Since 2021 began I’ve felt like I’ve been on my heels, just trying to figure out the day to day, never mind any long term goals that I’d like to work on. Near the end of 2020 I reflected on my goals for the previous year, being very gentle about anything unaccomplished, and started putting into words my thoughts and plans for the New Year. After having a rather okay 2020 in which I managed to build up my mental fortitude to a force hitherto unknown, I felt good that I could ride that wave into 2021 and continue on my progress from the previous year. In fact, I hoped to have a more productive and more successful year. Boy was I wrong.
In part, I think the problem stemmed from me being out of town for work at the end of 2020 and a full week into the new year. I like to use the new year to start new goals and to set up the things I want to accomplish in the next twelve months. While I started crafting my ideas into tangible goals, I didn’t sit down, as I have in previous years, and lay it all out on the table, or in my case, the wall. Typically I write out every category that I want to accomplish something in and then put all the details on separate cards which I then tape on my wall in a very visible place. That way I can see it every day and I can also watch and mark my progress. It works pretty well and I’ve done it for the last few years with high levels of success. This year, the week between Christmas and New Years was a hectic period of trying to get myself sorted for almost two weeks away. I left town just a few days after Christmas and didn’t have the time to put in the work. I told myself that it was fine and that I would do it when I got back. But I didn’t. I did sort everything into categories and I have it written down somewhere on a few loose leaf pieces of paper, but I never completed the process and then things came up.
Work has been busy. We’ve had the busiest January and February that we’ve ever had due to all the production we’ve been putting together and on top of that, I decided that January would be a great month to put out 10-11 videos a week on my YouTube channel. I mean, who thought that was a good idea? And as the world events started to play out and my general exhaustion from overworking and ten months of pandemic lockdowns played out I realized my mental fortitude had slipped. Not only had it slipped, but it went away all together. And that’s no fun. I think it’s mostly that, in the next two weeks we are going to hit a full year since everything changed where I am. We were already feeling the effects at this point last year, but March 13th was the day that everything got shutdown and everything became uncertain. I think I got through 2020 by believing that it would get better in a year’s time. I think that was the hope I held on to, and that is what helped get me through. But as we’re approaching the 12 month mark, I no longer have that milestone to look forward to and I have yet to find a new hope.
I don’t want to sound all morose and hopeless, because I am not fully. Yet it has been hard for me to plan or get into anything this year. January was a write off. I think I napped nearly every day, even days when I would get a full night’s sleep, and I was constantly on the edge. I took a break from YouTube for the first two weeks of February, hoping that I would magically fix my extremely broken sleep schedule, get rested, and be ready to take on the year. It took me a solid week to stop napping, and the only thing that started to fix my schedule also broke it. Instead of endlessly scrolling on my phone at night, I switched to reading. It meant that I fell asleep a lot faster and after a few days of that routine, I started to sleep like a normal person. And yet, that was also a problem. The more I read, the more I became invested in the stories, and the more I read. Soon, I was staying up until 2am or later, not because I couldn’t get to sleep, but rather because I couldn’t stop reading. In all of 2020 I think I read thirteen or fourteen books. It took me the whole year and it was greatly helped by audiobooks. I wanted to do at least the same this year, but it had been a struggle the year before. In my two weeks reprieve I read thirteen books and started on a fourteenth. It’s a bit of a cheat because twelve of the were manga, but it was something. And I needed that something. They were also all re-reads. I read Death Note and Battle Royale, two stories I seriously recommend. I started reading Ashfall again, though I haven’t gotten too far into it because I fell into the Lord of the Rings audiobook. It’s perfect to listen to while I’m working or while I’m crafting. In fact, I’ve started to neglect doing other things so I can sew and continue listening to the story.
I have read LOTR before. A million times, I’m sure. And that’s probably not much of an exaggeration. After I finished the series the first time I immediately picked it back up. And again. And again. I heard that Christopher Lee had read LOTR once a year for forty years or something and I aspired to do the same. Though I apparently wanted to cover the forty years in just a few. I’m sure by now I have read the series close to a hundred times, though I’ve been a few year since I’ve picked it up. I actually put it into the rotation near the beginning of 2020, which was quite apt when I came across this great exchange between Gandalf and Frodo:
I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
Fellowship of the Ring
It was what I needed at the time. I felt like I had been meant to pick up the book then. Perhaps that is where my strength to get me through the year came from. Who knows. In any case, I never finished the book, instead getting caught up in other projects to pass the time. I also stopped writing around the same time. I had finished the final edit on the book I had written and was looking to move on to a new project. I’ve mentioned it before, but that new project concerned a global pandemic. What terrible timing on my part! I tried to start it regardless, thinking that the real time research would be helpful. It wasn’t and so I switched focus. But as the year went on, I found it harder and harder to maintain focus on much. I sewed masks and scrunchies while watching shows. I played video games while lying in my bed. I spent the summer getting exhausted at my remote job being understaffed due to the pandemic. But I made it through. When I returned in the summer, it was a lot more sewing. So much sewing that I grew exhausted of making masks, and yet masks were making me money, and so I couldn’t put it to the side. Then I turned to embroidery as the year waned and that helped. I’ve been working on finding a balance of things, and now, as we are closing in on the third month of the year, and a full year since lockdown first began, I think I am getting there.
I now sew masks because I want to. I’ve got this fun little idea that I’m going to send some with fun patterns and maybe some scrunchies, to my friends. Little happiness bundles. I’ve been embroidering things I want to make and things that I think I might be able to sell, once I get to it. I’ve scaled back my YouTube presence to four videos a week instead of eleven. And I’ve started writing again. Well, world building is more like it. And on none other than my global pandemic story. A year out, and I can now appreciate the knowledge I’ve gained from going through one myself. I can easily write how governments handle it, because I’ve seen it through my own eyes. I’ve enhanced the tertiary characters and how they would react to everything. It’s been helpful now, where it couldn’t be before.
Do I think that everything is going to be rainbows and sunshine now? No. Absolutely not. This year, at least at present, I feel like my mental health is resting on the edge of a knife and any slight shift could make it all come crashing down. And I think that’s okay. It is what it is and this year in particular I think it’s going to be important not just to be kind to people around me, but to be kind to myself. There will be more missteps and false starts as the year goes on, of that I am sure. But so long as I take the next step and start again it’ll be okay.
An Invincible Summer 