Wanting to Write and Not Finding the Words

I’ve been trying to write a blog post for months. I have drafts and half finished ideas scattered across half a dozen apps as both text and voice notes. Plenty of words but not the time or the space to craft them into something more coherent.

So instead of trying to work through that pile I’m typing this. My only intention is to write and just hit publish. To send some message out, if only to start somewhere.

I honestly can’t believe it’s June. So much has happened. This year has gone whizzing by and I feel like I’m a passenger just watching all go by out of the window.

There’s the unending hellscape of COVID19 that’s causing so much pain and grief around the world. At the same time it’s “normal” here, no cases, no restrictions, not any real sign that anything is wrong. I mean “normal”, as in we just carry on living and doing the same mundane things whilst around the world this disease takes hold and destroys. I don’t know how to feel about that. This island we live in has created a bubble of safety, and now we’ve just closed the door and shut the rest of the world out.

I bought a house! We laid down roots here in Adelaide and took on a mortgage. We moved up to the hills and now we wake up to the sight and smell of gum trees and listen to birdsong. We go to sleep to the croaking frogs in our pond. A pond! I own a pond. I also live in a dome (a hexadome to be precise). Who’d of thunk it?

Work has been intense. I’ve spent the last few months… doing everything. I have honestly lost count of the things I have done and the number of contexts I have had to shift into. I’ve gone from developing timelines and project budgets to councilling and mediating relationships to working on proposals, facilitating workshops and writing about pedagogy. And that’s just a Tuesday! I work the week and then just try and turn off my brain over the weekend to recover. The chaos of work is just unrelenting, it’s drama upon drama upon drama. And when there’s a day which in contrast seems peaceful – I’m buried in a mountain of built up emails and messages. My To Do List isjust a record of what I didn’t do that week rather because fifty other “urgent” things came along and sucked up every hour in the week.

As we hit 6 months in to 2021 I’m just …. tired.

I’d love to be able to plan my day and not have it overridden by everyone else’s priorities. I’d love to get back to writing up my ideas, thinking through them and trying to turn them into something that makes sense. I’ve pulled out a number of half-baked ones this last month in particular and remembered why I wanted to do this, and then something else happens and I have to stuff it into a draw again.

I’d love to sit out under ours trees and write and think without feeling guilty. I’d love to not feel burdened to perform or be on and ready. I’d love to not have to sort out other peoples mess and instead make my own for once.

I’d love to just finish a few things…

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