Tag: Mental Health

February/March 2023 Newsletter: A New Chapter begins

Talk about stepping on the gas peddle. I went from doing four part time jobs for about 30 hours a week to one full time, contract job for 40 hours a week. As it turns out, 10 hours makes a huge difference. So instead of having the newsletter at the beginning of the month, we’re doing it at the end as a double whammy March and February Newsletter.

So, How am I doing?

On paper, I am doing great. My dreams are coming true, I’m making the most I’ve ever made, and I’m branching out in emotionally healthy ways. However, I am exhausted most days and I attribute this to overall weariness after graduating college. A Pandemic and the death of a father have been draining experiences to say the least. I’m hoping once I get back into my healthy habits, I can ease the burden a bit. However, even knowing I have the tools at my disposal, I know the only way my life is going to excel is by doing something extraordinary.

A Year of Mental Health

Last year was kind on my mental health, I took a break to slow things down and learned about stoicism along the way. This year, I’m going to be digging a little deeper and in May, I have most (if not all the articles) for Mental Health Awareness Month planned. One will cover the male malaise and the other will cover imperfection. Ideally, I’ll talk more about my craniosynostosis but only time will tell. And I’m going to take a deep dive of what keeps pulling me into my past. The last couple weeks have proven that my mental health isn’t quite where I want it to be and that’s ok. I have a lot of stressors right now and I’m only human.

The Revival of Adventure

If you’ve been waiting for more travel related articles, it has finally come. With my trip to New Zealand, I will have plenty to talk about but before then, I’m hoping to write a bit more about my goals for this year. I am an avid runner (or was) and with a half marathon, I can finally prove I still have the discipline to face down my toughest challenges head on. And I want to document this journey, so this year may well be a hodgepodge of all that will be done.

March…

So, this year is a little chaotic. I am taking more time for myself, which is good but it also means a bit more of going with the flow. So February I missed the newsletter deadline and while I had most of it written, I simply didn’t hit publish. The important article was my new year post, which I did manage to accomplish (although not in January). This month should be much better than last month as I finally settle into my new role and have a bit more room to breathe.

Life getting an update

I’m long overdue for a bit of a reboot. It’s a year about making the extra effort count and letting the pieces fall in place. It’s a year about having faith and it’s a year where I can be truly free. Each paycheck is going towards my savings and with it, a guarantee that I will be debt free before I turn 30. The next focus is the money I do make and a focus on adaptability. The future job markets will require flexibility and I’m hoping to finally get established this upcoming year.

Dating

I’m at a point in my life where it can really go either way. I’ve developed a lot of healthy habits towards dating and am working on feeling less urgency to settle down. My life is not really conducive to settling down right now. No dating apps but dating coaches I’m open to. Friends setting me up and meeting people in person? Yes please. It’s a chaotic process and my time is better spent other places. But also understand now that I’m older that it may be a necessary one. I have great relationships and enjoy my own company (most days) but there is still an element missing and perhaps it is time I prioritize that element just as much as everything else.

Keep on keeping on

So I have to remember to stay on the path, specifically, my path. I tend to overextend and suffer for it. This year is about knowing my goals and following through. And by knowing my goals, I mean really knowing them. Knowing why I’m doing something and having it lead to a better life. I’m tired of spinning my wheels, waiting on others, and being at the mercy of the world. I have not felt like I’ve had control over my life since graduation. And while in freefall, I’ve been just barely able to hang on. That is the truth. My purpose in this world has been lost in the chaos and that’s what worries me the most. That I am adrift without an anchor. It is so hard to fight back the fear and not let it crush me. So here’s to hoping.

This Month

I’m going to try to get out another article, thinking about writing one on dating apps. It’s going to be pretty low key as I keep my head to the grindstone and work on making sure everything is in place for later this year. As always, thanks for reading!

New Year, New Mike: A Year of New Beginnings

So this is the year. The gears have been turning for a while now and everything has lined up. It is time to hit the reset button. My crazy fever dream is just beginning. As of writing this, my working holiday visa application to New Zealand has been accepted. I have been working a new job for over a month now and I plan to fully commit to running a half marathon.

So this year, my resolution post is going to be formatted a little differently. I have been heavily goal focused for the last 3 or 4 years now. This year, I wanted to take some time to go over life and some of the reasons behind the big changes.

When Life Loses its flavor

So for a while now I’ve been trying to avert certain disaster and I’ve just been barely able to keep my head above water so I don’t drown. Along the way the world has brought me to my knees. A lot. And each time I have gotten back up. As a consequence, life has lost a lot of its flavor. I try to feel with my whole heart and there is barely a pulse left. On the outside I’m posed with purpose but on the inside I can feel myself imploding like a dying star. The hope is that when I finally go super nova, the energy released breaths life into a New Mike.

