Are you still here?
After all that's happened?
After all we've been through?
Wow. I guess we made it.
This year, I hit a wall. After five years of watching the world catch fire, and watching my own life experience upheaval after heartbreak after trauma after grief, I found I couldn't write anymore. The words just weren't there. That's why this blog has been silent for a few months, and even my Tumblr blog went quiet for eight weeks.
This absence of creativity was scary, but there was nothing I could do about it, and although the frightening thought occurred that I might never write again, my gut knew that this would not be the case. I stopped trying to write, and stopped worrying about not writing.
For the past five years I had been telling myself, "It's just a Winter; it will pass soon". But the Winter dragged on, and on, and every time I managed to write a passage or a scene I thought, "At last! My Winter is ending!" ... and it didn't. Those moments were but temporary thaws.
At the end of every year since 2016, I have thought, "Surely, next year will be better."
And somehow, each year has managed to be at least as bad as the one before.
At last, halfway through this year, I started to conclude that this burning world could very well be the new normal. I decided that I needed to stop hoping that the world would improve enough for us all to get on with our lives, and instead would have to find a way to write, and live, regardless of the anguish, the tragedies, the trauma.
I didn't manage it. All my energy was going into trying to heal: I had none left with which to create.
So I have not published a book this year. I have no new story for you. I'm sorry.
But I survived. You survived. We're still here. Maybe battered, maybe traumatised, maybe grieving. But still breathing.
Due to certain political changes that occurred in November this year, we have some evidence that 2021 really will be a little better; — not just wishful hope, this time, but some factual evidence. I am tentatively expectant that things will improve.
But I am not holding my breath. I need that to keep flowing, in and out of my lungs, so that I stay alive for long enough to finish another book, somehow, whether the world is on fire or not.
I don't have anything helpful to say. I don't have any words to make anything better. But I congratulate you on surviving.
Maybe you don't feel like you have survived. I certainly think that parts of me have not survived. I feel like bits of me have fallen off into the fire.
But most of me — and most of you — is still here. Let's rest for a while, shall we? If the world gets better next year, great; if it doesn't, we'll need all our energy.
Peace to you.
