We’re having out Paragon meeting tonight, Wednesday, instead of the usual Thursday, and it is amusing how much that throws me off.

It’s not sudden. I have known about it for a week. Technically. In fact, I more or less forgot about it until yesterday.

But the point is, it’s not a sudden change. And it’s a change I have made before, at least a half dozen times.

But it throws me off every single time.

Not in a huge way, but in a large way. It’s like suddenly I have to rebalance the stresses on a skycraper that just lost its major load bearing wall.

That skyscraper, in this metaphor, being my usual weekly routine.

Look, they can’t all be gems.

So why does something like this throw me off so badly? Why does any sort of alteration of my usual routine upset me and make me anxious? Why do I feel so compelled to do things in threes that I am making this dumb joke just so there will be a third question?

I think it boils down to self-soothing via hyperfamiliarity. I have spoken (written, whatever) before how how having a life in which nothing much changes is a way of self-medicating against anxiety.

The hyper-familiar, in this case, is the least stimulating. By staying in my room and spending most of my time on this computer, I create a low physical stimulus, high mental stimulus environment which therefore cannot stimulate my anxiety.

As solutions go, it’s crude and maladaptive, kind of like keeping yourself from getting a runny nose from your hayfever by living in an oxygen tent for the rest of your life.

It works, but it sacrifices way too much to pass a cost/benefit analysis.

The most sensible way to overcome this crippling dependency on low stimulus environments for mood stability is to pursue a regimen of gradual desensitization. Expose myself to increasingly physically stimulating environments so that I can adapt to them over time and thus create a situation where I can handle the real world better.

But that horse doesn’t make it out of the gate. Doing that kind of thing would take the exact kind of focus and discipline that I lack. I would need to both overcome the blinding chaos inside me that tears apart any kind of structure and focus inside me AND somehow break the lock my anti-action bias poses in order to do that.

It’s just not within reach yet.

And that’s the thing with me. I make all kinds of plans that “should” work but are actually less than worthless because they don’t take into account my lack of energy, ambition, focus, and drive.

They fail at step one because I am just not going to be executing any ambitious long term plans any time soon. And the bar for “ambitious” is set very low.

So I continue to float through life, full of potential and with enormous talent and ability but without the strength of spirit to pick a thing and commit to it and do it.

I am just not stable enough for that.

Oh well. It’s story time. Here’s the blurb from the client :

“The Micromanager – I recently worked with a client who insisted on emailing 3 to 5 times a day simply to say, “Are you making progress”. Of course, each time the email comes in, they expect an instant response. This would require a complete stopage of work each time the “You’ve Got Mail notice goes off. Solution, we work with our clients in advance to establish specific lines of communication and deadlines. We go the extra mile to teach them HOW to delegate and how to work with a VA team. This is a new experience for many and they usually don’t know what they don’t know.”

Hmmmm. I think I get the basic idea.

Hello again, and welcome to It’s A Soloprenuer Life, where I share my experiences of being a solopreneur in the digital age.

Here at Virtual A-Team, we encourage our clients to take an active interest in the work we are doing for them. However, occasionally you get a client whose interest is a little TOO active. You know what I mean?

We’ve all been there. You get a client who emails you three to five times a day to ask if you’re making any progress.

Yes we are, and we’d be making a lot more of it if you didn’t keep interrupting!

Because of course, it’s not enough to email. They expect you to answer instantly, and to do that, you would have have to drop everything you’re doing to reply.

Do that enough, and the next email will ask why you’re behind schedule!

Luckily, we here at Virtual A-Team go the extra mile to make sure that our clients understand how to delegate tasks and how to work with one of our teams. We also set up clear lines of communication with the client and provide them with detailed deadlines for each phase of the job.

That’s it for this week. Join us again next Friday morning for another episode.

Well that’s that. Another week, another $35 or so. Yay me!

I am trying to gather the energies needed to do another round of job hunting. My goal is to some day have enough work to get off Disability and be self-supporting for the first time in my life.

That would take about $1200/month in work, and that means getting (and doing!) a heck of a lot more work.

And I don’t expect to get there any time real soon. I will have to grab for new work while passing through the eye of my inner storm, and hopefully get enough regular work that I can finally grow the fuck up and be a man.

Who knows, maybe by this time next year,. I will be there.

And maybe then. I will actually get my shit together to actually look for work in television. What a wild idea.

I know I can do it.

But I don’t know if I can get it.

Story of my life.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.