The Off Seasoner:

Hello, and thank you for reading! After a long and unplanned hiatus, I am excited to be dedicating time to the project again. This blog was not easy to come back to. It meant acknowledging that I had given up on it, when I never meant to stop writing. I actually wrote the title for this blog in May, 2019, three months after my last publication. When I opened up my WordPress site for the first time since then, I had completely forgotten that I had started this publication three years ago. I had only written the title, the rest was blank.

There are a few reasons why weeks turned into months turned into years without me writing anything. One reason is that moving to the US ended up being very hard for me. I’ve been broke my entire life, almost always living paycheck to paycheck. But moving back to the US after Mexico was a whole new level of starting over. I had no money to travel, and felt like I had nothing to write about.

I was desperately focused on my career. When I moved, I was working a job that was not sustainable for me. I needed to do something about it, and this became my top priority. I was applying to multiple places a day and went through some grueling interviews on top of working full time. I was taking pubic transportation in Atlanta, a city that can be freezing, hot and humid, and have sudden downpours. A 15 to 20 minute minute drive in Atlanta could easily be a 45 minute to an hour bus ride. Basically, I was struggling. And getting my life into an order that made sense in this new place became an all consuming task.

After six months, I was able to find something that paid well and used my brand new programming skills. I was very lucky that I liked my job and the people I worked with. It is probably the first job I have ever had that I didn’t resent. I was being paid to think, to make decisions, to be creative. If you’re interested in knowing more about the job itself, I wrote a separate article about what it is that I actually do. It wasn’t the first job I’ve ever had with benefits, but it was by far the most comprehensive benefits I have ever had. It was my first time as a salaried employee, and I was making double what I had ever made before.

But with all that good news, came the constant and bone-deep fear that I was going to totally mess it up and have to go back to the way things were before. This was mixed with the ever-present dark looming shadow of imposter syndrome. I spent the next six months working nights and weekends stressing, learning, and doing extra work to make sure I was rated as a top performer.

Then, the pandemic happened. As for everyone, it was awful. But again, I was so lucky. I kept my job, and I could work from home. I got to know my neighbors. I reconnected with old friends over the phone and started telling them “I love you” a lot more. I somehow managed to avoid getting into bread making. I watched the murder of George Floyd give momentum to the Black Lives Matter movement and become the focus of the main public discourse before fading into the background once again. As things opened back up, I tried to navigate two fundamentally incompatible truths: Living a life while at the same time minimizing my risk of getting sick or getting other people sick.

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve started traveling again, I’ve started dancing again. I’m progressing in my career and creating the life I want for myself. My Maslow’s deficiency needs are all being met, and yet I couldn’t shake this feeling that there is something still missing. I reread the first post I had ever made, Why am I doing this? I wrote, “The bad news is I’m still frustrated and lacking direction.” Wherever you go there you are, as they say. My life is in such a different place than in 2018 when I wrote that first post. And despite everything I have experienced and accomplished since then, I somehow find myself with that same persistent feeling. The one telling me that despite checking off boxes of what the life I want should look like, something is missing. More than anything, this blog is to document my experiences and in the best case offer connection with someone who reads it. And when I decided to start writing again, for real this time, I wanted to offer an explanation. Why I had been gone, and why I had decided to come back.

So, even though I am as tired and busy as ever before, even if I feel messy and vulnerable doing so, I decided that having this creative outlet is worth prioritizing. It may not eliminate my existential dread, but my hope is that it will at least take the edge off.