I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Sunday Planning, I plan for the week ahead.
Over the last couple days, I felt some serious anxiety about my financial situation. It was unpleasant and it made me want to sprint into action, even though my worries are about the long term, not the short.
I’m considering whether I should plan to return to employment in the spring, after taking the winter off to complete my memoir project and hit the slopes as much as I can.
More appealing would be to get income going on my own, not taking a job. But I’ve yet to make any headway in that direction, since starting my reinvention project in April of 2024, and then continuing it here as the 1000-day project.
Chatting with ChatGPT, I came up with a plan to spend the next six months focused on building a sustainable creative business based on my writing and painting, with Things Men Gave Me as its centerpiece.
But that’s anxiety-producing in its own way. I told Chat I needed steps to take this week that I can focus on rather than getting too far ahead of myself.
Here’s what we came up with together:
- Publish Elijah Gave Me: An Aquamarine Ring from Tiffany + I Wanted That Ring.
- Send photo/bio to Pam for WCACO artist bio card.
- Write AI-newsletter piece on using ChatGPT to critique paintings + promote on LinkedIn.
- Research and list potential Substack cross-promotion partners.
- Directly share TMGM with 2–3 people and invite them to pass it along.
As I chatted further, though, I realized that planning for something in six months isn’t entirely anxiety producing. And the something I want to plan for is a solo show of the TMGM paintings. I’ll have eight to twelve paintings ready, and plan to exhibit them with excerpts from the essays. I’ll have a chapbook for sale, a limited edition pamphlet with the essays and paintings.
I might reach out to a couple galleries/exhibition spaces this week to see about availability for next February or March. I’d like to plan the show for ski season, since so many of the essays including skiing as a theme and subject.
Yesterday I pulled a Tarot card to try to inspire myself when I was feeling burnt out and bored. I pulled Judgment, which I initially thought was a really boring card. More boredom! But my Tarot book Tarot for Change suggested it means a call to adventure or resurrection, because it is about remembering who you are and forgetting who you are not.
Maybe I need to remember that I am a creative, a writer, a painter. I could go back to work as a data scientist, but that would not be living in authenticity and alignment.
The whole point of giving myself 1000 days to reinvent myself was that reinventions take longer than a few months, or even a year.
I shouldn’t short-circuit it by going back to technology work in six months.