Perfection. We always seem to be striving for perfection but it is very elusive.

I started to read this book titled Don’t Do Your Best which argues against the usual comments we get to just “do your best” at whatever we attempt. The premise of the book is, more or less, that attempting to do something – even poorly – is better than not taking the risk of trying in the first place. Or something like that.

If someone criticizes what you do, the say something like “I’m building my body of work, go build your own”. Or, again, something like that.

The picture above is of a paint pouring on canvas I did a few weeks ago. I wanted to do a paint project again since it had been a couple of years but hesitated doing one in the new house. The only sort of “unused” space is in the spare bedroom where my office is located. And it has beige carpet, so not exactly good for artsy craftsy things.

I opted instead to put down an old shower curtain on the floor in a narrow space between the dining room and living room and then set up a card table to work on which was covered in paper. So far so good.

I mixed up paint and did the first two pourings and then realized I had a bit of paint left over along with some in the pan. Well, why not do a third one? I dipped the third canvas in the paint tray and poured on the left over paint. At some point, not exactly sure what I was doing, the canvas slipped / flipped out of my hand and landed paint side down. On the floor. Not the part covered by the shower curtain, but the floor. SPLAT!

And that is exactly why I don’t want to do these projects in the house. I salvaged the canvas and cleaned up the floor so all was not lost.

I posted pictures of all three canvases on Facebook and the one above was the most liked. And the one above is the one that fell paint side down on the floor. In other words, it was the hot mess of the three, something I didn’t share when posting the pictures.

So the one that should have been thrown away (maybe) is the one everyone liked. Go figure.

It reminded me of when I would bake something new and was not necessarily be pleased by the results. I’d take it to work and whatever I put out would gobbled up with people raving about how good it tasted. Ok, maybe they were liars but I doubt it.

Goes to show, that even if we are striving for what we perceive to be “perfect” someone else may already think it is. We spend so much time beating ourselves up and twisting into knots to do things perfectly when maybe, just maybe, “good enough” will actually be awesome.

The very fact that we are ATTEMPTING something will blow other people away because they are too afraid to possibly fail when trying something new or different.

I am trying to remind myself of this on a daily basis. It is not required that I be perfect in order to succeed as a human being. It is not required that I do something perfectly the first time, only that I learn from my mistakes and do better the next time. It is not required that everyone else love or even like whatever arts and crafts I attempt, only that it brings me joy.

Stop trying to be perfect and just be you, however messy that is.

Did ya miss me? I’ve been gone from here for over a year, not exactly sure why. I almost decided to not renew the domain name and whatever else has to be renewed yearly, but I couldn’t let go. So here I am.

Things are generally the same, something that sort of troubles me. It’s been six years (!) since the cancer scare and yet it seems like not a lot has changed. And, in case you are wondering, I sorta promised myself that I would make some changes if I managed to recover from treatment.

In some ways, the move to North Carolina was part of the “change” I wanted to make, or at least a start. Moving was on the agenda before cancer, I just made it happen sooner rather than later.

And I suppose all the artsy craftsy things I’ve been working on over the past three years could also be part of the change. Yes, it’s been three years since the move. Time just flies.

But really, the biggest disappointment is work related, as it always seems to be. When I moved here, part of the plan was to downsize (done), have a mortgage the same or less than I was paying before (done), and generally uncomplicate things (mostly done). I was looking forward to slowing down the pace of work and life in general.

At the time, I was paid on “billable hours” which meant the more I worked the more I was paid…and the less I worked, the less I was paid. I figured if I got my finances straightened out, I could theoretically work less and enjoy life more. Also at the time (as in 5 or 6 years ago), one of the “perks” of the job was to work as much or not as much as I wanted to.

And then things went sideways in September 2020….which is just a month after the last blog post. I was approached and asked to accept a supervisory position which meant I would switch to a salaried job with paid holidays and paid vacation. It was a very good financial deal for me, no doubt about that. But it meant supervising and training people again (not necessarily my fave thing to do based on some past experiences) as well as continuing to handle claims. It also meant working “regular” hours as in until 5 PM every day instead of the mostly flexible hours like before.

I took a few days to ponder the decision. Part of the reason I said “yes” was because I knew one of the managers, who happens to be a good friend, needed help. I knew if I said no, I would feel guilty every day for letting her down. I still feel ambivalent about it and there are many days I wish I had said no. I also came close to asking to give it up and go back to being a worker bee instead of a manager. Many, many days.

It has been rocky and not exactly enjoyable. We had turnover issues for a few months meaning I was basically working two jobs. The other manager went out (twice) for major surgeries so we also had to cover his work. There is now an ongoing passive aggressive war with that manager. It’s just plain exhausting.

A couple of weeks ago, I came close to threatening to resign. I hadn’t been that angry, frustrated, and stressed out in a long time and it made me remember a long-ago mantra. “Change what you can change or quit yer bitching”. Or something like that.

Shortly after that awful week, I also had a long philosophical conversation with a “work friend”. He is a few years younger than I am, but he is also gearing up to trying to retire from the law firm he works for. The gist of the conversation is that you can’t put a price on happiness. And, I pointed out that no amount of money will give a person more hours in a day.

I go back to thinking about the cancer scare and how precious life is. I will always remember that day when it hit me that I could die during or after treatment and I wouldn’t be able to do all those things I wanted to do. What if this is “it”? Not sure how I can adequately describe how that feels. It was a wake up call that I fear I have not heeded.

