I’ve unwittingly put myself into DC mode already — that stressed out, overwhelmed, frazzled state that I moved to California to escape.
This move is fraught with stress, not just because I don’t really want to leave San Jose but also because of the speed. By this day next month, if all goes to plan, I will be moved and starting my new job.
The new job is the key: I am really excited about it and looking forward to it. I won’t talk much about it right now because I like to have my ducks in a row and it is only 99.9% confirmed at this point. I’m a stickler for that last .1%. But suffice it to say that this will be a new direction in my career, a direction that I had been moving towards for years. I’ve been moving in the wrong direction for a while, trying to hold on to a career in which I am no longer the young whizkid; so I am excited about taking this fork in the road into something I can easily envision doing for the next 20 years.
Anyway. While the career move is exciting, the house move is not so much. Decisions on my little bungalow, whether to drive or fly and ship the car, finding an apartment back in DC, figuring out when the movers should come, packing my stuff… it is all piling on and shocking me into inaction. It is almost so overwhelming that I feel as if I’m not accomplishing anything at all.
When I moved to California, I had no deadlines. I could take my time, relax, just go with the flow. Moving back, I have specific deadlines in the form of first-day-at-a-new-job, money worries about a vacant house back in San Jose, how quickly I can rent an apartment during the 4 days I’ll be in DC at the beginning of January, how many hours per day I can drive on a 3,000 road trip, how Diego will feel about not having a backyard anymore, and how long I will sleep on the floor of that apartment until the movers arrive.
Every night I sleep about 1 hour, then wake up and start doing math in my head — how much everything will cost. Every single calculation comes out optimistically, but being a pessimist I can’t believe what I’m telling myself.
When overwhelmed about the logistics of something like say- a move, might I suggest writing a to do list. Sure it may seem even more overwhelming but it also makes things linear. This way you have specifics and your mind can focus on one thing at a time. Right now your mind is just trying to wrap its head around the whole enchilada and its just to much to comprehend. Lists help to alleviate that.
Trust me- I do logistics for a living and I’m actually quite good at it.