When I was 10 years old, a darkness seized my life and broke my heart, mind and spirit. A darkness that made me feel alone, unloved, unworthy, ugly, selfish, stupid and like a complete mistake. I spent 8 years completely alone in my darkness – I didn’t even let my parents in. 8 years of hiding my heart, my true self, and spending the last years of my childhood in a cloud of loneliness. Depression started in my middle school years and by 9th grade, I was pretty deeply into a secret, angry solitary state of unhappiness. I found ways of dealing with the depression that weren’t as awful as they could have been I guess… I wrote poetry constantly, but not the kind of pretty stuff that you want to read. I wrote in a cryptic verse that no one could possibly understand unless I told them the true meaning behind it – and so long as they didn’t know what it all meant, I knew it sounded absolutely beautiful and intriguing. I seriously felt like no one in the world truly loved me since they didn’t truly know me – and that if they did get to know me and know about this darkness that they would go from not loving me to actually hating me, and I couldn’t have that either. At least the limbo wasn’t so bad, right?
Fare Thee Well, Lonesome Dove
How LinkedIn Saved My Life
Okay, so it didn’t really save my life, but it definitely did pull me out of a mighty big pickle. I’ve always been a fan of social media, jumping on the Myspace bandwagon back in the day as well as DeviantArt, LiveJournal or Xanga, and then moving into Facebook and WordPress in my college years. I started dabbling in Twitter shortly after graduating from college, but that’s about where I drew the line. LinkedIn just seemed completely lame to me. I mean, what could I possibly get our of a network where all I saw were people’s resumes and recommendations and blah blah blah… So I just didn’t get one.
When I started work for New Horizons Computer Learning Center in Nashua, NH, one of my key responsibilities was to develop a social media plan and to take our sales team into the domain of using these networking sites to generate leads. Hah! I thought that was all just crazy talk, right? I started doing my research and discovered that there really were a lot of benefits to using LinkedIn for prospecting and networking with current clients. Before I could get my co-workers going, I needed to get into it myself, so I spent a week or two going through all the features and fully vamping up my profile (which I had just started 10 days before my first day). I added previous jobs & job descriptions, skill sets, a link to my portfolio, educational information, and briefly checked out the recommendations area. I did a little hunting around in groups and such and then discovered a jackpot for our sales people and, even though I didn’t know it, a future me: job postings.
A Time for Thanks (Seriously)
I’ve done it again – gone and not posted for over a month. *Shameful*. Nevertheless, I have plenty of fantastic and wonderful things to update you all on!
At the end of the day on September 15th of this year I lost my very stable, comfortable and local job in Nashua. It was so completely unexpected and I was worried about finances and all that jazz. I began collecting unemployment and did everything I could to be ridiculously frugal so that I could still pay my student loans, rent and other bills. From time to time at my church we take time together to declare certain things over our lives – we have a set of PowerPoint slides that we go through and say aloud together which includes things such as thanking the Lord and declaring with Him for jobs and better jobs, benefits, sales, commissions, bills to decrease, blessings and financial increase to name a few. I remember one Sunday we did this and I was nearly in tears. Then that night my ever so wonderful boyfriend, Derek, had me put one hand on my wallet and the other on some of my bills. He asked me to simply pray “Lord, increase this (my wallet hand) and decrease these (my bills hand).” It seemed so silly, but I did it. Over the next month, I was noticing that some of my student loan payments were less than they used to be and I was actually having more money left over in my account each week than I had working full-time previously! It was unbelievable! And God wasn’t finished yet…
Meeting My Crafty Side
My apologies for the blogging hiatus – there have been a lot of changes going on for me since mid-September and I’m just starting to settle in to them right before new changes emerge. I’m so excited. : )
As many of you know, I’ve had a lot of free time lately. Generally speaking, any free time that I have had would go into job searching, writing my book, working on things for my wedding business, etc. When I get time where I can actually relax, I tend to choose things to do that aren’t entirely relaxing. My boyfriend gets on my case about this a good bit, reminding me that relaxation is not a synonym for laziness (I have a hard time seeing the difference sometimes). Well, all this free time has been allowing me to look at different ways of relaxing that I would really enjoy. Thanks to the inspirational Facebook postings of my artsy younger sister and an oh-so-crafty childhood friend, I’ve realized just how much I love making things and have started to explore different types of things I would like to make. And it starts with blankets. Yes, friends, I’m going to make some blankets.
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