I also told the work friend that this is NOT the lifestyle I wanted to have. At all.

So I am trying to think about ways to change things or maybe ways to accept how things are to “quit the bitching”. Not sure what the answer is, but I know I need to keep searching for it.

I feel a great desire – more than ever before – to be creative in some way. I wonder if this urge was always buried deep inside? I think I have a stack of 5 afghans that I made in the past few months that I do not need….because I already have at least 5 afghans I made for myself. Not sure what I’ll do with those, I already gave away a bunch of other ones I made last year. I’d like to do more paint pouring and maybe learn how to work with polymer clay…if I can find a creative space to be “messy”.

Stay tuned. Maybe coming here and writing things down will help. Sure like to think it will. Thanks for listening.

This entire year has been strange so nothing should be surprising any more.

I’d like to think that I am a goal oriented person. I usually start the day by figuring out what I want to accomplish. Some days I actually succeed. It’s like I don’t know what to do if I don’t have a to do list handy.

Years ago, when I seriously started thinking about moving away from Orlando, the goal was to buy a small condo on on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Something small with less maintenance. I even toyed with a “tiny house” when it was the new thing.

If everyone thinks Florida is “paradise” then why would anyone want to leave? Right?

Of course, Florida was not my first choice of places to move to way back when. In the 1990’s, the goal was to move to Charlotte. I can’t remember why I chose Charlotte or why I felt such an urge to move there. That was before “remote work” was a possibility and it was incredibly difficult to move out of state without having either enough savings to live on (nope!) or the ability to quickly pick up and move (nope! I had a house to sell).

So when the offer came in to move to Orlando as a job relocation and promotion, I decided to go for it. The real goal was to leave Pennsylvania anyway. The Orlando move was good for me in a lot of ways but it took years to admit how much I missed fall and change of seasons and temperatures less than 90 degrees.

Why does it take so long to accept that what you THINK you want may not be what you REALLY want?

Anyway (there will be point here, I promise….) turns out staying in Florida was not what I really wanted. Multiple hurricanes convinced me of that. I also think my tolerance for heat went way down after menopause and cancer treatment. And here I am in North Carolina – where I WANTED to be all those years ago. Funny how that works.

The move to Orlando involved a promotion to a management position. I was promoted to a supervisor position in the mid 1990’s and then demoted (long story, not really my fault). I worked my butt off to once again “prove myself” and submitted my name for another supervisor position which I was grudgingly given. I think the second promotion was partly to avenge the wrongful demotion and partially because no one else really wanted the new supervisor position.

Just shy of three years after the Orlando promotion, I was laid off without warning. It was devastating personally, professionally, and financially.

There were many rocky years after that as I tried to find SOMETHING else, ANYTHING else besides insurance claims to make a living. During those weird years (trust me, it was a really weird 3 years) I ended up at a company where I was, once again, promoted to a management position.

The problem was that I didn’t really like the job and I didn’t have enough knowledge about the business to be a manager. I was faking it which sometimes works. One of the people in my group accused me of sexual harassment or discrimination or something equally as ridiculous. When I was told about it, I burst out laughing because it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. Instead of asking for my side or doing any sort of investigation, they fired me. I negotiated a voluntary resignation and happily left.

I’m not certain I have ever really shared all of this with people. It’s like a shameful part of my professional life. And it’s how I got back into being a “worker bee” instead of a “queen bee”. And I swore (silently) that I would not go back into management again.

The goal with this recent move, was to downsize and reduce debt so I could start to reduce hours (maybe) and put myself in a financial position of not having to work as hard to get by. You know, like a pre-retirement thing. It sort of worked.

As an aside here (promise I am coming to the point real soon!)…around the end of July I found out a lady in the online cancer support group passed away. She had struggled with a far more aggressive type of cancer cell for years and we pretty much knew she was coming to the end of treatment options. One day she said she was going to research hospice options and just a few days later she passed away. This weighed heavily on me all of August. There just has to be more than work, eat and sleep in life.

So with all this background, I was mentally unprepared for the discussion that happened with my manager just before Labor Day weekend. The company is set to expand by getting some new business and, you guessed it, they were looking to bring someone else on board in a supervisory position. She chose me and said she would not have offered it to anyone else in the company.

I thought about it that entire weekend and really struggled with it, mainly because of such a poor history of crappy things happening after promotions. I ended up telling her that I would like to explore it further and told her some of weird history I have with being a manager.

At that point, it was sort of a theoretical conversation since the new business was not expected for a few months. Fine by me.

Last Monday, the company owner called and made a formal offer. Financially, it made sense – a salaried position (no more time and expense craziness!) with paid days off and paid holiday (days off were unpaid before but I could take as many days off as I wanted – more or less). It was also a change which was desperately looking for.

So I accepted the offer and was told the change would take place by Friday which also threw me for a loop. Was not expecting that at all.

But all week, I felt this strange underlying anxiety that I will screw this up, too. I just can’t afford to let that happen. And I also realized that accepting more responsibility at work is not exactly what the goal was for “pre-retirement”.

If I try to articulate this to people they think I am either making things up or being weird or complaining. Not complaining at all but I am trying to figure out why I feel so ambivalent about something that should be so freaking awesome.

I’ve rambled enough for now. Thanks for listening.