Still Alive (hiatus recap)

No, you’re not seeing things.

This is an actual post from the actual Laidig. It’s ok, I don’t know what’s happening, either.

Right now, it’s the height of Scottish Autumn. The days are shorter, the temperature has dropped, and it’s currently pouring with rain. So grab a duvet, a hot drink, and let’s talk about the year that’s gone by.

It’s been an interesting (and unplanned) hiatus, and it was probably a long time coming. In a nutshell, it has been a chaotic year. Out of a nutshell…

You know how it is. The longer you put off one thing, the less motivated you become to actually follow through with it. The months roll by, and the drive to do said thing evaporates. Before long, it becomes a distant memory as other things take priority: life stuff, work stuff, general stuff. And so whatever you have in your life that you don’t need to do gets pushed aside to make room for the things you have to do. Resourcing, or something.

Everyone’s chaos is unique, and some people even thrive in it – personally, organised chaos is my jam, anything less or more weirdly throws me. So in blogging terms, what was it that threw me? Well, in hindsight, the first thing was WordPress closing their photo challenges. Dumb though it sounds, the more I think about it, the more I realise that it had become the main thing that was keeping me in touch with this site and its mammoth community. It kept me consistent, and forced me to continue evolving whatever I wanted this blog to be at any given time (for example, I wanted the travel photography to tell stories, not become the sole focus). I guess the word I’m looking for is structure.

That in itself isn’t ‘chaos’, but it did start the ball rolling. When it closed, I was five months into physio for a shoulder injury and a hip/knee issue, and I had given myself turf toe (dancers, where you at). I’d stopped aerial silks mid-2017 because of the way the shoulder injury had manifested, and by May I was struggling to walk outside of my entertainer job. Just one shift was enough to lay me out for the week.
Mentally, immobile me = unhappy me.

Then there was the house build, and the short version of that saga is a schiester masquerading as a builder span us a line that was perpetually keeping myself and my partner out of our first home. 8 months versus 2 years is a kind of a bullshit that hurts your head. Compound that with burnout from a secondary work role, I wasn’t in a great place.

Physically, I was toast; mentally, I was barely functioning. Creatively, online and off, I had nothing. So I took a break, thinking I’d get back into it. But every time I came back, or sat down to a script redraft, I was empty. No drive, no motivation…no point.

I can’t say why I needed to return just over a year to the day of my last post. Maybe it was the rain.
I’ll think about it and get back to you.