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. 

It's Been a Long...

  It's been a long... 

I feel like here, in twenty twenty, we can fill in the rest of that sentence with any measure of time and it would be pretty accurate. It was a long weekend with the All Night Log On replacing the All Night Lock In on the London calendar of events for NaNoWriMo. Being so close to your bed that no one could actually stop you from just going and getting into it and checking out for the night brings a new measure of difficulty to an event which is already a marathon sprint. It's almost like someone is driving a golf buggy in front of you when you're running a marathon, but instead of just a normal golf buggy, it's one with super plush seats and it's warm enough but cool enough and there are snacks and drinks and cushions and it's lovely, but there is that nagging thing of you would be letting yourself down and no one wants to do that. Unlike on a normal day, well, a normal ANLI, we lost of fifty per cent of the participants overnight as people finished their fifty thousand words, realised that they were keeping partners, parents or pets away or they just started getting headaches and other issues and had to retire for the good of their health, and believe me, the thought of following them was so tempting, especially when I went into the fourth hour of a caffeine headache and my wifi was dropping out despite the laptop being sat directly next to the router, and there being seemingly no issue with the router or the other laptop I was actually writing on - just the one that was hosting the call - though it only booted everyone out on one occasion so that's pretty good going. 

This year NaNoWriMo felt like Such. A. Long. Month. because rather than being able to meet people in person and spend time with them, give them a big squeezey hug as you're leaving each other for the evening and scream I LOVE YOU, DON'T DIE! down London's streets to them followed by a fit of the giggles, we had to resort to online writing events that took us away from our favourite destinations of coffee shops in town and all of the museums, from having a brew and a natter and seeing everyone's lovely faces, to dealing with strange microphone and web cam set ups that don't necessarily inspire a great deal of comfort. Whilst the community survived online, and there are definitely advantages to being able to, or being forced to, host in this way, I can't wait for the day I am able to wrap my arms around my writers again and tell them how much I missed them, because I did. And I missed having loose leaf tea with them in Yum Chaa. I'm praying that Yum Chaa survive this year. 

It's been a long year because there has been a constant bombardment of bad news (EXCEPT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!) with the pandemic adding further pressures onto businesses that were struggling and causing many to buckle under the weight of new pressures. Once more we are seeing an economic recession which is costing jobs and livelihoods and robbing people of the stability that has, in many cases, been exceedingly hard won. I can't help but watch the news and wonder what will become of the local high street and the city shopping district. Are we moving towards a day where we order everything online, because we can, and then what? How soon does it become that we stop going outside because we don't have to and, those of us who can afford to, just get everything delivered to our doors? It is a horrible thought. 

I've been considered lucky, because being a civil servant gave me the flexibility to work from home from the moment things looked a bit too ropey, and that's exactly what I have done. I've been really lucky because there's three of us and a dog in a house with a spare bedroom. My parents and my brother were all furloughed, so for a long time, there was only me having to work, which was a frustrating and exhausting experience of its own, but also hearing people talk about how difficult furlough was for them, not because of financial issues, has got to the point where it pisses me right off. People are saying they were bored, and I know it can very much be a the grass is always greener situation and if I had been furloughed I might have been bored within a week and wanting to get online to do some work, but I also spent the whole of lock down one doing things like knitting baby blankets (I am nearly finishing my third) and making face masks for friends and family and also selling a few to help me raise some extra cash for Macmillan. I ran for London Landmarks Half Marathon, though on the day I didn't do thirteen miles because of injury. There was so much more I wanted to do as well, but whilst working a full time job and spending time with family, it was a bit of a juggling act. 

I'm really hoping that this start of the twenties is not setting the tone for the whole decade, because that would be a more than difficult pill to swallow. It's long and arduous and in some places people are working together and doing amazing things and in others they are throwing parties and not caring who it hurts, or who it could kill. There are organisations who are penalising their workers for the crime or infraction of not living with the person that they're in a relationship with and that is one of the hardest things imaginable. I once complained to an ex that I was not a f***ing tamagotchi and that's what we have all turned into this year. If lock down rules mean you can't see your significant other, it becomes texts and calls of I love you, I miss you, I want to see you, and strain like that can break relationships, though so can being thrown together too soon and for extended periods of time when we were only allowed out of our homes for an hour. Friends of mine have been quite lucky that they have been ready to move in together and the lock down just became their excuse, but for some people that wasn't feasible, or it might not have been practical. 

It's really hard to imagine that many doctors and nurses or other hospital staff moved out of their homes to try and keep their families safe. It is hard to imagine a lot of the things that people have been through this year, but with the vaccine now on the horizon, it looks as though there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's the light you see as you pass out from your medical stabbing because, like me, you are petrified of needles. That being said, I got myself used to needles enough to be able to give blood so hopefully I will be alright.