The last month of working on making this website a reality has been amazing. It’s taken me everywhere from frustrated to elated. And, now that the project has reached it’s first stage of completion, I’m filled with such a sense of purpose, and urgency, and awe that I’ve made it this far. I’ve learned so much along the way. I’ve built up some of my technical skills, but also I’ve learned a bit more about my own workflow, and how to pace myself. It can be hard to reign in my grand ideas and sweeping plans; they can be so inspiring and consuming. But since shifting over to looking at short term goals and deadlines, I’ve gotten better at figuring out how much I can actually get done in a week, in a day. It’s more in some things, and far far less in others than I originally thought.
Most importantly, I’ve learned to stop trying to count on “getting on a roll” (or into a “flow state” as my husband calls it) when I make my time estimates. I’m fairly good at getting myself into a headspace where I /can/ get on a roll, so for the first couple of weeks I did count on it. But pretty quickly the pressure of knowing that I /had/ to get on a roll to meet my self-made deadlines was making it harder to focus and get into that pace. So for this past two weeks, I’ve set smaller deadlines for myself, while at the same time loosely outlining what will come next if I finish early. So far it’s working much better and I’m getting what I intend to do done at that quicker pace again.
I really want to keep tweaking the website layout, fonts, etc, until I can get it just perfect. But for now I’m calling it 1.0 and stepping away from the design of it for a while. I have so many other projects that I need to work on, and I need to shift my focus on to them now that this page is working. The big ones are that I’m trying to get back into the habit of drawing everyday, and Working on the skills I need to make it into the Terradata training program that my papa pointed out to me.
It’s strange to be trying to expand myself out in two seemingly opposite directions. And they are very different, my art, and all these programming languages I’m exposing myself to, and these theories behind the structure of databases, yet they all feel right to me. There’s this intersection between all of them, that I’m in love with. Making things, and making them work, brings with it this feeling of power and elation for me. And more and more I’m discovering that it doesn’t matter which of my skills I use to get there, what matters to me is that I get there. The struggle of learning, of practicing, of putting things together and tearing them apart when they don’t work only to find a way to make it work, that is the part of all this that I love. That is what I want to keep doing with my life. And that’s why I’ve never been satisfied with the retail jobs I’ve had. There was no challenge, no growth, no making, no projects.
Let me make things.
