I'm Back!

Greetings, everyone!

So, here we are at last, one month later. Has anything changed?

Yes and no. I do feel a little better, but a month of reflection has also made me realize that I will probably never get "well" while doing this job. That's me admitting that doing two jobs simultaneously is taking its toll on me, and it has likely been doing this gradually for years until we reached this point. The real kicker was me feeling happy and relieved after the first week off, then feeling a kind of existential dread creep upon me during the final week as we got closer to today. Frankly, the only real solution to fully recover my health would be to quit.

I won't do that. I'm in this for the long haul.

What I can do is find myself a better work/life balance, one that allows me to be productive and maintain my health simultaneously. That's easier said than done when the only time I have to work on Supermodel is in the evenings after my day job, on weekends, or when I have vacation time. This is an unavoidable truth of this situation and not something I can change. However, one thing I can avoid is to stop turning ALL my evenings, weekends, and vacations into work days. Until now, I haven't really had much of a system for this, meaning that any time I spent taking care of myself or simply relaxing was time when I felt at least partially guilty that I wasn't doing any work. Needless to say, that's not even remotely healthy.

While I haven't landed on any specific schedule yet, I will start figuring that out as I now get back into my workflow. I figure that I'll have to make sure, say, two days of the week are entirely free from work on Supermodel in the same way that two days of my week are free from my day job. They won't necessarily be the same days. I can see myself doing something like not doing any Supermodel-related work at all on Wednesday evenings and the entirety of Saturday, for example, though these are just examples. This will allow me to relax occasionally without feeling the pressure of work looming over me, and I think this will go a long way toward keeping me sane going forward.

Likewise, I should probably start taking my vacations seriously, starting with this year's summer vacation. While taking an official break like I just did is very costly (it eliminates a significant source of income for an entire month), it's probably the right thing to do from time to time. Having a few weeks every year where I don't do ANY work, neither my day job nor Supermodel, would likely make life a lot easier for me. I still have a little time to decide how to approach this, but you can probably expect me to take another break toward the middle of July. I'll get back to you on that.

This break I was just on landed at a somewhat unfortunate time due to another vacation that has been in the planning since last year. In exactly one week, I head out of the country with family for an entire week and will be unable to do any work. This is poor timing, as I just came off from a month-long break, but there's no helping it. I will make sure to put in as much work as possible (within the scope of what I discussed above) before then. You will see a progress report from me before I leave.

Having all of that out of the way, I'm looking forward to getting the first version of Supermodel out there soonish. It's been way too long, particularly for the renders. Luckily, there's not much left to do on that front before I can move over to the more enjoyable scripting and assembly, at which point things should progress rapidly. I'm making no promises about a timeline at this point (obviously), but I'm feeling hopeful.

Until next time!