The Lonliness of the Work-from-Home Blogger
Yesterday, my friend Gee and I were chatting about our respective lonliness.
Gee moved to Seattle right after Thanksgiving. It's been slow making friends.
and a lot of my other friends have either moved or are home with their children.
Making friends is kind of hard to do after the age of 30, unless you have kids. Kids seem to ease the way for meeting other people--or, more correctly, other Moms who later become your friends rather than just your kid's friend's Mom.
But when you're single (like me) or don't have children (like Gee), it's kind of tough.
We mentioned how it's tough to talk with women who have children--that it's sometimes difficult to find common ground.
Yet it's not like we don't have friends. We talked about the people we know, but sometimes it feels like there's no real *connect* point. Like something's just not registering somewhere. We mentioned to each other how we're often the ones to call people. And maybe that has to do with the fact that we're the ones who are home all day vs. going out to work and we don't mind yapping away for a bit.
It breaks the isolation.
Compounding that is the whole working from home thing. I get my stuff done for Corante pretty early in the morning, then usually go on to my own blogging. I could fuss over one blog entry, in various ways, pretty much all day--publishing and re-publishing sometimes, just to fix something here or there. I'm reading in between, too--news releases, blogs that are important to stuff I'm doing/working on. But I miss a lot of things, and I can't get over the isolated feeling sometimes.
I occasinally get email from my consulting gig. The answers to most questions are pretty easy, so they usually don't take me too long.
And my article pitching is stalled. I have a couple of pieces proofed, polished and ready to go, and a couple of great ideas, but a massive insecurity grips me and I stall out. It's not that I fear rejection notices. No, not at all. I'm the kind of person who fears acceptance. That's a whole different thing from fear of rejection.
I once pitched a piece to More magazine and they said "sure! we'll take it! fax it over!" and I choked because I didn't hve the piece written yet--I figured they'd laugh at the story idea anyway so I didn't bother to write it.
It was then that I realized I have some rather unique stuff to submit; and that I might just be successful at the one thing I always wanted for myself--to be a writer.
What the heck was I supposed to do with that?? Everyone said, and every piece of well-meaning advice told me, I was doomed to a mountain of rejection slips and here I was getting an acceptance right out the gate!
Nobody ever prints any advice on dealing with *that* possible outcome. When you're braced so hard for rejection, even kind of resigned to it, how do you shift gears and act on the "yes! we want your story!" email.
gad! I blew that one bigtime! Been stuck ever since.
The instant feedback that sometimes happens with blogging sort of meets that need for interaction--then again, it's the *virtual* world. How *real* is it? There is a sense of reality as shifting sand...that this landscape is a beach where the ocean's tide keeps going further and further out. And the sand, sifted thru my toes, almost imperceptively shifts my position...
I'm not sure I like the whole self-employment ideal. I know I should be putting together stuff for my taxes, should be figuring out if I'm doing a DBA or something....I could use an appointment with SCORE, some time to write up a press release or two.
But I'm stuck there too. I know I'm great at pitching face to face, but to write it down--that's like making a commitment. I'm good with getting jobs done in a certain time frame. But making a commitment to an image--well, it's just tough for me.
And why do all the start-your-own business books begin with "first, you need to buy office supplies..." well, duh!
Gee and I said to each other that it feels like it would be so much easier to just get some kind of job somewhere, just to get out of the house and be with people, even if the job had nothing to do with our current passions. Our current passions sometimes feel all-consuming--far too consuming. Yet the idea that we might be stuck someplace where people might talk down to us because they don't understand exactly what we do, and what we do doesn't have an exact correlation to the outside work world, or at least one that's clear cut and fits easily into a little square hole---well, it causes a bit of anxiety.
So, the way we figure, there really isn't a solution to where we're at. There's a moving forward, from day to day, but no real patter for waiting--or is that wading?--thru the ennui.
Well, tomorrow's another day. Never know what might happen.
Gee moved to Seattle right after Thanksgiving. It's been slow making friends.
and a lot of my other friends have either moved or are home with their children.
Making friends is kind of hard to do after the age of 30, unless you have kids. Kids seem to ease the way for meeting other people--or, more correctly, other Moms who later become your friends rather than just your kid's friend's Mom.
But when you're single (like me) or don't have children (like Gee), it's kind of tough.
We mentioned how it's tough to talk with women who have children--that it's sometimes difficult to find common ground.
Yet it's not like we don't have friends. We talked about the people we know, but sometimes it feels like there's no real *connect* point. Like something's just not registering somewhere. We mentioned to each other how we're often the ones to call people. And maybe that has to do with the fact that we're the ones who are home all day vs. going out to work and we don't mind yapping away for a bit.
