The cynical optimist

I had a goal at the start of the year to write at least 1 blog post a month, it would be the first time in the four years that I’ve been running this thing that I would have had any semblance of consistency, and then 2020 happened, and I haven’t been dealing with it well at all.

January and February were alright to say the least, I was writing fairly consistently, I was still working on reaching out to people, building community and putting my work out there.

and then March came.

and with March came Covid-19 at least in my area and one of the bigger early epicenters was in a city about 45 minutes from me.

I did not deal with March well, everything basically stopped. I was considered an essential worker since I work in the front of store at a pharmacy. So my life became work and survive. My writing stopped, I wasn’t able to see my Fiancee because we were both quarantining, I had no motivation to do anything I had basically shut down all non-essential things as well. I was on auto-pilot.

March dragged on for what felt like a year, but finally we broke into April and I started to come slightly out of the fog. I still wasn’t able to see my Fiancee, Covid-19 was still around and though not much had really changed from the previous month I had begun to realize that I needed to adapt and work with what was quickly becoming the new normal. So like every April before this year, I joined Camp NaNoWriMo.

In case anybody doesn’t know NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month which is in November and anyone who is participating attempts to write 50,000 words in the month. Every April and July there is a sort of warm up? If you want to call it that. It’s called Camp NaNoWriMo and it’s sorta themed around summer camp and you can revise things you are working on, or write something entirely new and you set your own goal for the month.

For April I set a low goal. I wanted to write 10,000 words in a novel I’ve been working on for several years now, and for almost the entire month I DID NOTHING! Every day I would get up and tell myself today is the day! and then lay in bed and doomscroll through Twitter and feel myself grow more and more anxious about everything. April was also the first month I missed a blog post. I don’t remember much about April except for the last week, which consisted of writing a little over 1,000 words a day to make a mad dash to win Camp NaNoWriMo which I did.

April flew by and we were suddenly in May. How did March last a year but April last a day?? Anyway, May came and we were much in the same position, it seemed like Covid was going to be here a lot longer than anyone originally thought, however things were beginning to get themselves under control. I managed a blog post in May (I was hoping for two.) But with some personal stuff going on and some things I’m hoping to talk about in other blogs coming soon it was a gargantuan effort to even get that off. On Legacy was one of the more personal blog posts I’d ever done and was glad to see it do sort of well, but it took a lot out of me. I believe that was the only bit of writing I did in May entirely.

The sunset in May and rose in June. These months were just clicking by at an unbelievable rate. We had been on pause in March but it was beginning to feel like someone had put us on fast forward through June.

I didn’t do ANY writing in June.

My job began rolling back Covid protections in June, we weren’t doing senior hours anymore, we weren’t doing shortened hours, the only thing we had left were masks and plexiglass shields. So the anxiety was starting to come back with that, you see both of my parents are extremely at risk when it comes to that so I was terrified of bringing it home to them. Our annual Relay For Life event had been canceled many months before that and we were having a virtual event on the first weekend which seemed to be successful. We didn’t raise nearly as much money as we would have liked but that was understandable 2020 had thrown constant punches and we were all bruised and broken but marching forward nonetheless (Ah…something something the perseverance of the human spirit or something like that.) Then states started opening up and a pandemic which seemed to be starting to come under control was uncertain….

And then the protests…the civil unrest.

Working became hazardous two-fold.  Pandemic, and looting and rioting. 3 times in the course of a week, I had to rush out of my job, close down the store and get out of the area quickly over fear that we were going to be targeted. (We never were.) I didn’t write anything over the course of June either. I was once again surviving and working and hoping for the best, I was becoming weary with a lot of things and wondering about my future.

For a lot of June I was trying to write a blog post that never came together, and then we got an email telling us that the Relay for Life event was back on! but it was going to only be a few hours and we were going to be modifying it to practice social distancing.

So in late June my city got together, over one hundred of us I’d say and despite Covid and despite the rain we had a car parade through the city and honored those we had lost to cancer while wearing masks, staying socially distant or just staying in our cars. It was a beautiful night and probably one of the high points of my year. Below is one of my favorite pictures of the night.

And then June took it’s final bow and July took over, and I think I might finally be back?

A lot of July has been similar to the rest of the year, I’ve struggled a lot with personal questions, like Who am I? and what my future could look like even though I have no freaking clue what i want??

However…

It’s Camp NaNoWriMo’s second session. and I’ve been writing a little more consistently lately as maybe the image below shows???

I’ll have my first blog post in two months… I finally saw my Fiancee for the first time in seven months only a few days ago….I’m hoping to be publishing something new on The Prompt Magazine (if you haven’t checked them out you should!!) relatively soon.

So I don’t know if anybody has been asking the question but I hope this is an apt answer to where I’ve been!

2020 has been a dumpster fire , for the world and for me personally. I’m coming up against a lot of uncomfortable questions that I should have been asking for a long time and searching for the answers, but this year can still turn around!

So stay tuned here because I have a bunch of ideas for new blog posts and I’ll keep you all updated on other projects I’ll be working on. Stay safe and healthy!!