a tentative return

i want to write more. i want to start blogging regularly again. what's stopping me?

i was at a birthday party recently (i was masked, of course). the host was turning 28 and said multiple times while i was there that they felt old. i’m 27, and whenever someone under the age of 40 tells me that they feel old, my immediate response is basically to disagree with them. “you're not old!” we can debate the effectiveness of that if you like, but what interests me in this case is that i think that's at least partly a reaction to the impacts of age and increasing disability on my body.

to put it bluntly, i’m tired in a way that i wasn't when i was 22. i think a lot of other people in the second half of their 20s, and a lot of people in their 30s, feel this. i think that's why they say they feel old. there's an extent to which, if you grew up with enough privilege, the training wheels of college shield you from a lot of the realities of adult life. i certainly feel that i was shielded—i think my parents' helicopter tendencies and their lack of trust for me during my teenage years contributed significantly to this.

2020 hit me hard, and i have not recovered. there are ways in which i will never recover—i am permanently disabled due to long Covid—and, perhaps, ways in which i can heal some of the damage that was done. all i can do is move forward, one eye on my past to try to avoid making the same mistakes, the other on the road ahead so that i theoretically don't stumble.

what does any of this have to do with writing?

being out of school, i’m not exercising my mental muscles regularly in the same way. the conversations that i have with my friends are so specific to those friendships, so context-dependent, that i don't really feel able to write about them. the majority of my disability stuff impacts my energy levels and ability to do things and communicate. (i had some very scary moments just a few months ago where the processing link that controls my ability to put my thoughts into words just broke randomly. i still have no clue what i’ll do if that happens again.)

i know that i have interesting things to say. unfortunately, a lot of those things fall into a loose category where my opinions would look much better backed by a bunch of things that other people have written. i’ve fallen into the trap of feeling that this writing that i do on this blog needs to be certain things to be valid. until i typed that out just now, i didn't actually realize it.

and then there's the finishing a piece of writing. i have ADHD; i’m very good at starting new projects, much less good at seeing them through to the end.

something that i’ve remembered while writing all of this out is that my blog has always been a space for me to process my feelings, no matter what that looks like. i need to stop trying to make it something that isn't that. i will never be the type of writer who is incredibly well-researched—my writing draws on my lived experiences. that's the point. i need to stop trying to be an academic about this.

so, yeah, i’m going to see if i can have one thought every week that i think is worth exploring via the medium of writing.