hindsight is 2020

I don't know what possessed me to come looking at this old blog today, but wow, January 2019? That literally feels like a lifetime ago. I don't remember exactly what kept me from writing in the rest of the 2019 months, but I think anyone reading this will understand why a drop-off continued after 2020. 

So much has changed since then.

So much for the world, certainly, but also so much for myself. The biggest example I can think of is that I realized something during 2020 that had nothing to do with the global pandemic. All that darkness I wrote about a few posts before this? I was right about it being serious burnout, but what I didn't realize was that it was specifically of the autistic kind. I'd never even considered that I was autistic before that year, but when a close friend was diagnosed it brought some things within me to light. It wasn't a bad thing. Actually it was wonderful. All that time, for so long, I was so convinced that I was just broken as a human. Realizing I was autistic also meant realizing...I wasn't broken at all. 

It was a very emotional, but also a very freeing year of learning about myself and about ASD. And all of that learning, all of that new understanding for myself and my mind, lead to a beautiful time of healing. I realized I was autistic pretty early on in 2020, and by that summer I finally felt ready to...well, to exist again. My local library posted a job listing. I applied, and after one interview I was offered a position. A part time position, which was perfect for what I needed. The entire process felt as unreal as the rest of that year had, but the longer I was there the more real it felt, until eventually I looked up one day and realized it was officially the longest I had ever had a single job. I'm still there to this day!

Well, technically. At this very moment I am actually on a bit of a work leave, which was why I've had so much time to jog down some memory lanes and stumble across this blog in the first place. It's not a very fun work leave, though; I broke my ankle in three places, had to have surgery, and was told not to bear weight on the ankle for 8 weeks. I'm currently approaching the end of week six. Three more to go!

I've taken this time off to try and refocus myself on what I wanted to do all those years ago, back in 2019 when I had a dream of earning a living with nothing but my art, my writing, and a bit of gumption. I still have a RedBubble Shop, I focus most of my social media attempts on my BlueSky account, and sometime not too long ago I cleaned up my personal website. I make a couple of dollars a year on RedBubble with some popular Christmas designs, but otherwise I have certainly been less focused on art as I would have liked - and a lot less focused on writing, too. So I figured, why not give it another go? I'll just pick up right where I left off. There aren't exactly a lot of people here reading anyway, so that's about as low stakes as you can get. 

So, then. Hi! Hello, here I am. Let's go again.