Welcome back

Three weeks ago today was the last time I published a post on this blog. The break was unplanned and unexpected, but it would’ve been a good idea, had it been one at all. As far as I know, this is only the second time I’ve taken so much time off.

It all began, as such things sometimes do, by accident. I’d been struggling with deep fatigue, as I talked about back in June. That fatigue often left me unable to even contemplate doing a blog post or podcast episode, and if I started one of either, I often reached a point where I had to stop and walk away. When that happened, I almost never went back to finish what I'd started. Many planned posts and episodes were never actually begun.

This was happening, of course, when I published my last post in July (the last one until today), and that post was about beginning my new blood pressure medication, how hard it had been for me to take action on that, and why. There’s always an adjustment period for any new medication, and this one was no different (I’ll talk about that in a separate post). At the time, I was trying to record a podcast episode—several times.

Then, I just stopped.

It had gotten to the point that I just couldn’t face going to my computer for anything, and I didn’t go near it for several consecutive days last week. That’s not to say I wasn’t “creating” during that time: I was posting to social media, my personal Facebook in particular, and I used my iPad to write blog posts (sometimes, as has been the case for a couple years now, based on those Facebook posts). I never published any of them, obviously, mainly because once evening set in, I wasn’t motivated to go to my desk.

During that time, I was also trying to tidy my house because my sister-in-law was about to arrive from Australia for a visit, and she’s never seen my house: I wanted it to be perfect, then pretty nice, then okay, then not totally horrible. My diminishing expectations were the direct result of that same fatigue and my inability to sustain the physical work I needed to do.

That all means that I was busy, when I had the energy, in the daytime, and not motivated or energetic in the evenings; nothing much happened, in other words. It had been about a week since my last blog post when I realised I didn’t have it in me at the time, and I decided to just stay away until I felt ready to resume. That’s today, and this post.

There’s actually kind of a backlog of stuff I was working on but never finished, and while not much of it is time-sensitive as such, some if it’s getting old enough now that if I don’t publish them soon, I should consign them to my infamous “Drafts” folder, where many blog posts that never were disappear.

So, over the next week or two, there will be some days on which I may publish several posts. Or, maybe not, but today will be one of those days (that health update post will be up later today).

While all this has been happening (or, not…), I’ve been working on a few behind-the-scenes things that I’ll be talking about soon (they’re not relevant to my recent break—my “blogcation”?). It turns out, though, the unplanned and unexpected break was exactly what I needed, and it would’ve been a good idea if had it been an actual idea. Sometimes good things are totally unplanned and unexpected, and this was definitely one of them.

Now, back to it.