Last fall, not too long after my birthday, my mother in law offered me this ring.
That’s a real onyx.
I love silver and I like interesting rings, so of course I said ‘yes!’
The thing is, that this ring is what’s called a pillbox ring, or a poison ring, a piece of jewellery notoriously featured in period mystery stories.
I wondered whether she was trying to tell me something … ?
I’m talking about my work life here, and before I became a trainer, I can honestly say that work was hell.
Before I go any further, I just want to establish one fact: I disagree with the whole concept of work as something that we have to do to earn money, pay bills, and be a ‘productive member of society.’ I have no problem with work itself. I garden; I help my spouse renovate the house; I’m writing a novel. That’s all hard work and I don’t shy away from it. I just don’t like the necessity of selling the better part of my life so I can live the rest of it the way I want. It’s a devil’s bargain.
When I was young, it was retail, after school and on weekends. In university, it was seasonal, contract jobs. Now I can’t say that I hated all the jobs that I had. I enjoyed working in the library, working as a student counsellor, helping students write resumes and find job placements, I enjoyed the pet stores I worked in, and the veterinary clinic. Retail and food service, not so much. Being a security guard was the worst, despite the canine companion.
I enjoyed some of the things I got to do, like designing Web pages (in the old type-it-out-in-Wordpad days) and desktop publishing. I liked filming and editing horse shows. I was good at teaching, but aside from the subject matter, I wouldn’t say I enjoyed the rest of it.
The problem was that until I started working for my current employer in 2001, all of my jobs were short-term, with no future. I was always worried where my next pay cheque would come from. Plans were out of the question. I ended up on Employment Insurance. Twice.
So I got my first real job … in a call centre. Six and a half years and varied, frantic applications for internal job postings later, I became an adjudicator. While a vast improvement over my previous position, it was still a job, something I did to pay the bills. A year and a half later, I was successful in another competition and obtained my current job.
I started off monitoring new trainees but soon had my first experience as a corporate trainer. I liked it! I immersed myself in my job and tried to do my very best. Soon, I was rewarded with further opportunities for certification, new toys with which to deliver training (SMART Board) and the means of developing a collaborative work platform for my virtual team (SharePoint).
From there, I dove into the world of free Webinars on various aspects of learning, course design, and training delivery; I started writing courses, creating videos, and designing in SharePoint. I became a social learner, a mutant learner, and, as I’ve dubbed myself, a learning mutt. It was my day-job that brought me to the world of social media, platform-building, and this blog.
I’m now well on my way to becoming a certified trainer through my employer’s program, I’ve taken courses on curriculum design and project management. I’m about to become one of a group of trainers who will be delivering a newly developed business writing course.
I’m having as much fun now as I did in university and everything that I’m learning feeds my creative soul.
I still don’t like working, but if I didn’t have to work, I might still choose to be a trainer and course designer.
Go figure …
Have you found, or lucked into, a job you like? Are you still searching? Share your journey!
When I was a wee thing, my parents enrolled me in ballet classes. I think it was because I was such a spirited and energetic girl 🙂
All went well until the first recital. We were performing “Three Blind Mice.”
I kind of looked like this:
Young Ballerinas, Casa de Cultura, Havana (Photo credit: travfotos)
I tried to find my old photo in the big box of them I have. I searched Mom’s collection too, but no luck. It’ll do …
I was so excited I think I went ballistic, though I honestly don’t remember the specifics. The instructor had to discipline me, and unfortunately had to do so in front of everyone. I went from whirling like a dervish to hugging my knees in the corner crying in about two seconds flat.
We were about to go on stage and this wouldn’t do. Her pep talk wasn’t inspiring, but it straightened me out enough to perform. After the big night, I told my parents that I didn’t want to dance anymore.
I did do a little bit more later on. One of the local gymnastics clubs was offering after school classes and I did one or two dance classes that way and about four or five gymnastics classes. I always liked gymnastics better anyway.
The thing was, I learned a couple of negative things from that first creative challenge:
Avoidance of conflict and embarrassment crop up quite a bit in my creative life. Heck though, I was three at the time. How in the world was I supposed to know how to handle it?
So why court embarrassment again now, all these years later? Because when you’re creative (and I think everyone is), you’re usually creative in a whole whack of different ways. This was just the first way that I manifested my creativity. I also liked to draw, build things, sing, and I was a fantastic pretender …
So a tip for people who might think they’re “blocked” in whatever creative endeavor they’re currently engaged in: exercise your creativity differently for a while. It doesn’t have to be anything spectacular; singing in the shower will do. Or maybe you could dance like a maniac when no one’s around, go see a play or a concert, start a journal, if you’ve never tried, check out an open mic night at a local cafe, or karaoke if you dare, buy a sketch pad from your local grocery or pharmacy and get with the cartoons.
