Back when I had an active Tumblr, I think maybe every fourth or fifth post would start out as "I'm sorry, the two readers who actually care about hearing updates from me, for the absence!" I'm not going to do that here because:
1) I'm not even sure I have two readers on this thing. Blogging is so Aughts. Squarespace doesn't have some sort of RSS feed in the community option and I can not see myself EVER turning this into an email newsletter. So expressing guilt over what essentially is me talking to myself seems... unproductive.
2) I'm fairly active on Facebook and Instagram, which is where the people I care about updating my life to end up getting updates on my life anyway.
3) That's not the point of this site. Or at least, I don't think it was the point of this site. What IS the point of this site?
Oh right. I think it was to basically have some sort of easy archive for long-form writing now that I've stopped blogging/reporting for a living.
I think it was also my attempt at lifestyle writing. And I guess one thing I realized halfway through last year was that as much as I love going places & seeing new things & eating basically everything in sight, it was hard for me to write something that *I*, a perpetual sarcastic curmudgeon who generally disdains ~positivity~ and ~this glamorous life~ posts, would actually find interesting.
Turns out that when you’re blogging for yourself, and you’re not engaged in what you’ve wrote, it’s really hard to stay motivated to keep writing. Go figure!
Also though, full disclosure, I was hit by a major depressive episode sometime in mid-March, brought on by a mix of a come-down from the high of non-stop travel, the really meh Shanghai weather, a very boring post-project work life, and well… possibly years of littler depressive episodes I’d chosen to ignore.
I won’t get into it much here, except that it took nearly all of Spring and much of Summer to dig myself out of that hole. It made it so I didn’t want to meet anyone or talk to anybody. Forcing myself to maintain important relationships through the haze of my depression took up 90% of my mental energy. Fortunately, being a functional depressive still helped me come up generally aces, what with joining new political organizations, pushing through various work projects and some bursts of vacationing and freelancing even. So that, even as I came home everyday and lay prone on a couch contemplating the many ways I could just fucking disappear already, there was no outwardly visible sign of my deteriorating mental state - as my Instagram can attest. There's a lesson in here, kids!
I’m better now though! Kinda!
I was invited by my company to move into a different, much more busy role in a new city in China. Unlike my last posting, I have almost no time on my hands, running from project to project non-stop ten hours a day. And yet, being this busy has ignited a fire to write for myself again! Funny how that works.
I’m not promising anything, but hopefully this means more posts are a-coming.
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