Welp, that took a nasty turn.
The week leading up to my birthday went great: a surprise business trip to Atlanta, a great research talk, a wonderful visit with friends, a nice cake and gift from my teammates on the occasion of my tenth Google anniversary, a great card from my Mom, calls from my Mom and friends, a wonderful birthday dinner with my wife, and then an outpouring of well wishes online – half a dozen via email, and over 70 on Facebook. I was riding high. What a great birthday!
A few hours later, I was seriously considering deleting my Facebook account.
And this blog.
For context, the original title of this post was “worst birthday of my life.” The particulars are, sorry, not your business. But just so you know, no-one involved did anything wrong. It was all a simple series of misunderstandings. And everyone involved managed to fix the problem with a couple of hours of work.
But, still, a sequence of simple thank-yous online and the cascading reactions that followed on from that quickly turned a glorious day into a life-changing gut-punch. Facebook itself isn’t the problem, but deleting my Facebook account would help. But as I step back, I now find myself needing to reconsider, well, everything – not just Facebook, but whether I should have an online presence at all, and my involvement with every single job, relationship and project.
I know a few other people going through similar things right now – a close friend is rethinking their life, and it’s happened to a few bloggers I follow. I know, rationally, that artists have these impulses, I’ve had them since I was a kid, and it’s just a pointless self-destructive exercise. You feel like the particular events that have happened are the cause, but they’re really not. You’ve entered a mood, or a depression, and while it has a trigger, it’s the emotional state that feels forever.
Still, for a moment, I felt like deleting my Facebook account, smashing my computer, and loading the library up into a Dumpster.
To give you a scale of the seriousness of the problem, I am actually still thinking about getting a PODS unit and loading up much of the stuff in the library to get it out of the way and putting all my projects on hiatus while we deal with the shattered windows, the damaged floors, and all the other crap going on at the house. Now, while all that other crap is real, I said it the way I just did to exaggerate the problem. That crap has nothing to do with the gut punch, is all ongoing – the shattered window was from a ladder that fell during some work, the damaged floor behind the fridge was a discovery by my wife when she was doing cleaning.
But when the gut punch happened, it made me step back and look and everything to ask, “is this working?”
So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might put this blog on hiatus. I might declare a mulligan on some projects. I might rework some habits, make some changes, do things differently.
Or I might just draw a breath, take the gut punch, and move on – the way I did in the shower this morning, at which it all hit me again, hard enough to make me draw a breath; then I thought of the Avengers movie, that quote from Bruce Banner, the thing he just said before going green and tearing off to kick ass and take names: “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.”
Anger is an alarm, a sign of a problem. And the first thing you do with an alarm is to turn it off. Then deal with the problem.
So, this morning, when I felt the gut punch, I drew a breath, straightened up, killed the shower, got dressed, and left for work to go do my fucking job. I had an onsite interview to conduct, I have deep learning techniques to research, I’ve got to reinvent the foundations of mathematics for my latest urban fantasy novel, and I have eighteen more books to write in my main series.
Time to get cracking.
-the Centaur
Pictured: me on my birthday, Photoshopped to illustrate my state of mind when the gut punch arrived.
