Consume Your Craft

*Wave* Hi, there. It’s me. So after 8 long months of radio silence, where do I even begin?

Honestly I’ve been wrestling with a significant case of burnout, which is really very common in my industry. However mine also happened to be fueled by this months-long website migration project I’ve been on at work at least since April. We had to move around 1,800 websites from one system to another. It sounds easy, but it’s not really pick up said assets from point A and move to point B. No, no. It was more pick up from point A, then completely rebuild it on point B. Oh and it can’t look exactly the same as it did when it was at point A.

A project like this normally would’ve taken a couple years, but in our world? 8 months. There were some clients who did not like this one bit and never failed to let us know, whether it be by writing us the most hateful, deriding emails or calling us names over the phone. There were some days where all I could do was cry instead of make dinner.

I’ve always prided myself in having thick skin. Years of art classes, journalism classes, advertising classes, and just generally living and breathing agency life for 15 years has given me the ability to develop it. But this time it was really put to the test.

I began to have a mid-life crisis about my career choice. Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Is this where I want to be? Do I really want to be hated and bullied and degraded for the rest of my career. Maybe I need something more creative, more enjoyable rather than something that dragged me through the mud every goddamn day.

I believe I have an entrepreneurial spirit. Somewhere deep inside me there’s someone that wants to go out and do her own thing, to be independent and try and succeed on her own. But doing what? I don’t know yet. And “yet” is the operative word.

But right now, my craft is web development, specifically in WordPress. I’ve had a long history with it. I know it well enough to build websites on it, break websites on it, fix websites on it, and make websites on it better. I really need to focus on that.

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