It has been—

[Looking at calendar]

—3 weeks since I last write here on JALC.

[Allow me to pause one more moment to turn said calendar over to February.]

Now there’s a few main reasons for my radio silence. First and most prominently, I was on deadline for a stretch. An inevitable part of life for the non-profit grants professional. Especially one as prone to procrastination and over-scheduling as I can sometimes be.

Yeah, I had a couple proposals due near the end of January. Proposals for something the company has never pursued before, and for a competition I’ve never done before at any time of my career. Which is all fine: I like being able to add new skills to my toolbox, and now that these deadlines are in the rearview, I’m really glad for everything I learned in doing these projects.

Still, in the moment, I will be the first to admit that my learning curve was STEEP.

If I were less of a procrastinator—and, quite frankly, if I hadn’t been in total and complete burnout at the end of 2020—I could have done more to dig into this funding competition and its requirements while I was on holiday break.

But I didn’t. Which meant that after I posted on January 11th, I knew I needed to dig deep and keep my focus on work for a couple weeks.

Which I did.

I mean, not every second of every day. But intensely enough that it kept me from blogging.

One, I was saving my good brain space for work work rather than for here. Two, I honestly woulda felt guilty if my friends and colleagues saw me blogging here during all these evenings I had proposal work that needed doing.

Then, even once the deadlines had been met (Yay!), I didn’t come back here for another week because of all the other stuff:

—

Catching up on the Inauguration:

I was in the thick of it on January 20th, so I recorded hours and hours of coverage on the DVR and have been slowly watching through it. At this point, there’s another hour or two of that “Celebrating America” concert from Inauguration evening to go and I’ll finally be caught up.

Never mind all the ways that these first couple weeks of Biden’s terms have felt like emerging from a country-wide abusive marriage: hopeful and vulnerable and uncertain all at the same time.

—

Living and Dying in a Pandemic:

One of Mr. Mezzo’s uncles passed away in January (long illness, not COVID). Which opened up its own immediate grief, compounded by all the ways that our good-bye rituals are no longer possible in these COVID times.

And also re-opened all the rawness I feel about losing my own uncle back in July (sudden medical crisis, not COVID), and how we still haven’t been able to gather to celebrate him and inter his ashes.

—

Pre-diabetes Follies:

After a nice long stretch of good endocrinology reports and appointments, I had a bad one near the end of the month.

There’s a lot more for me to process there, and I’m sure I’ll use the blog to do that. I just needed several days to lick my wounds before I was ready for that next step.

—

Shiny New Objects:

I’ve started playing around a bit more on Instagram—the kind of quick hit expression that wasn’t so guilt-making for me during a deadline crunch. And it’s new and fun and kept my attention apres-deadline.

And I was enjoying the escapist ease of reading rather than writing. For the most part, the jar of reading prompts kept serving up the YA titles on my challenge list, which were nice relaxing brain popcorn for me amidst all the rest of this stuff.

—

So yeah, a bunch of reasons for my “wee” blog-cation. Sort of puts an ironic twist on my goal to get out there and shine during 2021.

Oh well. At least no one can say I wasn’t choosing authentically when I took this hibernation break.

============

Image credits:

• Calendar: photo taken by the author, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
• Woman climbing: Pixabay. Open license.