superficiel in depth

I've been working in a web agency as a project director for almost a year now. Almost a year of a monday to friday, 10 am to 7pm job. And so with that kind of schedule, I get to live "my life" in the evenings and during the week-ends. Except of course, I couldn't really enjoy my free time fully, as I'm usually exhausted or stressed and my mind is too empty to be able to think, move or act upon what I'd love to do.
It's the first time in a long time that I feel a huge gap between my work life and the rest of it. Usually my work life is blended with everything else. And even though some of the project I'm working on are gratifying and interesting, I can't really make them my own.
So it's been a fragile balance all this time, a silent fight to keep on doing things even though my deep soul is not into it. Cooking feels like a small victory, and so are spending time with my boyfriend, keeping my home tidy, going swimming, climbing, running, strolling in Paris, shopping, meeting friends, going to restaurants or movies.. I don't know when was the last time I could enjoy an exhibition in Paris.
Answering my friends emails is painful because I like to take my time to do that, so my inbox tells me I have emails that are few months old...
Blogging, well... if you're a regular reader, you might have noticed my poor frequence..
I feel out of the loop on so many things, starting with my own field, hard to catch up with everything that's been going on. The more I feel isolated, the more I resent distant communications and the Internet becomes at the same time my main way of keeping in touch and my main source of frustration for not being able to keep up the pace.
I have so many projects I'd like to take care of, bringing Superficiel up to date for one, making it a real organization..
Preparing events for Dorkbot Paris is always a rush, a last minute thing but thankfully there at least there are other people who are running things too..
And my art projects: I have two exhibitions to prepare in the next 2 months and I'm finding myself stealing minutes here and there to actually just think or conceive but there's no way I can make something meaningful like that.
So at the end of the day, I smoke my frustration in few cigarettes, sometimes with a glass of wine, in front of my computer screen, reading the news or watching some entertaining shows, hoping that the solution will come that can tell me how I can balance things right.
For a glimpse at the enormous website that has sucked the life out of me in the last months, you can log on 6 milliards d'Autres, a very successful project of the French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, that is also running as an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. As I started working on it, I felt some resonance with the RAW project because it aims at bringing awareness on lives of strangers around the world, and I think it achieves that quite well, although it's strongly mediated and edited which of course was the one thing we wanted to avoid in our work. But you should have a look at it, if only because it holds really interesting participative tools like collaborative translation.

-- Joëlle

Labels: 6 milliards d'Autres, Life, time, Work