Y’all. I know I’m not rocking your world when I tell you that 2020 sucked great big donkey balls. That’s no revelation. If you were taking the pandemic even the least bit seriously then you, like me, were largely staying home, sitting on your hands, and thinking about how much you’d like to get out and do something. For me, this included writing.

Or rather, I sat at home wishing I could get out and write.

I know, I know. There’s absolutely nothing stopping me from writing at home aside from myself. Well, I’m here in this Panera Bread to tell you that I am a very formidable roadblock, especially when I’m absolutely chalked full of stress. At any point over the last year, I could have sat down, and started typing. But I didn’t.

I missed writing. I wanted to write. I felt bad for not writing. But I’ll be absolutely fucked if I could muster up the energy or creativity to put words to page for a full year and a fucking half.

Well… That’s not entirely true. I did manage to sit down and do some writing a total of three times. And all three of those times felt great! Like I was breaking through a damn. Unfortunately, the next night, the spark wouldn’t be there, and I’d slip back into playing video games, or watching endless amounts of YouTube. Ideas just weren’t coming like they used to.

I pretty much stopped reading. I had my books…but I started listening mostly to podcasts since they were easier to work to, and that’s mostly what I used my computer at home for, work. A ton of my reading happens on my commutes between work and back, and for the last year and a half that commute didn’t exist anymore. I had that time back, which was nice….but I’ll be fucked if I did much productive with it for the first six months.

Thankfully, over the last month, things have been normalizing. At least for me, vaccinated and in a portion of the state with a high vaccination rate. I’m going back into work, listening to my audiobooks, and now, I’m finally back here, in Panera Bread where I do most of my writing. My Bluetooth keyboard and iPad still work the same as they did 18 months ago, and I finally have a new idea to get down on the page.

I’m jealous of the authors and creatives who could keep going through the pandemic. At the same time, I recognize that a lot of them probably didn’t have much choice, since their creativity was tied directly to their ability to eat and pay rent. Either way, I admire them. Next time around, I hope that I’ll have that drive to keep creating.

I don’t have any grand takeaways from this post. Just an acknowledgement that we, as a society, went through a thing. A lot of us are still going through that thing and will be going through that thing for a while to come. I’m going to try to get back on the horse, get back to writing regularly, and maybe write another book this year. For now, though, I’m not setting the bar too high. Today, I’ll settle for a blog post and a few new pages of writing… then I’ll move on to tomorrow.