Sometimes you just want answers, right?
I know I do...
Look, to say the least, it's been a weird past week.
It started last Sunday. October 31st. Halloween and the last day of October, all wrapped into one. What a perfect day to usher into this new month of November, a month (for me at least) that I had intended to pack full of new goals and achievements and which, I had hoped, would be start of a "new me", a different me --- a better me. Right?
Wrong. Look, I'm not going to sit here and lie about how every single thing in my life has gone to hell in a handbasket over the course of a measly 7 days (it hasn't), but I'll be damned if I can't lament just how hard the universe actually tried to make it happen. First was a personal commitment that I had gotten roped into just the previous week. I'm not going to divulge many of the details of the situation, but needless to say, I really didn't want to do it. For one thing, it was for a friend of family (not a friend), and for another, the situation required a lot of stressful planning and maneuvering that was just absolutely abysmal timing as far as my other goals for the week went.
Which leads into the second source of stress and shortcoming: my writing. It is November. National Novel Writing Month. I had intended, with all the hope and optimism in the world, that 2021 would finally be the year that saw my first completion of the NaNoWriMo challenge and my first ever completed novel. It still might be, to be fair. November's not over, and I've still got plenty of time (and desire) to get the job done, but realistically, I've made it a whole lot harder to even get close to that point. So not fun. Having your deepest dreams and ambitions get squashed so thoroughly, so suddenly --- so violently --- it hurts. And it's turned me off and away from writing for a good solid week, even as I had just made the personal re-commitment of practicing daily writing in some form. So, yeah. Not fun.
Where do I go from here? I started this article with the title "Rambling On Until I Find the Solution to All My Problems", and although I didn't actually think I was somehow going to stumble upon some silver bullet over the course of a 30 minute freewriting session, surely there is some nugget of wisdom waiting for me right now, ready to reward me for this sustained period of reflection and writing... right?
I don't know. I think it's a lot more likely, now that I'm facing some uncomfortable truths in this moment, that there is no silver bullet and that all I can do is complete one task at a time, like I'm doing right now.
So I think I found it.
My silver bullet.
Work.
Just do it.
That's it.
Wow. What a disappointing solution to all my problems.