The Long Journey

This year, I want to be more honest when it comes to love and that comes with acknowledging where I’m at. When I was young I thought I’d be married by 29 or at least in a relationship. Not drifting aimlessly and not lost to the darkness. My personal growth has seen me invest heavily in friendships and self-love, all of which I have in abundance. It even saw me coming back home and reconciling with my family. Now, my life lives in paradox. I am both surrounded by people and love but am also alone.

The Goal

This year, I want to reset and I want to just let love happen (well, not entirely, I do have a plan). To do this I cannot walk the path alone. So instead of hopping back on dating apps, I’m going to explore why I’ve been single for so long. And as such, it’s time for a dating coach. I have also relayed to my friends if they have any single friends they know to send them my way. I remember what love felt like when I was younger and want to learn how to recapture that energy. It’ll also be a year of dating books and podcasts as I seek to understand what love is and where it fits in my life. The hope is to make the process more fun and less work and while my “Year of Desire” went a long way for getting back on the saddle, there is still much to be done.

A Focus on Imperfection

This year I’ll be exploring imperfection and learning to find the beauty in it. My whole life has been spent obsessed with perfection. I thought if I didn’t follow a certain path, I’d end up like my father. In truth, I was partly right. I became obsessed with mental health in college and set down a journey of constant improvement that has made me a better man. And yet, here I find myself drifting. I feel shame and find myself in a state where I’m never truly vulnerable. The walls I thought I had torn down are in fact, still there. Why can’t I talk about my craniosynostosis? Why can’t I talk about my romantic failures? Why am I still so conflicted over my childhood? I thought being the best I could be would propel me forward in life but it didn’t, so maybe it’s time I look at the imperfections that make up so many parts of life.

The Concrete Goals

This year, the goals are practical. They are boxes to be marked that will prepare me for my journey in life and in the near future, New Zealand.

Running

My long neglected bastion. The one thing that has always given me peace in this world. It has always been there and is a measure of who I am. So it’s time to propel it into my adult life with a half marathon. The plan is to run the bridge of the Gods in the Cascades come August 6th and this time I have the tools I need. Nike Run Club has a fitness coach and has a 14 week half marathon running plan, guidance I have been sorely missing since high school. I’m going to try to get a friend to do it with me and it should be a nice send off before I live in New Zealand.

Coding

Ah, the journey I started on during the pandemic and what has been an on again, off again relationship. Coding skills I need, there is no way around this fact. My problem is I’ll do a little and then lose motivation, even though I find the concepts interesting. If I learned to code, this would open up a world of possibilities for me professionally and now I have the perfect catalyst; yup, you guessed it, my journey to New Zealand. I have a Codecademy subscription and the program is being vastly expanded, so it’s time I jump back in. My goal is 8 to 10 hours a week as I believe this amount of time is what I need to have some professionally ready skills by the time I live overseas. While communication is my forte, I want a true technical skill to fall back on.

All Other Goals

With great effort, my goals from years past have formed into stable habits. The journey may not be perfect, but I no longer feel the need to put cooking, biking, language learning, and piano on here. I practice them enough and am slowly building a strong lifestyle of having them integrated into my everyday. This year is for the big goals and I have no more time to dally.

The Human Capital Question

This year will also have a renewed focused on revenue streams, which means trying new things as well as looking back at the old.

Freelancing

In New Zealand, I’ll be a casual or part-time worker. As such, I want to have as much at my disposal as I can. That means not relying on one stream of revenue. Imagine making money part-time and then freelance writing on top of that. This in fact may lead to my return to social media, in a professional capacity. I’m still looking at the logistics but I really want to make freelancing work; not as a sole source of income but as an additional revenue path.

Sponsorships

I am officially considering sponsored content. Currently I am in the early stages of looking at how it would work but the idea popped in my head when I got a random email asking for brand ambassadors. I figured if there’s a product I’m using a lot, it could be fun to have the occasional sponsored article. After ten years of writing, I think it’s time I start at least exploring content like this.

Contests

Contests I have also been very curious about for a while now. Enter a fiction contest, win a cash prize. Easy, straightforward and what I hope to be fun. It’ll be a good incentive to invest more time into my writing and since I’ve been writing short stories for a bit now, it seems like a good time to jump in now that I have a general sense of where I want my life to go.

And that is my current roadmap for the upcoming year. It’s time to usher in the next chapter and fully enter adulthood. It’ll require a look at relationships, myself, and my professional capital. Last years goals helped establish a good lifestyle so now I’m making one last push to live as the best version of myself. I’m excited to see what this year brings. And as always, thanks for reading!