You may find that refocusing your creative mind (or your creative body) will make you wonder why you thought you were blocked in the first place.
What alternate modes of creativity do you engage in? What do you want to try that you’ve never tried before? Was there a time in your life when you felt shut down? What lessons did you learn from that and how did that experience shape you?
God help you if you are a phoenix / and you dare to rise up from the ash …
~~Ani Difranco, 32 Flavors
Rise Of The Phoenix (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
On Sunday, February 26, 2012, my dear blog labbydog.ca was hacked, necessitating, in the opinion of the hosting service on which she lived, a complete deletion of all materials. Even if I’d have been savvy enough to back up, those files would also have been suspect and deleted. It was a dark day.
It was a dark week, truthfully. Labbydog.ca was also the mail server for me, my husband Phil, and my mom. It took a couple of days just to get everything re-established after the wipe. Phil is a computer genius though, or as a friend of ours once said, an ass in jeans (a fine one, admittedly), and email was restored in short order.
I had some of my materials saved as Word .docx files, but by no means all of them. How to rebuild? More importantly, where to rebuild? I wasn’t about to trust my next effort to the same hosting service, who essentially blamed me and my importation of add-ons and plug-ins (A.K.A. “scripts”), intended to protect my blog, for its very destruction. I investigated each one and only downloaded them after the recommendation of an online guru. So what was I going to do?
I considered my options. Both blogger and WordPress allow the importation of domains, and thanks to Robert Lee Brewer’s excellent advice, I had purchased melaniemarttila.ca in January. It was my intent to move my blog to the new domain in February or March in any event, which is why I (oh-so-foolishly) hadn’t backed labbydog.ca up.
Robert, you saved my virtual ass, and my online sanity. Thank you. There are no words.
I mucked around with blogger for a day or two, but I really didn’t want to start entirely from scratch. I liked WordPress, was comfortable with the admin portal and the intuitive interface. So I started a new blog on WordPress, transferred my domain, mapped it, and prepared to wade back into the blogging fray.
I was seriously depressed, but the disease is an old frenemy, and I know how to deal with him. The bottom line is that I can’t worry about things I have no control over. I have to focus on the things I can affect in a positive way.
Depression and writing:
People have asked me since the dreadful day, “Why?” Why indeed would anyone want to hack my innocuous wee blog? I wasn’t particularly controversial. I didn’t have a lot of followers. It’s not like they were taking down some corporate mogul, or politician, or even a celebrity. So yeah, I’d like an answer to that one too. Why?
You’ll have to track down the hacker and ask his or her maliciousness yourselves. Quite likely, the culprit is not even a person, but some hack-bot, a lackey bit of code sent out to do its vile master’s bidding. So why?
The short answer is: because she or he could.
Hacking, trolling, griefing, phishing, propagating malware, and other acts of online evil are all about bullying and the abuse of power. You deal with it the same way you deal with any other kind of abuse, you speak up, share your story, and hope to hell you save someone else by your sad example.
I will share Wil Wheaton’s online motto here: Don’t be a dick!
Labbydog.ca 2.0 = Writerly Goodness on melaniemarttila.ca.
From here on out, I’m saving everything I post in Word. Once I have Writerly Goodness up and running, I will institute a back up routine.
When was the last time you backed up your blog, novel, training course design, or insert anything you’ve spent a lot of hours doing here? Don’t procrastinate any further: save your work. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait …
[W]e can rebuild [her]. We have the technology … Better than [s]he was before. Better, stronger, faster.
~~The Six Million Dollar Man, 1974
So yeah, I’m going to go back to the drawing board. I’m going to repost as much as I can remember of what I used to have on labbydog.ca, but I’m going to do it better (I hope). For example, ‘My history as a so-called writer’ isn’t just going to be self-serving or shamefully confessional. I’m going to try to put in some meat for the writerly. I’m going to try to answer the questions: why should I care, and what’s in it for me? I’m hoping for some serious takeaway action.
A weekly schedule should give the project some structure: different categories on different days.
I’m trying to learn/do/create/be better. And I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know how I’m doing.
The takeaway here: in writing, as in everything, if you love what you’re doing, you can’t give up. You won’t be able to. Sometimes, though, you might need a little help.
Some curation, and maybe inspiration:
What have you had to overcome to do what you’re passionate about? Ever felt like a phoenix rising from the ash?
Comment, like, share, subscribe! You know you want to 😉
