Balance

I’ve spent the last couple weeks thinking about what I want to achieve this year, and my ideas keep circling back to a singular theme: balance. I’ve spent the last couple years rebuilding my hopes and goals for the long-term and focusing on consistency in areas I care about, and now it’s time to make sure my approach to all these domains remains, well, balanced.

So what does my Year of Balance entail?

Consistency in Review

At the start of this year, 2023, I took a look at my life and decided the theme for the year should be consistency. In 2022, I focused on rebuilding myself–pulling together the pieces of a world turned upside-down by a global pandemic and revisiting my personal and professional goals (and in regards to my writing, how I want that personal goal to become professional). This year was focused on continuing that growth toward something more consistent: regular writing, positive work-life balance, and improved physical and mental health.

I’m happy to say I’ve had many successes, but I’ve also had a few misses.

So let’s look at 2023 in review.

November Roundup

November is always a busy month for me–it’s NaNoWriMo, students (and teachers) start itching for Thanksgiving break and the holidays, and this year was Fyrecon, too. So when I say I busy last month, I mean it! So let’s look back and see what happened.

Origin Story

I’ve been entering the Writers of the Future contest for a year now, and I’ve earned three consecutive Silver Honorable Mentions. I’m eager to win, and sometimes I imagine I’m at the awards gala, giving my acceptance speech. What would I say? Who would I thank?

Every time I imagine this, it gets me thinking more broadly: What’s my writer story? How did I get started, and who were the mentors and supporters that got me where I am today?

So since it’s been on my mind, I’d like to share my own origin story.

What to Write?

Lately I’ve been writing a lot of fiction. Since the start of the year, I’ve written at least six new stories (honestly, I haven’t counted, but I know I’ve written at least one a month) and I’ve sent them all out to market. What I haven’t written is a single blog post.

This blog has been a part of my life (albeit to varying degrees) for the past thirteen years. In that time, it’s been everything from a place to share my fiction and poetry to a personal blog talking about everything from religion and politics to mental health and queer culture. It’s evolved as I have, usually spiking in content between semesters while I was in college and then plummeting in content once I started working full time.

In some ways, my life is more uniform now, so I don’t feel as though there’s very much to write about personally. And the things I would write about often involve experiences teaching, which by nature involves talking about students, and while I might occasionally post snippets of a conversation that were funny on Facebook, I try not to talk publicly about students for both professional and privacy reasons.

I could talk about writing–but why talk about writing when I could just write?

This post, so far, feels like filler. It’s me thinking aloud. But isn’t all of my blog just me thinking aloud? So maybe it still fits. Part of me wishes I could embed a poll to get a sense of what my audience wants to read…which considering you followed this blog, is probably more of what I’ve written for years.

But then I grind against the taboos of being a professional author: don’t talk about religion or politics. But I’m a religious person, and everything is inherently political in today’s world.

So what’s a writer to do?

I could go back to publishing more fiction and poetry, but (at least regarding fiction) I think I’ve finally grown to a skill level that I’m capable of getting published, so I feel compelled to send stories to market rather than posting them on my blog. Is that selling out to the capitalist overlords of society? Nah, I don’t think so. It’s just engaging in the business of writing, rather than the hobby of it, and that’s critical to achieving my aspirations.

So again, what’s a writer to do?

Honestly, I don’t know. But I haven’t forgotten about this blog; I just don’t know what it’s supposed to be anymore. If you have any suggestions, please share them below.

In the meantime, do something you love. For me, that’s picking up a book or writing a story. Yesterday, in fact, I read a bit of four different books–I read like that. It’s weird, I know. But it’s how my brain works, so I just embrace it. What’s something you love to do?

Rebuilding to…what’s next?

Every year I start by blogging about my goals or theme for the year. For 2022, that theme was Rebuilding: trying to find myself again after a global pandemic, setting my sights on new long-term goals to move from just surviving toward truly thriving.

I came a long way: I invested in my writing through various workshops and conferences, and I wrote more than I have in years–I also submitted more stories for publication than ever before. Not only did I earn an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future contest, but I also had my first short story published. (You can check it out here.) I’ve also been accepted to a teaching fellowship through Teach for America that is helping me push my teaching skills to the next level, and I’m excited to start applying everything I’ve learned in my classroom.

So what’s next? What does 2023 hold for me?

Summer Sails Away

It’s hard to believe the summer is almost over, but as I write this, my last Friday of summer vacation is fading into the background. So have I met my summer goals?

Ha! Not at all. But I have managed to do a few even greater things.

Back in the Habit(ica)

Here’s how I got through my last two years of undergrad: I used a website called Habitica.com to gamify my to-do list. I added assignments, personal goals, and generally good habits to my list of habits, dailies, and to-dos, and getting gold and experience points for crossing things off the list helped motivate me to get it all done.

Then I started working full-time, and my daily routine became so routine that I didn’t need to keep track of things in the same way as I did before, and my use of Habitica dropped off.

I’ve tried to go back to it a few times, but it’s just never worked…trying to codify my entire life in it was just not realistic anymore. But I think I’ve got a new approach that’ll help me keep to it better, and I think I’ll need it just to get through the summer.

Long Term Goals

Isn’t it ironic that after I post about ending blogging, I get inspired to blog more? It’s actually not surprising, though: it’s summer now, and I have free time again.

So maybe I was a little hasty to say I’d stop blogging forever–but I needed to write that last post to process the possibility. Now that I have, I can look at things more holistically: The problem with blogging, no, the challenge preventing me from blogging is work.

And in the summers when I don’t work, I can blog more. So much like how beloved TV shows have seasons and off-seasons, maybe that’s my approach to blogging: I’ll blog in the summer when I’ve got time, and I’ll go on hiatus when the school year starts.

But what’s any of that got to do with my long-term goals? Since the start of my blogging career, one of my most returned-to topics has been my goals, so it makes sense that my first new post of this summer’s season is, yet again, about goals–but bigger and better.

To 2022: What I Need from You

It’s been a long tradition to make my first post of the new year about my goals and ambitions for the year ahead. My goals have been growing and expanding for years…and over the past few years, I’ve yet to actually fully achieve all the goals I’ve written about.

Goals, I thought, were a better way forward than resolutions. The latter, I claimed, sought to fix what was broken about the previous year, but I didn’t buy that brokenness approach. Goals, I thought, would provide a north star without subscribing to that mindset.

Turns out there may yet be a better approach than all of this.