A deliberate absence

I haven’t been blogging much so far this year—I know that will come as a huge surprise. There are many reasons for that, but this has been a mostly intended time away. This post is about why that’s been the case.

The story begins, really, last year. I said that was a challenging year for me, and it definitely was, for all the reasons I blogged about. However, there was also the death of a friend I never talked about here, for a lot of reasons, but partly because my friend’s death happened shortly before what would have been Nigel’s 60th birthday, and about a month before the fifth anniversary of his death. I was already dealing with a lot.

At the same time, I was dreading the outcome of the US election because I had a feeling it would be a disaster. Then, like so many people, I was profoundly—and badly—affected when the USA’s election disaster actually happened. All that year, I felt like I was watching the land of my birth committing slow-motion suicide, even as I fervently hoped voters would come to their fucking senses. I managed to hold back my dread of the disaster as well as I could, but that denial couldn’t last forever.

All of that was followed by this year starting out badly with technological problems I wrote about on January 2. That, combined with the USA’s upcoming coronation of the convicted felon, should’ve warned me that this year could be bad, too, but there was more.

Late last year, certainly by Christmas, I was aware that my sister-in-law, Carolyn, was beginning what would be her final battle, leading ultimately to her death. At first, just as with the US elections, I tried to ignore what I I knew was going to happen, but reality again conquered my attempt at optimism.

I didn’t talk about the US elections in part because I couldn’t pretend that my fears were unjustified. However, it wasn’t my place to talk about my sister-in-law’s health battle while she was still waging it, and then I didn’t post anything about her death until after her immediate family did. After that, it was normal blogging issues: I wanted to include a photo of her with my post, and didn’t find the one I used until late Saturday when I was looking through my photos.

What all of these stories have in common is that I found them personally challenging for a lot of reasons. The tech problems were challenging mostly because they’re still not actually solved, just a little bit better. The disaster caused by the US election results is ongoing, and getting worse, of course, and I’m still working my way through all that. The death of my friend was hard, but it also happened at time when I just didn’t have the emotional space to talk about it. That, and especially the death of my sister-in-law, were also difficult for me because they brought up the trauma of Nigel’s death and my emotions around that. I tried as best as I could to keep everything in perspective, to compartmentalise when necessary, and I often succeeded. Still, it was nevertheless six months of waves of emotion washing over me.

All that said, it was absolutely NOT unrelentingly bad: I had fun during those six months, even if sometimes it was despite everything, and I achieved some things that made me feel happy, accomplished, proud, etc. It was, in other words, a period of time with good as well as bad—pretty much like every other time in one’s life.

Nevertheless, for a lot of that time I simply didn’t have the mental or physical energy to blog or podcast, nor the ability to say why that was. Because of all that turmoil, I missed out on blogging about things that I very much wanted to talk about, completely non-political things, of course, things that were personally important to me (like anniversaries). I may talk about most of those things in one one post (kind of like my old “Internet wading” posts). I also have other topics leftover from last year that I still want to talk about, including some that have reached their own first anniversary in the past couple months (whether I mentioned them at the time last year or not). On top of that are some very good things I’ve been up to starting back in December, and that topic, too, deserves my full attention.

The thing is, though, that because I don’t know when things will get better, I also don’t know when I may have a shot at being even slightly more productive—in everything/anything, actually. I guess we’ll find out together.