Hey y’all 👋🏼 I hope you’ve been enjoying Sana’s Notes so far, if there is anything you’d like to hear about from me, just hit the Reply button and let me know! I hope you enjoy this week’s catch-up.

— Sana Tabassum

🍎 food for thought

Can I be honest? I’ve had the worst week (probably out of the entire year). Yes, even worse than that week I wrote about a few newsletters ago. As a creative person, I often find my mind very cluttered with thoughts, ideas, things I think I should be doing, things I’m not doing and should be doing, and all the backlog of stuff I wanted to do ages ago.

Writing in my commonplace notebook has been a big help - I did a brain dump for the first time this week and I still don’t feel confident, but better than before. Like many others around the UK, I’ve also been victim to the flu going around and have been spending most of my days sleeping for hours on end 😴 or curled up on the sofa feeling too weak to move. I’m still not 100% but taking it easy - which is ironically very difficult for me.

Naturally, it called for re-arranging priorities and postponing meetings or tasks I had planned when I had way more energy. Now combine all of these things with job rejections, feeling pretty lonely and even a mild panic attack, I feel like a mess 🙃. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful I don’t have it worse and I totally am zooming out and considering this situation from a wider perspective.

Sending this email out isn’t a cry for help, but more so a way for me to see how I’ve been overworking (and overthinking) during the past week and that I’m still here, writing this right now, so I guess that’s a win.

For architecture students who may also be feeling like things are piling up; deadlines, personal goals, responsibilities and so on, I’d suggest just taking a few hours out of your day to do nothing. Sleeping is great, but sometimes you just need to put away the laptop or drawing and distance yourself from anything that requires brainpower.

What I’ve learned 👇🏼

• When your body is asking for rest, listen to it - there’s no workaround.

• Being alone with your thoughts is very scary and something I’m trying to be more comfortable with. It sucks though.

• You don’t need to end the year with a bang or worry about what your 2024 goals are looking like, just take it one day at a time.

🍗 content nuggets

Some of the newer, random pieces of content that I’ve been watching in between day-naps. Enjoy.

🦋 magic sauces

In the new year, I’m planning a 30-day content challenge as I’ve seen this work for a few fellow creators and I just want to take back my posts to a simple, easy format rather than have to stress each week.

The topic will be around a typical architecture portfolio, from page sizes to things you should be adding to your drawings and portfolio layout inspiration ⭐

🔥 on the back burner

Last week I posted a video of me re-doing my portfolio for job-applications and can I just say, this was well needed! I’m much happier with how it looks now and even upgraded my CV so for the time being I’m applying to jobs that are slightly more flexible. I feel like since I do have a wide range of skills, I am allowed to be picky with where I apply but so far it hasn’t turned out in my favour. But we carry on.

In my last post for the year, I partnered up with 4D modelshop to showcase some of their best-selling model making materials and their free guides which I highly recommend if you’re keen to brush up on those skills. You can also get 10% off with their student discount!

to.scale

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— Sana x