Are we there yet?

I’m bored. I’m finding it really difficult to fill my days without a job. For my entire life, my days have been filled with work, study or dance and now I’m feeling stuck… like, are we at the end point/revelation yet?

I’m currently in Amsterdam, a much slower city than New York. I’ve got a friend here and in Belgium so some of my days have been filled visiting them. The other days have been spent strolling around the city, finding places to eat, cooking, watching whatever Soho House has on in there screening room and finally watching Sex and the City (I didn’t grow up with Sky so a lot of these old shows are only just getting watched). I’ve also been really ill for the past week, I think my body might be purging all of the sicknesses that I had to suck-it-up-and-work-through over the past 7 years of building my career.

The truth is, having ‘me time’ isn’t that life changing when you spend a lot of time alone. I live alone and, when I went through very busy work periods with a lot of events and networking, I would spend my weekends doing nothing in order to recharge and be ready to go again on Monday. I’ve pretty much spent the past 3 weeks alone travelling and, honestly, I’m over it now. I’ve got one more trip straight after this but that’s with a friend and some family so that will be a welcome change.

I get bored easily, it was one of the main reasons I was constantly in trouble at school - if I’m not feeling challenged then I don’t want to do it (whatever it may be at that given moment) and I want to move on to something else. Before my company, I’d never stayed in a job for more than a year, often moving on after a few months and usually the reason was that I needed a new challenge. In most jobs, the only reason I stayed for more than a few weeks was because I would set myself tasks to keep myself busy. It’s also probably why I don’t like having one friendship group - in secondary school I was cool with pretty much everyone in my year which allowed my to float around depending on how I was feeling and who I felt like spending my lunch break with that day. Looking back now, my ADHD and ASD probably explain a lot of this and I’ve been reading that people with ADHD are actually better off having a few jobs rather than one so they’re constantly stimulated.

Anyway, as I said, I’m bored. I’ve got an idea of what I’m going to do next but that won’t be for a few months so I’m thinking about volunteering or helping some friends out with their businesses so I’ve got something to do. It’s also made me rethink my original idea of going travelling around Asia for a few months. I fear that if I don’t have a task or challenge to get on with then I’m going to get bored and want to come home. This jobless life is very unchallenging … my challenge when I get home from my final trip is to find a challenge.