Writer & Photographer | Halifax, Canada
I’ve had a hard time figuring out my goals for this year, let alone how to talk about them.
I’ve been tempted to just write last year off entirely, to look at the admittedly ambitious targets I set a year ago, the things I still want to accomplish, and start fresh. Pretend that—as far as my personal and professional goals go—2020 just never happened. Go back to zero and start again.
But that’s not going to work, is it?
I didn’t want to write this post.
I wanted to be able to write about how I wrote every day—or at least most days—in October, and about how happy I am with the progress I’m making on Birthday Girl. I wanted to be able to write about settling into a good routine, at the very least.
But I can’t write about any of that, so this is the post I’m writing instead.
Every month, I share the articles and sites that I found most interesting. Here’s what caught my attention in April: what might happen to the novel, film vs. digital, journalling and goalsetting, Norman Rockwell, and more.
Is it just me, or is the year moving really quickly? But in a weird way: there’s part of me that feels like January and February took forever, but then I freak out because how is it March already?
It’s probably just me.
Anyway. February.
I’ve got to rebuild routines that the holiday season shattered, and find my way back into stories I haven’t thought about in a month. I have to navigate a minefield of existential crises, brought on by that same new year/birthday season. January is dark and rainy or so cold I can’t even bring myself to walk to the coffee shop to interact with someone that isn’t my cat. If it wasn’t for those big goals and dreams, I don’t think I’d be able to make it through the month.
The year—the decade—isn’t even two weeks old and it’s already testing my optimism. I keep sitting down to write this post, and I just stare at the blinking cursor, trying to figure out what to say about my goals for the new year, trying to figure out how to say that I’m still hopeful. That despite everything, my goals for this year are more ambitious than they have been for the last few.
The last two weeks have been kind of great. I’ve been: rethinking | putting | crying | listening | sending | waiting | accepting | eating | risking | realizing…
I kind of feel like I should start this with some kind of ‘it was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ riff.
I thought that October was going to be busy, that there were a lot of things that would get in the way of my creative goals.
It turned out to be even busier than I expected: I’ve only had one full week without interruptions (even today they’re testing the fire alarms in my building, which is always a joy—that’s why I’m working on this blog post instead of fiction), I’ve had inconvenient (but not serious) health issues crop up, and it’s just been generally difficult to stay motivated.
But I did it.
September hasn’t been terrible, and after July and August, I’ll take it.
But I do need to get past ‘not terrible’ and start making real progress again.
