In April, Trusty Transcriptionists celebrated eight years in business. This year saw me at a crossroads more than any other. After an inconsistent workflow during the pandemic, I wondered if I wanted to keep this going or turn my mind to a new challenge. In the world of transcribing, as long as things are busy and fascinating academic studies are being presented to me to transcribe, I remain happy. But I was beginning to lose my joie de vivre with the entire enterprise, to be honest. For the first time in eight years, I applied for a few jobs in my area of expertise where I could put my social sciences degree to use and was offered job interviews. I pulled out of the process twice because things picked back up again to the pre-pandemic level. I then found I was committed to several large projects with hefty purchase orders. Perhaps when it came down to it, I wasn't ready to move on from a business that had taken years to build up. So I set a new goal to keep Trusty Transcriptionists going for a decade and then reassess from there. I find that having these goals helps keep me motivated.
The other thing that became abundantly clear to me when I was lone working during the pandemic is that it's not sustainable long-term with my business. Once things began to get busy again I needed some help as I was constantly having to turn projects and clients away because a person can only do so much transcribing in a day. It became frustrating and tiring, and I felt burnt out. So for my larger academic projects, I once again have several very trusted people helping me out. I still work on all of the HR work and journalists' transcripts myself because of confidentiality issues. But because academic projects generally consist of 15+ interviews per client, we can now get through these projects more swiftly if the client agrees to me getting some assistance from my trusty transcriptionists! The last six months have seen me working on interesting academic interviews, including a very large ethnographic study to the more standard and countless one-to-one interviews. Lately, I've been transcribing some heart-warming interviews sent to me from youth workers, these people are amazing and the work they do is so important. I find it fascinating to hear young people's opinions and thoughts on a myriad of topics, especially politics and equality. I also delved into the dark triad of personality, an intriguing and eye-opening study. And I found myself working on three healthcare studies. One of my favourite studies was about neurodiverse young people, where I learned a lot about high-functioning autism and how different genders present. Another study that gave me a lot of food for thought was about sustainability. It made me reflect on some of my choices in my own life and tweak a few things to play my part in being more sustainable, like having more meatless days and avoiding fast fashion (Since the mid-1980s I've always loved second-hand shopping, who knew that I was actually contributing to a more sustainable world!) I've also never driven a car in my life and have always used public transportation, so I feel I've at least slightly atoned for my other sins over my lifetime ;-) I will close this blog entry by saying I was yet again reminded of how fragile life is and how important it is to appreciate each day. During the summertime, my husband's cousin who was only in his 50s was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and passed away shortly after. He'd been living his best life and had taken a dream trip to Hawaii before the diagnosis; this made me happy because at least he had one fabulous last hurrah, even if he didn't know it. And that's the thing, we never know what's around the corner. Two days after we attended this cousin's funeral, my husband went for a run, came home and didn't feel well. He started having chest pains. The long and the short of it is, he had a mild heart attack. I felt so grateful that this happened at home rather than when he was outside running. The NHS has been brilliant and several weeks ago he had surgery and was given a stent. None of this was on our radar prior to it happening, it came completely out of the blue. It was very frightening and difficult to come to terms with of course, but now he's as good as new. We've made some small lifestyle changes (Like we've stopped ordering our weekly takeaways, our definite Achilles' heel.) As the saying goes, 'tomorrow is promised to no one'. My ethos is to try to live a meaningful, happy and authentic life whilst embracing the ups and downs because nothing is linear. To try to be kind to others and to forgive others' mistakes and forgive my own as well of which there are many because I'm only human. Work remains busy and for that I'm grateful. If you would like to book yourself in for a large academic study please contact me, at this time I have availability from mid-October onwards.
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