The 2022 Groundhog Day Resolutions picked up where 2021 left off: focus on professional development (software), balancing my sense of personal well-being with challenging personal issues (gender identity and transition, new ADHD and ASD diagnoses) and the need to develop future income streams that did not depend on freelance gigging.
In hindsight, my starting goals in 2022 were organized around five pillars:
- Commit to the software developer freelance role that I've fallen into, as it is the main driver of income and my main responsibility.
- Elevate the coworking discord to a primary goal, as this community is really the kind of place I've always wanted to be a part of. It's more than just a side thing at this point...it IS the point.
- Produce more shareable content which would drive future engagement with my ideas, which creates the opportunity for new income streams.
- Improve the tools I use to explore, analyze, develop, and share my ideas with the world.
- Express my personal identity and express this publicly, while also dealing with frustrations that put me into a negative mood.
Largely these goals remained consistent through the year, but the manner with which I thought of them as simply "context for productively starting and finishing tasks" has evolved into a more nuanced acceptance of my so-called cognitive "impairments" and finding the conviction to mitigate them in my own way.
Here's the highlights of what happened this year:
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The main goal achieved was the new website here at
dsriseah.com. I'm really happy to have an all-in-one WRITE-ORGANIZE-SHARE website system...it's SO MUCH BETTER than the clunky Wordpress site I have at davidseah.com. The current system is based on a static site generator called Eleventy. While visually the site is still pretty rough, what's great is that I can conceptualize, think, outline, and publish as a continuous flow of ideas in an "open notebook" format. As a bonus, the new site uses the same Javascript software stack as my freelance work so I'm getting a two-for-one bonus: improving my software development skill while making my IDEAL environment for thinking and sharing. I'm pretty excited about the possibilities. -
I made considerable progress in handling the frustrations I have been feeling with regards to work, chores, and interpersonal relations. The two key insights were that blame is the discharge of anger and accepting that I have impairments due to ADHD and ASD traits. I wrote extensively about these subjects in the journal and knowledge base under tropes and quirks.
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In July I finally wrapped-up a long-running freelance project, and declared myself to be on sabbatical where I could rethink my priorities with life. It's been a while since I've had so much time to myself, and it took me a while to remember how to work on my own stuff again. I've been living off of my savings since July, and I think I'll have new project work coming in the Spring of 2023. In this time I have developed a lot of new models of understanding, particularly with regards to my current productivity system as it relates to ADHD/ASD. Over the past 15 years I've tried a lot of things for Groundhog Day Resolutions, and I've picked the techniques from the past that most help mitigate those traits. This is another kind of acceptance that took a lot of effort to emotionally process; much of October and November were completely taken up by this.
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I identified sources of frustration being related to compromise in the quality of my work as well as the lack of control I have when I am not the one negotiating conditions of delivery. This is closely related to the ADHD/ASD traits I've identified, and really reinforced the desire to develop those alternate income streams. I want to get out of freelancing, or find a way to make the freelancing more of a community similarly-skilled human-centered conversational developers who enjoy getting into the details of what makes something excellent.
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I have become more comfortable with my transgender non-binary identity, and am expressing this more in public. I'm not comfortable saying that I'm a woman (that is such a complicated term) and I don't want to erase my past under "David Seah" as a point of transparency. At the moment, I've made a distinction between my personal sense of gender and social expression. The problem I'd like to avoid is being singled-out and murdered by some crazy person, and at the same time I am physically shaped in the masculine form. This is hugely depressing and I have to cope with it dozens of times every day, I think the major victory is acceptance and becoming more comfortable expressing myself as a non-binary transfem queer person rather than trying to fit to the male mold that physically defines me in the eyes of society.
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By the end of the year, I had a curious thought: for all my focus on being a better designer and product creator, am I really a kind of writer that is trying to uncover something that feels "true" or at least "good"?
That's it! You can read the my review notes for more details if you really want them.
REFERENCE DIAGRAM
I made an "outline of everything" in Whimsical to get my head around the year: