Forgive me, blog, for I have sinned. It has been **checks notes** 7 years (🤯) since my last post.

Every spring, I have to decide whether to renew the annual cost of owning this domain name. Every year since 2018, I have come very close to hitting cancel. It’s only out of sheer laziness that I haven’t. I finally figured that I’m paying for this thing — I might as well use it. There’s plenty to write, and if all goes well, there will be plenty more.

To say it’s been a strange ride since I last wrote in here would be a laughable understatement. To try to do any kind of meaningful actual update on those intervening years would be equally ridiculous. So I’m picking up here at this time code without concern for what was missed in the fast forward. The plot had its twists and turns, but the ending is still on its way and TBD by plenty of other factors.

What I will say about the time since February 2018 is that it can be characterized by a few choice words. The one rolling around in my mind right now is “almost.” I came close to realizing a lot of my priorities. Some of them, I did realize, only to see them crumble.

Frustrating. Sad. Wasteful.

In the past now.

This year has been particularly challenging, in a way that no year since 2018 has been — not even those pandemic years. I’ve been staggering through events in my personal life that have toppled the structure I had built atop what I believed to be a sturdy foundation, and which have left me questioning core pieces of my worldview. Everything about this time has been erratic. I’ve been emotionally volatile, my energy has been virtually non-existent from the simmering anger and sadness always coursing through me, I have been getting nowhere near enough socialization, my eating/sleeping/activity/bathing/general adulting habits have been all over the place; there has been no routine to speak of.

I’ve felt wronged, insulted, tarnished, judged, abandoned, unimportant, forgotten, betrayed, mistreated, and rejected.

I’ve felt stressed, alone, scared, confused, hurt, angry, stupid, hopeless, devastated, nervous, useless, mournful, and exhausted.

I thought more than once about giving up entirely.

I knew incorporating exercise into my life would make a difference. When I think of the time in my life when I was most emotionally, psychologically, and physically healthy, it was when I was disciplined around being physically active. The two-pronged problem standing in my way for months was a total lack of motivation alongside deep apathy.

Then one day — if you’ll forgive the facile, cryptic, and highly suspect jump cut (again) — everything in the space around me was suddenly batshit crazy. That’s coming from someone who was pretty sure she was the dictionary definition of crazy at this point, so to see that things around me had out-crazied me to the batshit level was… something. The abrupt intensity filled me with a new kind of restlessness that was frenetic, and HAD to be released before I exploded into a million pieces. And so I found myself back at the gym for the first time in years.

For the past two weeks, I have been sticking with my plans and commitments to self to prioritize my overall health.
I am running again.
I am preparing thoughtful meals for myself and not consuming meals from restaurants again.
I am managing my finances responsibly again.
I am writing to detangle my thoughts again.
I am making an effort to keep a social life again.
I am getting out of bed in the morning again.

I am trying again.

**deep breath**