i just blogged in my mouth a little bit…
Hi there! Welcome. Fancy meeting you here. Come here often?
This is my first week officially unemployed. It’s liberating. It’s terrifying. I am very lucky/privileged to have a small severance package to continue getting paid through the end of July. My current lease ends at the end of August. That means I will be paid long enough to pay rent on my current apartment and not a moment past that. The million-dollar question that keeps coming up is what’s the plan?
If you’re new to me, planning and journaling used to be my thing. I started writing in elementary school. I wrote a lot more fiction when I was younger, but after getting in trouble for writing my own homage to R.L. Stine’s Fear Street books using the real names of other kids in my seventh-grade class (true story), I started sticking to essays and opinion pieces. Fun Fact: it was post-Columbine, but pre-9/11.
I started my first blog the summer between middle school and high school. I continued it a little way into college with less frequency. I started writing online less once social media became a thing. I moved most of my thoughts to pen & paper in an analogue journal. In 2018, I started bullet journaling. Having a planning and journaling practice was wonderful, and it helped me start to become more consistent in achieving my goals. In 2019, I published my first book, an essay collection titled Bad Sex and Other Problematic Analogies, and performed a one-woman show of the same name.
Early in the pandemic, journaling and planning got difficult for me because I felt like our whole lives were just made of waiting. There came a point where it looked like the world was moving forward again, whether we were ready or not. Our brains have all had to re-configure and re-wire to so many new types of “normal.” I did that again with journaling and planning. I had a very picture-worthy journal. I also had the time to do it. I created and taught a class at a work retreat titled Journaling for Personal Growth. It was a big hit among my colleagues, and I had friends outside of work asking me to share it with them. I was really proud of it, and at the same time, I’ve let that presentation sit and gather proverbial digital dust for years.
Last year was a particularly difficult one for me. I had to put a pet to sleep, I went through two rough breakups, a bad job change, some unexpected financial struggles, and what looked like the beginning of the end in my country. I felt so lost. I stopped doing my traditional journaling and bullet journaling. I had been achieving my goals, but I wasn’t feeling accomplished. I felt like I was doing all the things I was “supposed to,” and I wasn’t getting what I wanted. I had no sense of control.
This year has been different. It feels like the world is falling apart, and yet, just like me, humanity has survived all of the hardest things we have ever been through so far. Being hopeless about the future or your ability to make change is exactly how people in power want you to feel. Hopelessness is an absolution of your responsibility to make things better than they are. But we are not helpless, and therefore we must not be hopeless. Each of us must find the will and the joy within us in order to move forward and support one another. I feel a strong sense of purpose to help others and make art, but I struggle with knowing how to do that and survive financially. I also know that this is not a terribly unique problem.
I took a break from setting goals. I decided to just survive for a while and let the universe tell me whatever it had to tell me. I’m not usually one to just listen to the universe. I like to believe we make our own destiny. Now I think it’s a little bit of both, like nature vs. nurture. I’ve been spending this past year making stuff as I please, working at a job that I hated, and hoping I would see some kind of sign. The good news is that I think I’m finally getting it.
