110125_first day

It's the first day of November, and I'm just coming out of (probably) the worst October of my 20-something years of life.

It's been about 6 weeks since I ran my first half-marathon on September 14th, and IT band syndrome decided to kick in while my passion for running was at its peak, which forced me into no-running mode, leading to gloomy sadness. Pair that with late, 8 AM sunrises and chronic burnout symptoms I've been living with for the past 5-ish months, and boom:

I had the perfect recipe for a mental disaster.

The problem with this was that:

1. I hated the current state of my life with a passion, and
2. It drew me to to cheap thrills like doom scrolling and emotional eating, (which, obviously, is never the solution. All I was doing was numbing the pain) and
3. seeing myself doing such things made me feel worse about myself that I ironically did even more of #2.

Now, to be fair to myself (and I can't dive too much into detail here), a lot of the solutions to the issues that led to the chronic burnout, doom scrolling, and emotional eating were out of my hands. There wasn't really anything I could do, which even made it worse.

But at this point, I was

sick of learning,
sick of seeing myself sick of learning,
and sick of seeing myself doom-scrolling after work
(and more doom-scrolling to numb the pain from doom-scrolling).

I'm just rambling, but to get to the real point here:

At the very least, I wanted to do something that would make me feel less like a trashy person. I decided to throw my perfectionist ego out the door and write a post here every day for the month of November – and HUGE disclaimer, it didn't have to be tech related. I told myself that a "post" could even just be a single sentence saying "I felt like sh*t today!" because the whole point was to come in here, write something, and hit the "Publish" button.

So here's to The November Project (what a name) where, (hopefully) by the end of this month, I'll have 30 consecutive posts for each day.

Plus, November is my birthday month so I think it lines up pretty well.

Not gonna lie, no one really reads my blog posts anyway if they are not tech-related, so might as well just keep it raw.

See you tomorrow,
Ael