I've written before about the way that my heart broke with the ending of NaNoWriMo, and the fact that even the mere existence of 2.0 made things hurt a little less, even though I still had to acknowledge what we had lost in the process. I'm not interested in rehashing any of that now, and not because it's just past midnight on the 1st of November, but because for reasons I can't be too sure on, this year my heart doesn't feel anything like as heavy and it's not holding all of the melancholy that came with the last few years of this month. November used to be my favourite month of the year, and so many good things have happened in it or because of it, and I'm apparently unconsciously choosing to celebrate that and bask in the happiness that is my favourite month of the year.
It's weird though, because last November I was at home A LOT, unable to move much and feeling horrendously ill for being in my eleven millionth month of pregnancy, being four times the size I normally am and feeling pumped full of hormones that I was terrified of everything and only ever a few seconds away from crying. I was the sort of odd that I was having near on constant conversations with my stomach the first half of the month not to tell my son not to come out because he would be premature (by that point in pregnancy a lot of parents are thinking just come out already, and it's okay that they're not focusing on how hard prematurity can be - you can only experience what is in front of you) but because I desperately wanted to get to go to a gig I had been waiting for, for a record I had been waiting for, and I had already missed going to see Feeder and I was gutted. I spent the day of the gig telling my son that if he dared even think about coming out or trying to start plans for making an exit during the gig, I was going to call him Brian after Brian Dales, because Brian as a name for a baby is a strange one to me. Thankfully, he stayed put.
In previous years, I have gained some of the most amazing friends I have ever had including one of the guests at my wedding and a few others who were invited but couldn't make it (for exceptionally valid reasons!) I learnt that I can focus - I didn't know what hyper focus was at the time, okay? - for long enough periods of time to actually get projects finished and I even managed to read my own writing and get it to a stage I was happy with to share it with the world via self-publishing.
November taught me that I wasn't the only somewhat strange person on the planet and letting your weird out, even if for a while you need to do it in controlled doses, is completely okay, and you're allowed to love things. You can love things loudly and passionately and obsessively and if you're really lucky, you'll find other people to love the same thing along with you, and the pair or group of you together can just feed off each other's energy for that one thing. And liking that one thing together doesn't mean you have to like everything the same.
This November is different from any other November I have stayed up and written at midnight, because this year I'm a mum and I'm a wife, and in a few hours, my son is going to get up and want cuddles and playtime and bottles and feeding, and my husband is going to want the companionship of not being alone looking after our son, and I'm going to have had less sleep in order to have sat here writing this, but the biggest trade off tonight is that I get to feel like in all of the things which have changed in the last few years - and there have been some really big changes, not just my incredible little boy - I have a little bit of myself back. I have the strength to be the person who finished a 30 day challenge in 6 days, who wrote 101,101 words in a month and finished there because she liked the palindrome, and sipped prosecco to toast having broken 100k in a month, because it was something she had dreamed of. I get the girl back who once thought 10k days were insane and how the F can anyone do that? To the very next year smashing through 3 of them in a month. I can be the girl that hates talking in front of large crowds but gave a long speech in front of forty odd writers returning for the first overnight since COVID, finishing with Oh yeah, for those of you who don't know me, I'm Charlie to a chorus of laughter without the RSD kicking in to tell me they were all laughing at me, because surely the FIRST thing you do is introduce yourself, not the last.
The person who did those things, I am still that person. I am still brave and adventurous and ambitious and ludicrous and ridiculous and in some ways that's how I have the life I have now - you know, the boring and average and mundane married with a kid and a dog kind of life (it's anything but boring and average and mundane) - and it's the thing which will continue to permeate through the rest of my life. And whether I like it or not, NaNoWriMo was and is a big part of me, and for whatever reason, this year it feels like coming home and the best word I have for it right now is grateful.
This feels like such a flip from where I was only days or weeks ago when I saw that my bio on this blog is still very NaNoWriMo centred, but maybe I just needed to see that and gently stew on it for a little while.
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