As you might imagine, finding a job when you don't have one tends to be a priority. While there is little risk coupled with urgency in my case (beyond perhaps the need to have health insurance), I do like to have regular income because it's the way I provide for my darling family and it enables us to have adventures together. So weekdays start with an hour or two of following up on leads, setting up conversations and seeing if there's anything new to consider. This routine doesn't really go much beyond 9 a.m., so I have a whole lot of free time on my hands.
I've been feeling some extraordinary anxiety the last week or so, and I thought it was the lack of work. Now that I'm really taking the time to explore that anxiety, I realize now that the anxiety is tied to my desire to fully use that free time for something creative. I just don't know what that creative thing is, or how to start it. How screwed up is that? Most of the time, most of us would say something like, "If I only had more time to..." Now I actually have that time, and I have no idea how I would finish that sentence.
Now, I know that software is still a creative endeavor to an extent, but as my occupation, there is typically a directive or problem to address, so starting isn't all that difficult. In my TV days, doing far more creative work, I had the unusual opportunity to figure out what my community needed, and then do it, so even then there was some level of directive to get me started. When you step away from that and look for ways to express creativity purely for pleasure, there is no directive.
I suppose it helps to talk about the things that I think I would like to do. I want to write two screenplays, a short and something feature length. I have a lot of ideas for the longer thing (and I'm actively researching one idea), but nothing comes to mind for something shorter. I want to write something short and make it, as an exercise to make the longer thing "better." I want to make something out of wood. I was thinking an arcade cabinet, cocktail table style, would be fun. I have two software projects, the first being the conversion of CoasterBuzz to .Net Core, which is colossally boring, and I'd like to take another stab at my dashboarding idea, that I built a prototype of years ago. Heck, I'd like to build that quilting community over again with fresh eyes. But all of that coding stuff, I think might feel too much like work.
That's where my head is at. Anxiety is much less impactful when you understand it. Now, I wonder what I need to start...
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