Took a few hard knocks to help me get focused.

I made a goal last year to begin finding my way into a new field. I started volunteering here on 7 cups back in 2016 thinking this would be the field for me. While I do get a lot of value from the time I spend on 7 cups, I realized very quickly the field I want to get into isn't specifically mental health related.

The field of interest for me is community building. I love the hectic days of a growing community and being the one to put everything together and building a team. It takes vision and organization to accomplish such a thing. I'm good with the details, I try to see where the weaknesses in an organization lay and find ways to grow them into strengths.

I've been branching out into organizing and growing communities online. I tried this here on 7 cups, but had some real struggles last year that showed me I need to make some life changes. I can't combine I do something out of love with something I do professionally. I love the people I've met here on 7 cups, therefore I need to make 7 cups a place where I come to be with people I care about and hopefully people who care about me.

My professional ambitions have to be directed elsewhere.

Just this recognition and acceptance that some of my past mental health issues were stomping all over me made me realize that I need to make some changes. Luckily for me I had one of my online communities completely blow up in my face. This taught me that my issues were a problem and I needed to start creating a certain amount of seperation in my community building activities.

I also got myself some good books on stoicism to remind myself that there are things under my control and things that aren't.

That's been my mantra, work on the things I can control, ignore what I can't control as long as ignoring it doesn't hurt me.

What I can control is my attitude, patience, and optimism.

My attitude was terrible for the longest time. I wrote about this in grief and loss, but after losing my brother and dog in the same week last year, I went into a huge depression. Depression is something I've struggled with for decades. For the last six months, I've gotten angry with friends, alienated coworkers, and struggled to keep a good frame of mind.

I recognize now that I should have created those divides between professional and personal awhile ago. In addition to that, I should have taken a long step back from all of my ongoing projects, found temporary replacements, and taken some time to process the losses I had just endured.

After one of my online projects blew up in my face, I was angry. Yet, I had to recognize some of the things the people involved were saying to me. I had changed and not in a good way. I accepted that feedback and decided to do something about it. I rebuilt the community in a smaller form with some firm rules in place. Some of the ones involved in the previous community who were causing me stress were pointedly left out of the new one. I cut the focus of the community down to a very narrow one that requires very little of my time and investment as its a community for friends and not a professional one.

I reached out to those I had hurt and apologized to them. I made apologies to my real world friends and a couple people here on 7 cups for my behavior. Whether or not my behavior had an understandable source -my grief- it still isn't acceptable that I didn't handle it in a mature rational fashion. I can control how I treat others, for a long while I lost sight of that and it wasn't fair to other that they suffered from it because I lost sight of it.

I've since moved on and made a list for myself.

1) Each day I should feel grateful for being here, right here, no matter where I am.

2) Each and everyday I should see to it that I do something to serve the things I find important to me. Often that means spending time here in groupchat on 7 cups or doing a 1 on 1 if I have the energy for it. Outside of the cups, this might mean studying up on the things I'm interested in.

3) Waste time on the things I value, don't get sucked into spending too much time on the things I don't. Too bad I can't do this with work, but then work allows me to live the lifestyle I have, so I can't complain too much. However, its getting much easier to pass up flamewars on social media due to this rule.

4) Write about how I feel as often as I need to and really write from the heart. Be honest with myself and others about what is going on. I could have avoiding a lot of problems if I had recognized my own issues sometime last year instead of ignoring them till they blew up in my face. Had I spoken to others about them, maybe they could have been more understanding. Yet, how could they have been? I wasn't even honest to myself about them.

5) Each day is a new day. While sometimes I have to spend time fixing the mistakes I made yesterday, I should really strive to work on making new misakes/progress today. Focus on today and moving forward as often as I can.

6) Don't ignore yesterday, sometimes you gotta fix things, but don't let it consume you. Do you best to fix it and move on as you become able to do so. Moving on is a bit of a trash cliche that gets used to minimize other's problems, for me it means moving on as you are mentally and physically capable of doing so. It might take more time than one things to do so.

All this brings me to today where I was just offered a role in a growing youtube tech channel as a community organizer. I'm not going to be paid for this role, but it gives me exposure in the field I'm interested in. It allows me a wide range of opportunities for growth and future avenues of explorating new concepts for personal studies.

This means I'll have far less time for 7 cups, but that also means I'm going to be blocking my time so that the time spent here is more focused. I'm hoping this will lead me to being more driven to help others and less driven to spend time chit chatting in various groupchats. Overall, not a bad thing, I think a lot of positive good can come of it for me.

Anyway, thanks for hanging in there with me for this whole long winded rant. I felt the need to get my feelings out on paper and I didn't want to put this on my blog with my audience of 2. Feedback is welcome.