Well, it's certainly not been on writing, has it?
That's not really true; it has and it hasn't.
At the end of last year, I decided that my 4thewords streak was going so well and I wanted to commit to it further so I bought myself a year-long subscription and thought that would be enough of a kick up the bum to get me writing more regularly.
The truth is though, I needed a bit of a break because the world feels like a lot at the moment, life feels a lot, work is a lot and the last thing I really need is to be heaping more pressure on myself, and yet I am doing in other areas, so writing had to hit the backburner. Yes, it is very often cathartic, and I know that's a common experience among writers, but when it's also something where you put pressure on yourself, whether it be to write a number of words or pages a day or to make a project come out beautifully, anything really where it is forcing yourself to do something, it adds an extra layer of pressure that is not necessarily healthy.
A lot of people in the UK have been furloughed, whether that was during the initial lockdown or whether it was the flexi-furlough where people have been on reduced hours, but that's not been my experience. The industry I work in very quickly told those of us not tied - figuratively - to an office space that we should work from home for the foreseeable future. At the time, we thought that was likely to be maybe a few weeks, then maybe three months and we're now nearly twelve months on from that decision and we haven't been asked to go back in just yet.
Whilst that has meant I haven't had to worry about my job security like a lot of other people have experienced, and I do count myself as exceedingly lucky given the number of people who have needed to start using food banks and other support just to make it to the end of the month and get their next paycheck, it does mean that work has been a bit relentless. I've had odd days of leave here and there, and I have gone through most of my entitlement for the year, but I haven't had the same kind of break I would normally get from taking some time off and going to somewhere that is away from work and I haven't had the masses of time to fill that others have described. I know of a lot of people who have actually enjoyed the furlough scheme, for their own reasons, and whilst I am really glad, as mentioned, of not having to worry about job security, I can't help but be a bit envious of the ten weeks plus that others were away from their jobs on a fairly decent proportion of their wages. I'm not saying I would have written any more if I had have had that time because that's something I will never know, but it is something I'm curious about.
Something that definitely has factored into my lack of writing though has been my almost complete and utter inability to self-censor.
I'm having to get a lot better at this, but it's something I find really hard! What I'm talking about is things like, I want to share how difficult I have been finding certain things to do with, for example, putting clothes on ebay which were my previous size. (I have been finding this difficult, but it's not something I really want to talk about!) Whilst that in itself can seem harmless, it's often the reason why I'm doing certain things is the reason I want to talk about the thing itself. Following the example, I might say something like finally admitting I'm more likely to gain more weight rather than lose enough to fit into the things that no longer fit. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, but that's the conversation that is prompted by the talking about the ebaying... All will become clearer in a few months, honestly.
So, that's kind of it for now, because otherwise I will fail epically at the self-censoring.
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