It breaks the isolation.
Compounding that is the whole working from home thing. I get my stuff done for Corante pretty early in the morning, then usually go on to my own blogging. I could fuss over one blog entry, in various ways, pretty much all day--publishing and re-publishing sometimes, just to fix something here or there. I'm reading in between, too--news releases, blogs that are important to stuff I'm doing/working on. But I miss a lot of things, and I can't get over the isolated feeling sometimes.
I occasinally get email from my consulting gig. The answers to most questions are pretty easy, so they usually don't take me too long.
And my article pitching is stalled. I have a couple of pieces proofed, polished and ready to go, and a couple of great ideas, but a massive insecurity grips me and I stall out. It's not that I fear rejection notices. No, not at all. I'm the kind of person who fears acceptance. That's a whole different thing from fear of rejection.
I once pitched a piece to More magazine and they said "sure! we'll take it! fax it over!" and I choked because I didn't hve the piece written yet--I figured they'd laugh at the story idea anyway so I didn't bother to write it.
It was then that I realized I have some rather unique stuff to submit; and that I might just be successful at the one thing I always wanted for myself--to be a writer.
What the heck was I supposed to do with that?? Everyone said, and every piece of well-meaning advice told me, I was doomed to a mountain of rejection slips and here I was getting an acceptance right out the gate!
Nobody ever prints any advice on dealing with *that* possible outcome. When you're braced so hard for rejection, even kind of resigned to it, how do you shift gears and act on the "yes! we want your story!" email.
gad! I blew that one bigtime! Been stuck ever since.
The instant feedback that sometimes happens with blogging sort of meets that need for interaction--then again, it's the *virtual* world. How *real* is it? There is a sense of reality as shifting sand...that this landscape is a beach where the ocean's tide keeps going further and further out. And the sand, sifted thru my toes, almost imperceptively shifts my position...
I'm not sure I like the whole self-employment ideal. I know I should be putting together stuff for my taxes, should be figuring out if I'm doing a DBA or something....I could use an appointment with SCORE, some time to write up a press release or two.
But I'm stuck there too. I know I'm great at pitching face to face, but to write it down--that's like making a commitment. I'm good with getting jobs done in a certain time frame. But making a commitment to an image--well, it's just tough for me.
And why do all the start-your-own business books begin with "first, you need to buy office supplies..." well, duh!
Gee and I said to each other that it feels like it would be so much easier to just get some kind of job somewhere, just to get out of the house and be with people, even if the job had nothing to do with our current passions. Our current passions sometimes feel all-consuming--far too consuming. Yet the idea that we might be stuck someplace where people might talk down to us because they don't understand exactly what we do, and what we do doesn't have an exact correlation to the outside work world, or at least one that's clear cut and fits easily into a little square hole---well, it causes a bit of anxiety.
So, the way we figure, there really isn't a solution to where we're at. There's a moving forward, from day to day, but no real patter for waiting--or is that wading?--thru the ennui.
Well, tomorrow's another day. Never know what might happen.
posted by Tish Grier at 10:26 PM
2 Comments:
"... it's the *virtual* world. How *real* is it? There is a sense of reality as shifting sand...that this landscape is a beach where the ocean's tide keeps going further and further out."
I know what you mean about this "virtual world" of the blogosphere. It's a big part of my life, and hugely important. If I didn't have the social networking that happens in cyberspace, I'd probably be more social in "face to face".
But it's hard to find people who share common interests and values, and sometimes I feel as if I know you (who I've never met face to face) better than I know most of the people in this town.
The weirdest thing is this: if you were to pass away (heaven forbid!) I'd want to come to your funeral more than I would for some of the people I've spent face to face time with. I think this is because there's a difference between superficial talk, and the type of deep reflection we share with strangers in the blogosphere.
But then again, we humans are physical, social creatures. There's nothing like the sound of a voice, the body language and facial expressions that we get in talking to someone face to face.
So, (raising glass) here's to finding that magical mix of introspective, provocative conversation together with a REAL person you can talk to face to face.
Until then, thank god for blogs.
dammit shamash! stop making me cry!
but seriously, I could not have said this better myself. And, yes, I feel that way about the funeral thing, too...I sometimes wish it were easier to make the virtual relationships into realworld, but sometimes geography or other circumstances make it difficult.
Still, I always think it is truly a wonder that, thru these little boxes, we are able to find others whose life experiences resonate with our own. How the various forms of social media break down social isolation and can somehow facilitate social growth is a benefit I believe hasn't been fully explored yet.
The challenge, eventually, will be to find that world between the utopia of the virtual world and the harshness of the real world.
Oh, we live in curious times indeed :-)
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