Mental Health Awareness Month 2022: An End to Social Media Version 2.0

It is that time of year again. This month is all about mental health. This year, if I’m not mistaken, will be my forth year talking about all things mental health. Last year I covered social media in the most rudimentary form. Broken and withered from the Pandemic, I wrote an article in the heat of the moment and since then was wondering how I could improve the topic. When I wrote what was essentially a rough draft for how I wanted to live my life in the modern age, I had no answers for questions I found myself facing. Last year I ended the article with “I have no solution”, which in hindsight, doesn’t make for a great read. There was no call to action, only despair. As promised from last year, I’m trying a new approach with my mental health articles. I’m approaching them from a more upbeat perspective and am focused more on practical articles.

A life without social media

Part of the goal with this article is to start discussing the implications of social media in modern society. When I wrote “Goodbye Social Media” I worked on it at different stages; a few weeks and then a couple months of a complete disconnect. Since then, it’s been a lot of trial and error as I’ve begun to navigate life without Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (not to mention Snapchat and TikTok). Overall, not much seems amiss. A year in and I can safely say I’m OK. The first few months were a lot of uninstalling and reinstalling but past that point I accomplished my goal. If people want to reach me, they can have my phone number. If they want to make sure I’m not dead? They can read my blog.

The health implications

I read a lot. So it’s to my surprise there is so little literature on the impact of social media and there is little debate on the consequences of letting technology dictate our lives. Recently, I have noticed mild interest beyond the occasional sensation piece and that was sparked most recently by Facebook. Yet if I were to do a search, I would still find very little. I am against a Mark Zuckerberg Metaverse and in all reality, Metaverses in general. Technology is a tool, not a way of life.

Am I the only one?

The experiment has ultimately been a musing in isolation. How much agency do we have if we venture past social norms? Am I the weird one for having people contact me via text? I had someone ask me for my Instagram recently and I told them I did a full social media disconnect. All-in-all when I mention this to people the response has been positive and I have yet to have someone respond in the negative.

The Dating Apps

The dating apps are where I struggle the most. These are the apps that get reinstalled and uninstalled on a regular cycle. Over the last year, it has become less frequent as I’ve started to approach dating differently. I don’t care much for dating other than the fact that ultimately I do not want to die alone. I miss early childhood and romance that lasted well into college. When one could simply chat with someone and let a relationship develop organically. Now, I am Nickle and dimed for the opportunity of love. I have tried every dating app from Earth to Alpha Centauri and they have only led to a handful of dates; many conversations that ultimately go nowhere.

My Social Media Indulgence

Over the course of my experiment I briefly discovered reddit. After a couple months, I’ve uninstalled it and hope it stays that way. Reddit isn’t bad compared to some of the other social media out there but it offers no real benefit and has made sleep difficult the last couple of months.

What does it all mean?

Is there any true benefit to a full social media disconnect? As far as tangible data on myself, I have none. Do I overall feel better? Yes. But what does that mean? Is it truly better to not be constantly scrolling through social media and seeing an ad every other post on Facebook? In theory, yes. But does it lead to a more fulfilling life, more productivity, etc.? That is tougher to say. When I removed the need to post, has that somehow damaged my social standing? That should I not post through a tinted lens I simply disappear from this universe? Most likely not, but you have to wonder.

How has it been?

Overall, great! LinkedIn is the most I use and outside of that I’m just living inside my small bubble. I hang out with friends and every aspect of my life has been localized. The next step I suppose is to talk more openly about moving away from social media. I’m beyond curious to know what others are doing. Social Media used to rule over my life but now it simply is. A minimal digital footprint, much like I had when I was growing up. When I was growing up, computer labs were just being introduced to classrooms and the internet rocked. Now it’s a minefield to navigate and I just can’t convince myself society is benefitting from it as a whole. I’d like to talk more about it in the future but for now I’m ok with the conversations I have had. If you are curious about my original journey, I’ll include the link below. It’s a fascinating piece to reread now that I’ve been off social media for quite a while now.

And as typical, this month will ramp up as I explore every aspect of mental health. The two articles planned for the next couple weeks are an exploration into my name and it’s link to my identity and then a delve into my fathers death and it’s impact on me. The articles are helpful to write so that I don’t become closed off and so that I can express myself in healthy manners.

Last years social media article: Goodbye Social Media

Thanks for reading!

State of the blog: 2022

Ah, January. A month of promise, a month of hope. With my resolutions written, it is time to take a look at my blog. My bastion, my slice of the internet. Whatever storm weathered, this is my safest port (if not my only port in the storm). With this post, I wanted to take the time to talk about the past and look forward to the future. All my plans and dreams (blog related), laid out for the world to see.

2020

A lot of planning went into my blog for the year and the effort showed. My goal was to provide consistency without burnout and to that end I am extremely proud of the work I’ve done. I have no pressure to write and have a lot of freedom when it comes to what I write. I’ve situated myself as a poetry, short stories, and articles blog and made the brand Mike Cole, so there’s no confusion as to what you’re getting into.

