Goodbye to All That

The rest of 2015. What am I going to do?

What did I even do with the first part of 2015? I wasted a lot of time, that’s what I did. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent jacking around on the computer, looking at the same sites over and over again, researching stuff until my brain was raw, which only served to feed my OCD and make me think something had to be wrong. Yeah, I’m one of those. Something has to wrong now or something has to be wrong just around the corner.

Or try to sleep. That was a biggie. Most people sleep. I try to sleep. Of course that required a lot of research on what to do to go to sleep and what to do while I wasn’t sleeping. Usually the latter was filled with the aforementioned researching ways to get to sleep.

I also wasted time not reading books. I tried but I couldn’t focus. I read a hell of a lot of magazines but they were good magazines, like Smithsonian or The New Yorker. Well, actually, I read New York magazine which I accidentally subscribed to because it sounded a lot like The New Yorker and was a lot cheaper. It’s about the city of New York, in case you’re interested.

Then, in July, I broke my desert summertime malaise and hauled my germaphone ass to the east coast to see my family. It really is good to get the hell out of where you are sometimes, even if you take your problems and issues and all parts of your personality–both good and bad–with you.

Getting out of my rut helped me see what a lump of not much I was being, and when I was on my trip I started going to museums, taking day trips with my sister and started walking to the bay daily. That was really the thing that helped the most. I had gained some weight during this just-hang-out-and-not-do-much phase, and worse than that, I was out of shape.

The walking helped my mind as well as my body, and I when I got home, I started walking every day. The more I walked, the better I felt. I felt as if I was actually doing something, that this perennial dilettante could stick to something and make it work. (Hence the title of my blog Alwaysstartingsomethingnew.)

Walking boosted my energy and mental state so that I finally was able to think about doing something else. That something else was writing, which I dabbled in since I learned to write but never had the patience to do every day or to sit down and write books like my sister does.

Signing up for Writing 101 helped get me back into a routine. A productive routine, not a shitty nothing-to-show-for-it time-wasting routine. The more I produce, the more I want to produce.

I’m not going to lie and say that Writing 101 has helped me start a life-long habit of writing daily, but it sure is a good start to just writing. Just Fucking Writing. Anything. Any length. Any quality. Then once I do that, maybe I can start editing my work and improving its quality. Or not.

I’m not a writer, I’m a person who writes sometimes. That’s what I’m going to do with the rest of 2015, and that’s good enough for me.