Life In Hard Mode
When we were kids we used to visit our grandparents down south in Florida every summer. There were almost no other kids around, hindsight tells me it was actually an old age community. My sibling and I were lucky to meet one pair of kids who would also visit their family at the same time on occasion. The two kids were roughly our age and we got along just fine but what was more important was the video game console they would bring with them. It was an old original Nintendo Entertainment System and it only had the included games Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt.
Nobody played Duck Hunt and we got really good at Super Mario Brothers.
I mean finish the game without dying good (using warp zones). We got so bored that we started inventing challenges like playing with one hand, avoiding mushrooms and other power-ups, and even in a mirror at times.
We called it hard mode.
Now I'm an adult or as I would have called it back then, big. Instead of playing Super Mario Brothers in hard mode I am doing real-life in hard mode it seems. As kids we chose hard mode out of boredom as an adult have I chosen hard mode, slid into it by default, or made bad choices? It was my choice to take on this huge mortgage (well 1/2 my choice). It was also my choice to juggle job-1 & job-2, nobody made me.
This week alone I am travelling daily 90 minutes between jobs stressing over FIFA traffic which will bring closed roads while covering for 3 key managers who are simultaneously out of office due to a series of unfortunate events. To make matters worse some glitch in our software has caused tons of work to shift to my team that normally wouldn't come even come near us. While I didn't chose this I did chose not to prioritize building up more redundancy and encouraging team members to document key processes. I also didn't advocate strongly enough to have more staff up-skilled or to have new talent brought in, again hindsight. Lessons have been learned and I'm going to try and start putting more effort into not doing life in hard mode.
I know a lot of people are dealing with bigger issues. I still have my health, both physical and mental, and want to try and preserve that. I will be leaning into some seriously selfish--self-care in the coming days. At any cost I will be eating healthy and buying my way out of some problems because I can. My partner even suggested securing a hotel near job-2 on one challenging night.
I will also keep my eyes open for any mysterious question mark blocks with a power ups in them.
Feeling overwhelmed and a touch nostalgic. Thanks for reading this far.
-v-