2023 (and 2022), Where Did You Go?

Est. Reading Time: 2 minutes

I haven’t posted on this site since May 15th, 2022. That’s nearly 50 million seconds. A measly 555 days. One year, six months, and six days. That’s a long time. I’ve renewed the domain and the hosting, and put in all the work to keep it on the Internet. And I posted…nothing. What happened?

I had posted a grand vanity card for 2022, pegging it as the year I hoped to finish a book. That was in February. I posted two more times, once to proclaim my laziness to the world and another to rant about my disappointment with an indie book series I had just completed. Then it was radio silence, a vast nothingness…until now.

What has caused me to post now? The circumstances that have contributed to my lack of posting haven’t changed. I’m still lazy. I still have a myriad of issues, all grabbing at me with clutching, tearing claws, like a pack of wolves, demanding my attention, stretching my mental bandwidth. challenging my emotional stability, exhausting my physical limits. Maybe someday, if and when I get past some of these challenges, I will write about them, but not now. Now I will safely tuck them away, continue to battle, continue to lose and win based on seemingly random choices and circumstances, and endure.

Because enduring is all I am doing right now. I don’t feel any growth, except as a function of advancing age, mentally, emotionally, or physically. I still have hope that this will happen; that I will one day (hopefully soon) be able to say “I grew in this way” during this time. That hope hangs by the slimmest of threads.

I face possibly the most momentous and consequential decision of my life. This is a decision I cannot avoid, so the weight of it feels even heavier than decisions like having kids, asking my wife to marry me, deciding what college to go to, or whether to be a jock or a band geek in high school. Many will say “That’s life” and I won’t disagree with them, but it doesn’t make it any easier.

What else is going on with me?

I haven’t participated in NaNoWriMo since 2020…and if you’ve read some of my previous posts, you know that was a big thing for me. I have written some, but not much. I have an excellent project just dying on the electronic page, waiting for me to return to it. Maybe I will. I will have several weeks off from work in the near future, so I might get some time (and inspiration) to revisit it. It requires several thousand more words, a LOT of editing and rewriting, and probably some raw luck to get completed, but it is one of my most developed works in progress and deserves to be completed. Maybe, just maybe, 2024 will be the year.

Most of the other things going on with me, as I already said, I’m keeping under wraps for now, so I guess this is the end of sharing time.

So here I am, posting to this site again, 555 days after I last posted to it. I don’t have much to say, but I figured I had waited long enough and something had to be posted.

Done.

Photo credit: Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash