Practical advice.

Explaining internet gags to my therapist is always a weird thing. But it's useful sometimes. I told her about the table-flipping thing - the one where someone's so fed up with the situation they're in they flip over the table - to illustrate my feelings towards parts of the job hunting process.

Job hunting led us to the Tao Teh Ching, which I haven't read cover-to-cover but skimmed enough to get to a specific passage about how if one sees everything as easy, it'll be hard, but if one sees everything as hard, it'll be much easier. I talked about how that's very solid wisdom and how I've noticed it to be true in my life in the past few years. About job hunting and writing, mostly: thinking of both as difficult processes makes it less of a struggle to get down and work on them when things get troubling. With the job hunt process, knowing it's an uphill battle where it's going to take a lot of time and effort to get me to a positive cash flow helps me deal with not having something yet. Some of it's knowing after a set point, it's out of my hands - once something's off into the ether, I can't do much but wait - and some of it's knowing it's me pounding out the letters and finishing up the applications and hitting the "send" button. It's not easy to treat it like a job, but it's getting easier to think of it as work.

As for writing, I've learned not to start things unless I know how they end up; the work is a matter of getting the characters from the start of the story to the end.

I got there about fifteen minutes late and about a third of the session was spent talking about travel, Australia, and baking, so we didn't have much time to talk about other things. But she purposefully made a note for next week, so I'll show up on time and see what happens.