shifts in life

I decided that i needed to breathe this weekend so i chose to break some habits for the weekend and spend time offline, doing physical activities, rearranging my room to better suit my personality, engaging in board games and attending a talk on the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

When i pulled my meditation card yesterday for my moving meditation, i was stunned to find a new one. I pulled the New Vision card. Doing so allowed me to process some of the confusion that i’ve been feeling lately.

My blog is a site of some of that confusion. When i began blogging in 1996, it was for a handful of people. It was password protected, it was personal. When i shifted to LiveJournal, i started layering entries; some were personal, some were open to whomever. When i switched to MT, i became a public blogger, but not one that was read or really desired to be read. I kept up interesting links, mostly for me and my friends. Some people would stumble in and i’d find new research buddies. In the last 6 months, my research has shifted from being the out-of-place-too-theoretical-mumbo-jumbo at the Media Lab to something that folks find useful. People read my half baked ideas, late night ramblings and musings and rather than joke with me about them at the next friend gathering, i get to feel the pressures and wrath of being some public digital presence.

I feel pressure to blog, pressure to be helpful to businesses and people’s careers and have self-induced so much bloody guilt for failing to meet everyone’s expectations. I truly want to be helpful… it’s in my blood. But i’m exhausted, feeling the pressure of little income, no sleep and a non-existent social life. I snap at the people that i love, have no patience for people’s self-motivated questions and feel like i’m less of a help and more of a caricature of an academic. I haven’t been able to focus on my academic work in a way that i’m proud of and i feel like i’ve been on conversation repeat for months now. It’s funny but i enjoy talking to the press these days far more than the tech creators, because the press’ naivity is still curious and fascinating, while i’m tired of the how can this make money conversation. (And besides, the press are always nice on the phone and i don’t take their misinterpretations personally.)

I’ve reached a new level of koyaanisqatsi, one that i’ve never felt before. And on Friday, i broke into a new realization, one that the card encouraged me to meditate on. I must take a step back, figure out how to be valuable not only to others, but to me. I must learn the word no (because i prefer no to learning how to flake). I must realize that time == money (thank you Ronen). I need to own my time a bit better and choose how to help wisely so that i can stop doing focus groups for cash and feeling guilty about joining friends for fancy dinners.

A friend once told me that i should think of myself as a product. If i give myself out too much, i will be seen as a valueless product. If i don’t work on evolving my knowledge, reinvigorating my skills, i will be seen as an outdated product. If i don’t work on selling myself, i will be a bankrupt product.

::sigh:: I hate having to learn anything involving balance… i’m so not good at it. But i’m so tired of feeling so out of balance, useless and spread way too thin. This week, i will focus on applying Goffman.

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5 thoughts on “shifts in life

  1. Anne

    danah – I know we’ve only met once, but I can barely imagine you without an incredible energy around you 😉 Here’s hoping you find your balance …

  2. joe

    fuck expectations… fuck pressure… let it roll off of you. You’re doing a good job, girl, and you’d better be having fun… or nothing will fall into place.

  3. scott

    i was considering constructing a machine to suck my brain out my nose, hose it off, carve out the rotten spots, and slink it back in there. kind of like that tong the egyptians used to use to scrape out the brain during mummification, but more automated and with a reverse button. chemicals are old news. soft techniques like mediation and therapy are too ambiguous. let’s get physical. mechanical. rearrange the room of our thoughts. i’ll let you try it after i test it out on marble.

  4. MichaelP

    danah – We’re all just happy to get snipets of your brain every now and again. In the meantime, here’s some Tony Hoagland for you (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/?wid=4302) –

    we’ve all tried to start a fire,
    and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
    In the meantime, she is the one today among us
    most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
    and when we see it, what we do is natural:
    we take our burned hands
    out of our pockets,
    and clap.

  5. Vicki Smith AKA CalGal

    Funny thing about balance. It doesn’t seem to be a steady state for anyone–mebbe women in particular. I know that I am constantly needing to step back and do that balancing thing over again, even though I was oh so sure I had it all taken care of.

    Part of this is related to my amazing ability to turn almost everything I am involved with into a responsibility and everyone who I have contact with into someone I must care for in some way. That is the mebbe it’s a woman thing I alluded to earlier.

    I don’t know of any quick fixes, but it seems to have gotten easier to spot the imbalances as I have gotten older and easier to get myself into a better place fairly quickly.

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