Daphne Bennett

and I have given up pretending otherwise.

a year since i printed my new business cards on moo, i had done no blogging, sketched a few lines and hardly touched any python.

what a let-down.

i still spend far too much time on the phone and drink too much. no one is going to read this blog and i am not going to try to promote it anyway, so i stop pretending there is a purpose in anything, particularly in writing. I cannot write if I am to pretend I have something important to say. let’s give in and lean into the despair.

A year on. Where am I now.

I drive. I am a driver now..

I got my first data role in the Council Adult Social Service team, submitting statutory data using Microsoft SQL Server and loading SQL code onto PowerBI. At the moment the only thing I code is sQL, and it’s more decoding then coding because I didn’t know a public service SQL server relies on this many tables, I am still in a new kitchen opening random cupboards to see where they put salt and dishwasher tablets. And I will forget it all next week.It is a survival sport but they are very generous to me. I truely believe I am incompetent and trust me this is not imposter symdrome, I know what distinction looks like and I won’t even get a pass. But still they asked me if I would like some extra hours and I said ya and I got 3 more hours a week on my contract just to figure my life out. Not a bad deal.

I have started my Masters in Public Administration – Social and Public Policy journey with Uni of York and am to submit my first 2500 words summerative assessment in a week’s time. My first module has nothing to do with policy, it’s ‘Leading and Managing Change’, mainly about business and HR, which is not my vibe but i do enjoy studying, I like dry boring theories and pretending this is what life is all about.

To pay for my masters I am still in Events Team and Children’s home picking odd shifts here and there. I am miss Rabbit in Peppa Pig, you see me moving barriers preparing for the marathon on Saturaday, you see me playing with a child I hardly know in the park on Sunday, you see me next to the Police Chief and the MP on Monday, then you see me with the Performance team in the Town Hall on Tuesday. I am a nobody but my career goal is to go further and further behind the scene. I want to get paid for being invisible.

I still do lots of other things. Things I am proud of occassionally. Things I don’t have much feeling about. Things I am not proud of. Things I find meaningless. Things I find meanings in. Things I grew out of. Things I lean into. And I will explore them on this blog.

I got nothing to sell, this is not a linkedin page. I am not really looking for a job, I am not looking for love. I am not looking for a house.

After so many years of being a rolling stone, moving cross-country every couple of years, renting, buying, selling, carrying my children everywhere, waiting for storms to pass… I am looking around, taking stock, and saying to myself, it’s all okay, you don’t have to run anymore. You don’t have to carry it all.

Arghhhh. It’s hard. The unbearable lightless of being.