Every day when I wake up I tell myself this will be the day.

This will be the day I am able to stop putting nearly all of my energy into work and then family and then home.

I told myself I would be able to write today.

I will give myself time to write.

And I didn't. It's nine fifteen PM now and there's no way I'm going to be able to write anything of meaning.

Yet it seemed important that I show up to try. I wanted to prove to myself that I can, in fact, still occasionally do the thing for myself that I set out this morning to do for myself and kept getting de-prioritized in my head in favor of other activities.

Today other activities included weight lifting and vacuuming the basement and completing the sorting of the million cables that I own into boxes so I can actually find and use shit I bought instead of buying a replacement cable simply because I can't find the thing I own.

My brain says: Cable sorting is practical. There's an immediate payoff. Do it.

And then I don't write. And I become angry at myself for not writing.

Here's a short list of things I thought I ought to write about but didn't.

  • Tom Scryleus' Youtube channel and the idea he continually pushes to "work for yourself" and "start a business" so you don't have to work.
  • The fact that I am worth about 3 million USD if you include home equity and about 2.3 if you do not.
  • I could afford to not work at all if I made even a halfway decent amount of money annually. I still have a mortgage. I still need health care. I am still at least 13 years away from sniffing social security. And so on.
  • But I could do it. I'd have to choose a path to try to make money.
  • I work so much and so hard for my job now that it'd be a lot better for me if I turned this skillset into consulting of some sort. AI has empowered me to be able to do all sorts of things I could not handle before.
  • I do not call my mother enough
  • I have not scheduled my CAC scan or my shoulder surgery, which is shit on the List of Things to To that also gets deprioritized during the day. There are many, many other things that got pushed down.

But the issue here is that I want to write. I have a firm belief that I should be writing. That maybe this is the path out of work hell – out of I'm too fucking busy shitstorm hell that swirls seemingly always in my head.

I will write tomorrow. I will write right after the lady comes in the blood van to take three vials of my blood to send to a lab to do an autoimmune panel which will then send that result to the IVF clinic so that my wife and I can take the next step forward in our IVF journey from hell that never seems to end.

No scratch that I will need to go running right after the blood draw because I will need the energy from running to power me through the meeting at work where I am expected to discuss all of my open issues and bugs, at 10 AM in the morning, and then the meeting where I must discuss the Big Bug, the integration bug that is currently open and live in production and might threaten to eat my whole day.

And after that? I need to schedule the shoulder surgery, the CAC scan, think about making dinner for my wife, think about taking my dog out for a walk, think about calling my mom and scheduling a visit with my good friend Ray who has been waiting for a response from me for weeks.

This is all assuming nothing else comes up tomorrow that's new, which is of course absurd, lots of new things will come up tomorrow too.

So when do I write?

Never, apparently. I cannot work on my projects and initiatives without taking time away from other obligations – care of family, care of house.

I want the time to come out of work but it is just eating me up.

I love the idea that I can do something else, but the reality is that even trying such a thing would radically upend my life – I'd have to stop working on IVF, my personal health, my relationships.

It won't stop, these thoughts. The impossibility of the situation.

It's not as though I'm miserable or grossly unhappy. I have energy and power through my days.

The problem is that I so often feel empty and dissatisfied, and I think a big part of the reason for that emptiness is that I am seemingly not allowed to focus on myself for any length of time longer than perhaps twenty minutes a day.

Which is about as long as it took me to write this pointless entry.