Author: Graeme McMillan

The wonderful thing about Spring is how easily I forget it after it’s finished each year.

Despite how that sounds, I don’t mean that sarcastically, or as any type of warning that I actually hate Spring and look forward to it ending every year — just the opposite, in fact. What used to be one of my least favorite seasons (I’m an October baby, I’m naturally predisposed to the fall, what can I say?) has become more and more of a highlight the older I get, and the longer I stay in Portland with its lengthy and emotionally difficult winters. (Man, the unrelenting greyness gets to you after awhile.)

That said, I feel as if Spring is something I remember in the abstract, at best; I know in theory that everything comes into bloom and plants sprout new life, and the sun starts to shine, and all that good stuff. If you asked me to describe the kind of thing that happens in the season, I could do that, no problem. I just forget what it looks like, is all. And then, each Spring, there will come a moment when I’m out on a walk, and I look up and see all the trees covered in their new growth and it takes my breath away.

It reminds me of something I realized when I was back in my hometown for the first time in years, back in 2023; I went for a walk in the early morning before anyone else was up, it felt like, and there was a point where I realized that I’d grown up surrounded by beauty and nature, and hadn’t even noticed at the time. There was such lush greenery all around me, and it had become alien enough that I noticed it again, and appreciated it as if it was new.

I get that every Spring here. There’s a point where I suddenly remember that there’s all this life happening all around me in such colors and varieties, and I feel humbled and touched at the same time. I always forget how genuinely beautiful Spring can be, and I actually love that; every year, I get to see everything new and fresh and fall in love all over again.

Ever since I started in this job, I’ve made it a point to keep analog, handwritten notes whenever possible. I have multiple notebooks — I generally go through two a year, although that’s in part because I always like starting a new notebook at the start of each calendar year, so the real measurement is probably closer to going through one-and-a-half-maybe-more — filled with comments to myself from meetings, from planning sessions or those brief moments of inspiration where I suddenly know just what I should be doing to achieve success or whatever; I have notes that are instructions for specific tasks, and notes that broader plans for, if not world domination, then at least ways to move through the world without too much disruption.

And, for the most part, I rarely look at them a few weeks after they’ve been written.

There are certainly some notes that I find myself poring back over, however long later; there are instructions for specific things that require codes or particular steps to be followed to avoid failure, or there are things that should be remembered very particularly for the desired result. But for the most part, almost everything I make note of is temporary, and forgotten about within weeks. Each of these notebooks is filled with comments and phrases that are meaningless to most everyone, including myself after enough time has passed.

Occasionally, I’ll look through old notebooks, looking for one of those codes I need or something else that suddenly seems relevant long after the fact, and I’ll find myself lost and confused: what does all of this mean? Why did I write these meaningless phrases, and did I even know what they meant back then? I’m creating an archaeology of myself that no-one will be able to decipher if they tried.

Tax season, every year, is a stressful time for me. That’s been the case since I came to the States; I remember that first time of trying to do American taxes and basically thinking to myself, this is arcane and ridiculous, and somehow I have to do this every year? (Yes. Yes, I do. Every single year.)

It’s not just that I’m hardly fiscally-minded. I try to make myself feel better about that each year by going, oh, I’m creative, that means I get a pass on being business-minded or serious in a way that actually benefits me — a theory that certainly makes me feel a little better about myself before the crushing reality sets in and I worry if I don’t have all the paperwork I need and perhaps I’m going to be destroyed by a system that really couldn’t care less how creative I may or may not be. It’s also that the tax system is this very strange, seemingly very intentional anxiety machine that makes things as difficult to understand as possible: do you have the right forms? Have they all been filled in by other people appropriately? Because if they screwed up, that means you screwed up. Are you going to get everything filed in the appropriate manner to two different entities in time? And, because I’m in Portland, Oregon, will you also remember to pay the entirely separate Arts Tax, which isn’t included in the State filing for some reason?

It doesn’t help that I have experience of having done it wrong in the past; I remember being told, the first time I went to a tax specialist, that I’d been doing it so wrong for the past three years that I owed an entire subsection of taxes I wasn’t even aware of. Oh, and because I’d owed it for so long, I’d be charged a 100% penalty for non-payment, so I basically had six years of back taxes waiting for me like the worst Christmas gift ever. I remember being called while on a business trip to the UK by a separate tax preparer that something was wrong with my paperwork and they probably wouldn’t be able to file on time unless I scanned and submitted entirely different documents that I didn’t have to hand because, again, I was in a different country on a work trip.

Because of all of this, I try to do my taxes pretty early each year — preferably somewhere in February, so I have two months or so to fix things if and when they go wrong. Except that, this year, I spent February and the first half of March sick, so I had this internal pressure of gotta do taxes gotta do taxes GOTTA DO TAXES in my head the entire time. They were done before the end of March, filed and accepted, but still. I’m half-convinced that, somehow, something is going to go wrong at any moment and I won’t have time to fix it.

Happy tax filing deadline tomorrow, everyone.

So, let me tell you about the last week of March from a work perspective. We have traffic goals that we’re set at the site — no surprise, because that’s been the case at literally every single website I’ve worked at — and, for reasons too complicated to go into, March’s goal went from “oh, we’re definitely going to hit that” to “oh, we have no chance of hitting that” in the blink of an eye about a week out from the end of the month. (It was a technical thing, not the fault of any particular person.) The reason I’m sharing this isn’t to complain, but to tell you that what happened next surprised the living shit out of me. Namely, I refused to accept it.

That’s not entirely right; I knew throughout the entire week that the goal was virtually impossible — there was a chance, but it was the slimmest of slim chances — but, for whatever reason, I just decided to act as if we’d do it anyway. I worked stupidly long hours, I set specific targets for particular writers to write particular stories for me to edit, I just… pushed, for want of a better way to put it, utterly determined that if we were going to fail, at least I’d have tried my very fucking hardest to succeed and no-one could say anything different. I got the bad news, I spent about a couple of hours being upset and mad about the extenuating circumstances, and then I just… went.

Part of this came from the fact that, the week before, when we were all thinking it was a sure thing, I purposefully took my foot off the gas to give myself, and the writers I edit, a break. February and March had been stressful, I figured, let’s all take a breather for a little bit. The numbers are good, we can afford ourselves this luxury. And then we found out the numbers weren’t good, and I felt embarrassed and mad at myself for that decision.

More than that, though, I was just mad. I was mad that, after these past couple of stressful months, the win that looked like it was right there suddenly wasn’t, and I just decided that I wanted it anyway. And if I wanted it hard enough, and if I really, really, applied myself, then why couldn’t I get it? Or at least, get close? As the song goes, anger is an energy… and at least this way, it was one put to good use. There’s a lesson there I should probably take into other parts of my life.

We ouperformed by the numbers by 10,000 by the time the month was done.