Last night was a good hike. though. Out in the National Forest, chasing up and down fire access trails.
The last month has been Mercury retrograde: a good time for reflection and self awareness, a bad time for big decisions, actions, or knowing what the fuck is going on in your own head. I want to write about it because it felt like there was such an arc to it. I've been thinking a lot about my career, and where I fit in with my work., what my role is, how I piece into everything.
I was in the dog park early in, and had a conversation with a guy I've talked to there before. I had pulled the Magician that day, and he felt like some manifestation of the elements of the card. He was a professor of Arabic and a lit PhD, so we were chatting about translation poetry and our publications, dishing the way you do when you unexpectedly meet someone in your field. Midway through, he stopped, laughed, and said something like "wait, but now you're in software?"
A lot of the month I spent walking those lines as I put together this tech writing/software industry presentation for some JMU writing students. It felt like the perfect culmination of the question and my uncertainty about my identity. Doing the thing I used to do to describe the thing I now do to a bunch of college kids studying what I used to study? It was a weird, full circle.
At the same time, I struggle a lot with the magician card. When I pull it, immediately I assign it to someone else in my day instead of acknowledging my own ability to be a shapeshifter, to be charming, attractive, and sleek and capable. I've worked in software/tech writing almost ten years now, but I still have so much impostor syndrome. The last two weeks of work I've been so anxious about what I'm doing. I woke up having panic attacks about it during this week. But it's not really a big deal, and I've got it. How much longer am I going to have this narrative about myself?
