue to see if there are other treatments of helping to rid myself of this.

I wondered why I feel anxious all the time? Is my body overly affected by stress hormones and neurotransmitters or perhaps it’s producing such hormones too readily? It almost seems irrelevant as from what I can find, there is no sure-fire way to treat my GAD (generalized anxiety disorder).

According to scientists they believe anxiety and GAD are a combo of biological and environmental issues. Seems obvious! And so to relieve anxiety one must re-regulate imbalances in brain chemistry and changes to physical brain functioning- Regulation of serotonin, norepinephrine and gamma-aminobutyric acid in the brain can relieve anxiety. On top of that, feeling in control on one’s external life plays a big part in one’s mental state.

As long as I am dealing with anxiety and an increased negative response to new and unknown, or known situations, my journey through life will be a tough one. I had/have big ambitions to achieve success in various aspects of my life but am hindered by afflictions such as GAD. It is wrong to compare myself to the next man when I am at a disadvantage. Knowing I have to struggle gives me a small degree of comfort when I am not attaining the same as the next man, but that still doesn’t stop me from wanting to achieve great things within my life. I have done well to achieve as much as I have despite my problems and will continue to push myself as far as I can.

One other thing I often theorize is desensitizing myself to life. The idea is to get stuck into things which scare me in an attempt to realize such things aren’t so bad after all. The problems are- this can potentially be a very stressful and traumatic experience for me, so I am often reluctant to put myself in a place of pain on the off chance it will be beneficial. Second, I want to experience positive references from engaging in new experiences. I could continually attempt new things I’m not prepared for, but feel that the constant negative feelings of humiliation, rejection, loneliness and failure will result in fuelling my fears and leave me even more house-bound and anxious.

Perhaps there is as way to do new things with people I feel comfortable with to help turn the new experiences into enjoyable shared memories? Maybe listening to some of my favourite music while at a new venue or reading some funny jokes could help build a positive reference? Or simply taking a moment to acknowledge how brave I am for doing a new thing.

Sleep and Waking Routines

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A few things I’d like to try over the next few weeks:
Before I go to sleep at night, make time for positive self talk or to identify the little good things:
The fact it is quiet and I dont live in a noisy neighbourhood, it’s warm and comfortable, I have a big bed all to myself, I get to watch a little bit of TV while in bed without worrying about disturbing anyone- being single has its advantages for sure 😀
I know it sounds kinda small and pointless, and I will no doubt have a hard time neglecting my negative thoughts, but I actually did this a few days ago and remember waking up the next day feeling just a little bit brighter, so worth doing!
When I wake up in the mornings listen to positive music or watch a few minutes of an upbeat film… or any film to stop me from lying in bed dwelling while I’m waking up and getting up.
I really need to get out of my current habit of resisting waking up because I feel bad about my life compared to when I’m in bed, sleepy and half-conscious.

I’d love to get to a stage where I get up in the morning and look forward to the day and all the things I’m going to be doing and experiencing. That is a big goal of mine.

This will involve setting aside an extra few minutes at the start and end of the day and I will need to cue up some decent material to listen to and add to my mobile phone alarm, but if it at least makes me feel a little bit happier or makes sleeping and waking times a little easier, then it’s more than worth it trialling.

And if all else fails, there’s always the option to knock one out to relieve a little stress!