{"id":2716,"date":"2021-07-01T14:05:42","date_gmt":"2021-07-01T19:05:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seth-swanson.com\/?p=2716"},"modified":"2021-07-01T14:05:42","modified_gmt":"2021-07-01T19:05:42","slug":"a-year-without-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/2021\/07\/01\/a-year-without-words\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year Without Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Y\u2019all. I know I\u2019m not rocking your world when I tell you that 2020 sucked great big donkey balls. That\u2019s 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\u2019d like to get out and do something<\/em>. For me, this included writing.<\/p>\n

Or rather, I sat at home wishing I could get out and write. <\/p>\n

I know, I know. There\u2019s absolutely nothing stopping me from writing at home aside from myself. Well, I\u2019m here in this Panera Bread to tell you that I am a very formidable roadblock, especially when I\u2019m absolutely chalked full of stress. At any point over the last year, I could have sat down, and started typing. But I didn\u2019t. <\/p>\n

I missed writing. I wanted<\/em> to write. I felt bad for not writing. But I\u2019ll 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. <\/p>\n

Well… That\u2019s 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\u2019t be there, and I\u2019d slip back into playing video games, or watching endless amounts of YouTube. Ideas just weren\u2019t coming like they used to. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t exist anymore. I had that time back, which was nice….but I\u2019ll be fucked if I did much productive with it for the first six months.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m going back into work, listening to my audiobooks, and now, I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019ll have that drive to keep creating. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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\u2019m 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\u2019m not setting the bar too high. Today, I\u2019ll settle for a blog post and a few new pages of writing… then I\u2019ll move on to tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Y\u2019all. I know I\u2019m not rocking your world when I tell you that 2020 sucked great big donkey balls. That\u2019s 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\u2019d like to get out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[108,109,110],"class_list":["post-2716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing","tag-writing-goals","tag-year-in-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sswanson-001-site2.gtempurl.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}