When I went back to college I became fully immersed in the what I needed to do. I adjusted my time management, I worked my life around classes, homework, and working just enough to pay the bills and keep on pushing towards the goal of graduating and not being the oldest person in the classroom…I’m not even that old, I wasn’t even close to being the oldest person in every class… but that was my insecurity which calls for a different post, at a different time.
So fast forward four years and now I’m done. No more homework, no more classes, no required reading. Just me and Lola sitting on the couch reading trashy novels because I didn’t want to read anything that I had to think about really. I still went to work, but my job doesn’t start until nighttime so, with my body adjusted to waking up early I never slept in too late and filled my time with late morning yoga classes. But then what?
I knew that I had to get some kind of internship or new job. I wouldn’t let go of the job I have now because hey…that student loan grace period ends sooner then anyone ever thinks. But the beauty of my job is that it allows me to have free time to pursue other things, while at the same time having the comfort that it had provided while I was attending school. So the search for internships started and stopped soon after school was over. I started working at an internship for a Lifestyle Website soon after graduating. I promised two half days a week, which is pretty much a lazy, non existent commitment but I wanted to ease into it. The internship wasn’t far from my home and I didn’t really have to change anything about my current schedule to accommodate this addition. I hadn’t been interning for very long, and I hate to admit but I gave a very minimal commitment. I just couldn’t get into it, instead of taking advantage of the opportunity I tuned out. I didn’t want to be bothered just yet. I was still in the mindset of ‘yay school is over! Let’s do nothing bur eat bon bons!’ I left that internship after less then a three month commitment. I used the excuse that I needed to find something more in the field that I wanted to have a career in, (which is editorial/ literary publishing) and that was pretty true, but I still could have stuck the internship out in hindsight.
And so me and Lola were back on the couch, watching trashy T.V. and reading trashy novels. Only this time I spent majority of the day looking up the very limited choices of editorial and literary publishing internships available in Los Angeles. After about a month of searching I found a great opportunity that I just couldn’t pass up on. There are really only three prominent literary presses in Los Angeles and I happened to snag an internship at one of them.It presented itself as a great opportunity, with many things to learn and many connections to be made. However, it completely fucked up my own personal daily schedule and lifestyle.
First of all it’s like a solid 45 minute commute, and who am I kidding this is L.A. and everything is a commute. It literally takes me 7 minutes to walk to the corner of my street because J-waking is a bitch of a ticket and the light takes that long to change. I also had to make a way better commitment than I had done with the previous internship. That wasn’t too much of an issue because I was very excited to start this opportunity and get started, no matter how long the commute was. So I found myself committing to three full days (9-5) in Pasadena in an office, in a cubicle, pretty much by myself.
It’s been two weeks since I’ve started and the adjustment I’ve had to make to my everyday daily life has been turned upside down. My household has never been a 9-5 type of household, I don’t believe it ever will. However, Eric and I have learned to never say never and to never underestimate the power of throwing a child into the mix or in our case a puppy or two. Everything had to be readjusted, grocery lists, cleaning schedules, and most importantly, my workouts. I suddenly find myself meal prepping on Sunday nights so I have lunch for my time at the office, I wake up early and put my coffee in a togo cup and commute my way to working for free. I get home late, I make some kind of dinner whether it is for myself or for when Eric gets home, maybe, take a shower and do it all over again.
This new routine isn’t something that I had been ready to do with the previous internship, nothing would come in the way of being at the yoga studio four days a week, nothing disrupted “me time” which was my lazy days on the couch. But in the end, everything was disrupted including the days I vacuumed my apartment. It took really two weeks to adjust, and I am still honestly adjusting, finding time to take Lola on walks and getting use to waking up early. This internship has posed more disruptions that I had anticipated but has also introduced much more opportunity than I had thought it would.
While readjusting my schedule I have also had to overcome the early onset anxiety of proving myself a worthy intern. And both of these concerns I have learned, have to be taken with a deep breath and inner confidence. Readjusting is never easy, and having confidence in your own abilities is something that comes from within, it must be taught and learned by only yourself. It is easy to fall into lazy, trashy T.V. mode and it’s even easier to stay there. It’s comforting and it doesn’t require any kind of stepping out of your own private comfort zone. But we don’t grow on the couch, we don’t push ourselves to see what we can do and how far we can do it. And I am better than trashy T.V. and unintelligent novels.
All Dina Does.. 