When last we met our protagonist, it was December of 2019, before a plague hit the world and made life really fucking difficult.
Thankfully I just got my booster for the vaccine against that plague, so things will be marginally less difficult.
I had originally taken a sudden hiatus to focus on landing a job, write some more rituals (there was a Seasons of Transition III planned), and write blogs regularly again once I had gotten my rhythm back. The county shut down, my workload drastically increased, my friendship with my co-author ended, and I was under the worst stress of my life.
And then I quit my job that was supposed to be better than the last job and failed me yet again, moved out of a house I had lived in for 27 years, had a mental health crisis related to moving, got told to move out, MOVED AGAIN, and now finally have something vaguely resembling stability. Or at least familiar instability. Which was the environment I was writing in to begin with, so I guess it won’t be a hindrance.
Or I hope not.
I kind of backed myself into a corner for a while with my writing, because I was getting very used to ~teachable moments~ type shit and essays where I was trying to prove a point. And I don’t necessarily regret writing any of it because I stand by most of it, but at the end of the day I was getting sick of myself, and also ineffectually trying to impress people.
I mean, I was getting the response I wanted from certain people, but also, no, I wasn’t. The lack of self-awareness I was criticizing ran so deep that people I was literally describing were recommending my blog. And I cannot begin to tell you the kind of emotional exhaustion that left me with. It was very clear that nothing I was doing mattered and I no longer valued whether people liked it.
Also, a much pettier complaint, apparently you cannot make a case for why cute people should people fall in love with you by being smart. You have to be their type, and also actually tell them you like them. It’s so fucking complicated.
To try and resolve that sense of constriction, I’m going to give myself permission to be a lot more casual about my writing. I used to have content ready to go every week, or every other week, but it was because I had more free time and I wasn’t freakishly stringent about what I was putting out. And I am realizing being stringent was completely unnecessary, because I am running a pagan blog, where the formula for success is “confidence, irrespective of accuracy.”
That, I cannot get myself to do, but it means that the margin for error is far wider than I was willing to occupy. I am a hardass to myself first and foremost.
It’s not the worst tendency in the world, because a lot more people could stand to be much more self-critical. But I’m an anxious dumbass and was intensifying that behavior every time I got frustrated with people I thought should be more self-critical. Like I thought it would trickle down or something.
That is absurd.
We’ll see what happens. For now, I’m seeing how I adjust to this move.
Falkabarn 