It’s
While I’d usually start the year with blog posts about gratitude and plans for the months ahead, I don’t feel I can launch into all that without first reflecting on the last few months, and the changes I’ve seen in my blogging and writing habits.
I’ve been feeling incredibly guilty about my lack of blogging and ‘business as usual’ writing over the last number of months. I berated myself for letting it slide; for losing my momentum, my drive, and my creative thinking, not to mention the confidence to put my ideas out there.
I miss being the woman who would churn out post after post, review after review, idea after idea; writing until the pads of her fingers felt numb against the keyboard, night after night.
But I’ve come to realise that it would be absurd for me to expect myself to create, write and share exactly as I used to, when so much has changed.
My attempts to keep writing blog posts throughout the first, second, and then third lockdowns of 2020 and early 2021 wore off. At the start, it was a way of maintaining a little normality and connecting with others while we remained apart.
As time moved on, my energies went elsewhere. Priorities shifted. We moved house. I started freelancing and working more. I was too anxious about busy, indoor spaces to regularly review theatre productions. My mental health stumbled, several times. I started to spend more time with a paintbrush than a pen. I focused on managing relationships with loved ones and making up for lost time. There was change; so much change. And loss.
It’s no wonder that, with all this and more, my writing waned. While I have been working with words in different ways, I just had nothing much to share on here.
As we approach two years of pandemic life, I’m realising more and more that it’s unrealistic to expect my writing habits to have remained unchanged in this time. I’m not the person I was in January 2020. Neither are you.
I’m not sure what this means for this blog for 2022. While I don’t in any way plan on getting rid of it, I do hope to shed the pressure I put on myself to update it regularly and to an excellent standard, just as I did as a 29-year-old who had never heard of Covid (lucky thing).
I hope this year will bring more motivation; more writing for pleasure, more ideas, and that familiar urge to share an idea with you on these pages. I hope to finally press publish on thought pieces, reviews, poems and more, and share them proudly. I hope to write something with substance; something to make you laugh; something to spark an idea. Something imperfectly worthy of being out there.
There may be another post soon; perhaps something on gratitude for 2021, or goals for 2022.
Or…there may not.
Maybe later this year there may be another summary, another non-apology, another rambling piece to atone for my absence.
Or…I may be back again next week.
Either way, I hope you might be there to read whatever I come up with next!
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