21 Dec 2024
Hello! 2024 annual report time!
The last two reports have been somewhat of a downer, but I think I’m making healthy progress on the superburnout I’ve been experiencing. I’m a classic case of burnout where I read that it takes 3-5 years to recover from burnout, and I thought “Okay but I can probably sort it out in 3-5 months, right?” Not right! This year, I’m starting to get the work-life balance thing right. And even when I don’t get it right, I get it closer to right than I have in the past.
Let’s start with talks! I gave three public talks, one private talk, one conference poster, and taught a 4-week course in a/v preservation. (Thanks to Jimi Jones for inviting me and co-teaching with me.) This is more than I’ve done in the past couple of years, but somehow it felt like less.
Next, blogging (on this website you are currently on, if you are reading this not c/o an RSS reader). I did a LOT of that. I challenged myself to post something about every format I was researching for the Library of Congress (see below), a project I was on last year and the early part of this year. There are 39 posts, and every format got a dedicated post.
Books! I published one, and then two, and then three Spanish translations (not this year, the previous two years). But! Just a few weeks ago, I did the legwork of converting all these books into ebooks and published those as well! They haven’t gotten hardly any attention because I haven’t announced them, but that is something I plan to do between this blog draft and posting this.
Code? With the research work and regular job (see next paragraph), I guess I didn’t do any web projects for fun? I think I needed a break. And software development has felt like more of a bummer this year, less joyful. Maybe next year it’ll come back to me.
Job! I was looking for a job and then I found a job. I started working at NPR. Their RAD team (that’s research, archives, and data strategy) has one full-time software developer, and that role opened up and I was able to grab it. It’s a really good fit for me because I LOVE working with archivists (or info specialists, or librarians, or however each person self-identifies), I like feeling like I’m in control of my own destiny and the destiny of the archives, and it’s pretty laid-back (no on-call, no sales calls, no micromanagement, no complete-void-of-management, et al). I get to work on things that feel both important and interesting to me. My team is amazing – not a bad one in the bunch. Not that it’s all roses all the time; it’s still a job and it comes with all the usual pitfalls of a job, but it finally feels like I’m somewhere sustainable and safe long-term, which has been incredibly rare for me. It’s definitely increased my ability to CHILL OUT and FEEL SAFE, substantially.
Other than one full-time job, I wrapped up that amazing Library of Congress project with Myriad early this year; it really was such an honor to work on researching file formats. I also did a small software/technology project for EAI around increasing access to their records.
I went to an in-person conference for the first time since the pandemic, and it was a really nice experience (at least, 95% of it). I had a lot of people come up to me and thank me for something I did that helped them in the past, either emailing me to ask for help (which I usually can’t even give! but I do my best!), guest lecturing at a class, teaching a class, or a resource/thing I made that helped indirectly. This made me feel really great! Especially because I spend so much time in my head feeling not-good about these things. I want to better move into 2025 with the mindset that this is the kind of work that matters and is worth doing, and being able to separate that from cash/prestige/FOMO/jealousy/capitalism/fear cycle.
I was catching up with a friend of mine and he was apologizing for spending a long time in what he describes as ‘maintenance mode,’ which is where you can only see and act upon what is immediately necessary in front of you, and you don’t really have the capacity to engage with friends or do creative things, even though you want to do these things. This really summarized how I feel so often. It’s not that things are as dire as a survival mode, but it’s not exactly thriving, either. You aren’t unhappy, but you know you can feel better, but trying to get there feels exhausting.
Also, I switched from Lexapro to Prozac. Listen, if you suffer from PMDD, I cannot recommend this highly enough. I have been having increasingly difficult two-week intervals where I would feel scarily low, and Prozac sorted that right out. Anxiety is still a WIP, but that’s okay. The time-based depression periods were really scary. I also was finally diagnosed with PCOS! Which isn’t surprising to me, and it doesn’t change much because it’s not a solvable condition, but it does make me feel a lot more justified in my general lived experience that had otherwise been completely dismissed by doctors for my whole life. It also has helped me judge myself against a scale more reasonable than the intangible “perfect.”
This is my third-ish year going into a buying ban, and I lasted until around September, I think. I’m going to start again in 2024 and see how long I can go, since my stock has inevitably become replenished. I also had a “tariffs?” panic moment and overstocked on things that could hypothetically increase drastically in price or just become unavailable, which was a bit silly. The whole thing is sort of like a game. Especially around realizing how long something like a blush or sunscreen or lipstain lasts – almost forever! But fully finishing one feels like a real accomplishment in a world where I have no control over things that impact my ability to live my life. Relatedly, I started tracking my closet with Indyx, where I have a reduced capsule of 50 items (clothes, shoes, bags, but not leggings, sleep/workout clothes, etc.) and I’m setting up some guidelines/challenges around that (although I’ve been pretty flexible with these rules). Mostly I’ve been trying to come up with guidelines that help me make limited and smarter choices around clothing, think about how pieces interact with each other in a wardrobe, create consistency, and buy less.
In classic new-years-resolution form, I did ~3 month-long no-drinking stints, which was good practice to lean more into that in 2025.
Regular work will continue at pace. There are a LOT of things I’m excited about doing at work, but they are all complex and challenging and slow-moving and require a lot of collaboration. I’m set to give two different workshops on different topics in the Spring. I may teach a class again in the Fall, but it’s too early to tell. I feel back in a healthy groove with this kind of thing, after needing a break.
Books, I have some plans for books. I alluded to writing something longform in 2023 and I am hoping it will make it into production in 2025, along with some other slowwwww-moving plans in motion with yet-to-be-announced-but-confirmed authors and topics. In between, though, I am helping my mom publish some books! So that’s a nice little side-quest that will take up a good amount of time in the first quarter-and-a-half of the year.
This upcoming year feels inevitably dire, and I’ve been working through all of that and all of the issues I have in my head about all sorts of different things, like misdirected ways in which I determine my self-worth, never feeling like enough, gaps between how I perceive myself and how I seem to be perceived, my terse relationship with the overlapping subjects of money and survival and suffering, fears around communication, that kind of stuff. I feel like I have been making a lot of progress on things I struggle with, mentally, but have been backpedaling in the last couple of weeks due to situations both large/abstract and immediate/close. Progress is not linear!!
I’ve been leaning on tarot decks as a way to force myself to be reflective about hard things, and it consistently keeps calling me a workaholic who needs to focus on enjoying life and not overworking out of fear for survival. Each time, I sigh and say “I KNOW, I KNOW,” but do I know? Because I’m clearly not listening. In 2025 I want to keep utilizing this tool (and my beloved i-ching) to keep reiterating these opportunities for self-reflection until I manage to fully grasp lessons I need to not just learn, but internalize.
I’ve been trying to wrap up this post for a while, and I keep typing out goals or ambitions and then self-editing, so I think that means I’ve reached the conclusion of what I want to comment on publicly! If you read all of this, thank you for reading!