2021

I could better understand what was working and what could be improved upon. Overall, a great year. A year of growth and progress and I really have no complaints. Some minor tweaks here and there and 2022 is poised to be another great year.

Come this year

I didn’t want to take too long going over the last couple years as this year is the most exciting to me. This year is simply refinement of the core concepts developed in 2020 and 2021.

The Newsletter

The Newsletter is now official. It was experimental in 2020 and was my way of adding cohesion to the blog itself. In the past, if I disappeared for a while, I would occasionally write an update to let people know what was going on. The problem was, it would be completely random. By having a monthly update 7 or 8 times a year, I’m able to better communicate what’s going on. I find it enjoyable to give a glimpse into my life and the reception to the updates has been fantastic. The Newsletter had a bit of a branding crisis early on but this year I’ve worked out most of the kinks and have a better idea of what I want the purpose of the posts to be.

Series

In 2020, when I made the decision to make my blog a more consistent, cohesive experience I looked into what specifically that would look like. The Newsletters were a big aspect of that change. Every month, even if it was a busy month, there would be a newsletter; I wanted practice writing them and it makes a lot of sense from a blogging perspective. The second aspect of the blog was to give myself a time and place to write about what I enjoyed. Up till this point, the articles I wrote were great but once again inconsistent.

Short Stories

For the series, I decided early on there needed to be four. This gave my content a rounded out feeling and would allow me to have exciting content throughout the year. Short Stories are something I had always pondered writing but usually make me blush in embarrassment with how dorky they can be. I equate them to a similar experience as a D and D campaign (I have only played one, I swear!).

The reason I’ve been so adamant regarding scheduled time to write short stories is I truly believe it helps with creative thinking and problem solving. I love any activity that challenges my brain so being able to create a world from nothing is extremely enticing. What I’ve written has garnered positive feedback and it’s an aspect I’ve been wanting to expand upon for a while now.

Sustainability Month

Years of brainstorming and it’s finally come to form. I picked two issues I cared about and chose those as my hills to die on. Sustainability has been near and dear to my heart ever since I was a young lad. My first memory is that of the garden we had at my preschool, picking peas from a pod and remembering how delicious they tasted. In my later years, I joined Students for Environmental Action and built a community garden at my high school. In college, we had a garden in our backyard and even made our own compost from our leftovers. Now, I can at the very least write.

Last year was the first year I started my sustainability series. It was exciting, fun, and for the most part lighthearted (except for the Oregon wild fires). This year, I plan to continue all that was good from the last year and expand upon it. Sustainability is a broad topic so it gives me a lot of ground to cover. I could talk about corporate greed, consumerism, and all in-between. I can also talk about walking, cooking, and all other manner of fun topics. The goal is for the series to be engaging and not go into climate crisis mode. There are many pieces written nowadays that stress the urgency of action but as far as effectiveness I don’t know if I believe it works. I’ve read about terms such as “climate anxiety” and it all seems very peculiar to me. Our world is complicated and my hope is to make it simpler. I’m excited for what this year brings!

Mental Health

Mental Health is a tough subject to talk about. In my everyday, I brush it off when in the company of others. I tell everyone everything is fine and it’s rare I’ve been vulnerable around anyone. A lot has happened to me the last couple years so the articles planned for this year will reflect that. I have a rough outline of what I want to talk about and overall I’m excited to share as I work through my life. This year will be a mix as I experiment with articles, only one is planned to be heavy subject matter with the rest being general mental health articles that are more on the lighthearted side.

Poetry Month

Celebrating national poetry month was fantastic last year. I opted to return to form to when I had started this blog all the way back in 2015. A simpler time filled full of questions of the weeks and a bunch of random other topics as I tried to gain a foothold on my chaotic world. It is rare that I have the opportunity to reach back into the past and pull it into the present, so the fact I can for poetry month has brought a smile to my face.

Most poems I write nowadays I simply write and leave up to the readers interpretation. I have my inspiration but the beauty of poetry is applying your own meaning to the poem you’ve read. To make poetry month special, I brought back analyzing poetry from my ‘Fruitful Friday’ series, a now ancient relic of a bygone era. The best part is now the analysis is of my own poetry rather than famous poets. Poetry month will stay the same for this upcoming year.

In Sum

There won’t be any major changes this year. The website is easy to read and follow and the content has been solidified. I am talking about what I want to talk about and the final piece of the puzzle has been resolved this last year. Horror Month is no more and Short Story month is here to stay. There are no creative restrictions and basically the sky is the limit for what I can write about. Two to three articles a month is reasonable for me and writing now takes top priority over other activities.

That’s it! This is just an overview for the upcoming year! Of course there will be updates through the Newsletters and more to come as we get closer the series. I’ll be back soon for the February Newsletter!

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