Sinking into a routine is really difficult when there’s no structure in your life.
My day job is a special education teacher, so I’m used to having an insane amount of structure in my workday because my kiddos need that structure (they need structure on top of structure with a crayon on top).
Teaching from my home since March 11th, while glorious at first due to a lack of commute, meant that my structure suddenly became nonexistent. Granted I’ve still been teaching 8-hour days via Google Meet and Zoom, but it doesn’t put you in work mode in quite the same way as walking around my classroom usually does.
Yesterday was the last day of school for the summer (independent schools end early - yay!) and now I’m suddenly staring into this 2.5 month long void of nothingness… ahhh!
I’ve fallen back into old habits (reading manga by the shelfful) and some new (audiobooks are cooler than I thought), and although I’ll be teaching summer school (again from the comfort and prison of my home), I feel this itch to do something truly productive with my time that also fits me.
With the country (and the world) in its current state of affairs, it feels challenging to feel like I am being productive and making a difference. I don’t want to be wasting my time, and I’m doing my best to support others in a way that is sustainable for me (mentally and monetarily).
One of the things that I want to focus my time on is my writing. I know I’ve said this before, we’ve all said something like this before, where I want to spend time on my passion and my craft and really focus on me and my joy (and hopefully others too as a result). I’ve been writing on and off for the last few years, and I’ve neglected this blog tremendously - and it was initially created as a writing tool to keep me sharp on a daily basis (thanks HH for the motivation).
I’m hoping to check back in with the writing more regularly - posts and short pieces - just to get the wheel fully turning again.
Writing through the lens of my own journey has been challenging, especially because it feels like the next part of my journey isn’t over, so how could I write about it? It’s taken some time just to fully accept that my first book, Calypso , was not only a coming out story for me, but just the first part of my coming out and understanding who I am as a person. Like, it’s really just me coming out. Wow.
In the midst of 2020 I think a lot of us are trying to understand who we are as people, and who the people around us really are.