When I Think About This Year

 When I think about this year's National Novel Writing Month, I get a bit sad. 

One of the reasons for this is the painfully obvious reason that I was desperate to see my novelling friends who pop out of the woodwork in time for NaNoWriMo and then retreat again to hibernate until next year. Not all of them came along to the virtual write-ins, and even when they did, it's not quite the same. Yes, there were some amazing parts, like being able to say hey to all of our American friends who visited London and then had to return to the USA, but we can be quite a huggy bunch, and by this point in the year, I would say that we were desperate to have a hug from people we didn't live with, and unfortunately, it was not to be. 

Another reason is that, despite knowing that I can be terribly harsh on myself, I was beating myself up a bit, and continue to do so, about how out of sync I felt with the whole thing. I felt like I wasn't being an overly great ML this year (Municipal Liaison - think Regional Coordinator and you're about there) and I felt like I was being a terrible sprint leader. I enjoyed doing both, and I enjoyed the challenge of being an ML in a virtual world, but there were some things that were so difficult about the whole situation, not just NaNoWriMo, but the whole thing of lockdowns, work, shorter days, and longer nights rolling in and a whole pile of other things which made the whole backdrop of the event different and it made it harder. Every year I fall out of November into December with a cold that comes on through exhaustion and a need to sleep for a week to recover, because I run around like a blue arsed fly trying to do everything I need to do. Despite the exhausting nature of it, it's exhilarating. This year kind of wasn't. 

The thing I'm most upset about though is that I had a plan. I had a pretty solid plan and I figured that actually, this year was the time I was most likely to pull it off because my mum makes tea throughout the day, and even when she doesn't bring it to my desk, she puts it half way up the stairs and it's not far for me to go and grab it. I wasn't having to shop for meals or cook them or worry about anything like that. My mum does the laundry - though anyone who knows me knows I own enough clothes to get through most of, if not all, of the month without doing a load of laundry if I really have to, even if it means wearing things which aren't really weather appropriate on the days I'm not leaving the house. In theory, all I had to do was my job and my writing, as well as a bit of human-ing like showering and sleeping. 

What I wanted to do was write a few different projects that I have either had in my head for a while or that I have had a couple of runs at and decided I didn't like in that format. I wanted to just hammer the keyboard throughout the month and think about the editing later, in classic NaNoWriMo style, and more than anything I wanted to sprint to my personal best for NaNoWriMo, get my first 50k done in under five days, and then keep going at said alarming rate to really cement my membership in the overachievers club. 

I did none of the above. 

If I'm being completely honest with myself, I struggled to function as a human being during November. We were in the second set of national restrictions, I wasn't going out for a walk or a run as often as I had in the first national lockdown and my mental health took a dive that looked similar to the path of Oblivion at Alton Towers (a complete nosedive, following a brief pause where you stare down into the waiting abyss.) I finished "early" by most people's standards, but not by mine. I wrote a lot more than the 50k, but not what I was going for and I wrote every day, which is something I haven't done for a long while, even if NaNoWriMo. Despite having a 4thewords account and a streak that is very close to a year, I don't write every day. I think about it almost every day, and when I don't, I pay for it the next day with having to recover my streak. Writing every day, focusing on writing every day, and bringing myself back to the keyboard even when it was the last thing I wanted to do was a bit of an education and it was one that I was glad of. 

As you can see, there are things I am glad of from this year, and perhaps I needed this year to be a bit of a battering so I could knock my idea of myself during NaNoWriMo and this feeling that I can do anything in NaNoWriMo and sod the consequences, right off of its pedestal. I think I needed to remember that the rest of my life does not get suspended for the month, and also remember that I need a lot more tea and a lot more pizza than my parents do, particularly in November. I think that those things have made me develop a new reverence for NaNoWriMo and the dedication it demands, but, after a significant rest and turning my attention to finishing a few projects which are not writing-related and have lain on my desk untouched for too long, I think I finally feel ready to tackle the things I wanted to do in November, but just a little less fiercely and with a bit more time to get them done... 

I'm not expecting anything to get better overnight. The simple fact of the matter is that Brexit is on the horizon, the UK mutation of the virus will not be the only one, and vaccines take time. 2021 will not be a catch-all cure that repairs all that went wrong in 2020, but it is an opportunity, not to start again, but to keep going.