November 28th, 2020 – 794

~ Sam Shuttleworth

I couldn’t do it. I just wanted to write early, but my batteries are now in that limbo phase where you know you can only take ’em out and put them back in again so many times before you have to just accept that they’re empty. I’m running on fumes and my mind is not holding up well to the process. If I had any spoons left they’re spilled on the ground five stories below and I don’t have the energy for the stairs to reach them.

I feel cold, weak, like I’m failing. I’ll write, I always do, but it does feel like nothing else is allowed to stick this year. This, it turns out, is my lowest moment, the point at which I begin to crumble. I’ll get past this, I always do, but man if the tunnel don’t seem a lot longer than when I set off into the dark. I care deeply about not falling apart, but I’m failing so hard not to. I can’t take this disruption limbo of giving the normal world back and taking it away again. I get it, and I’m going along with it but it sucks, it sucks hard.

I wonder how I’ll look back on this time. Will I see this as a point of pride for overcoming the same demons that nearly dragged me into the abyss at Sussex, a triumphant round two? Or, will I see this as a dark chapter I close the book on and try to exist in spite of? Or is this just what life inside my head will be like from now on, as all the positives I spent seven long years trying to painstakingly assemble all fall to the ground and shatter. Or, will I not look back at all?

I just don’t know. How can I? All I can do, is get this off my chest, try to breathe, and write a thousand words. A win is a win, even if my world’s on fire. Can’t waste time feeling bad that I’m so inwardly focused in a time of national crisis: I’m doing my part, keeping safe and working on, and I’m allowed to feel horrible doing it. I’m doing the one meaningful thing that helps. And I’m doing the one meaningful thing that helps me too.

Sorry for the viserol post. I’m not in a good place right now, it happens. I’ll finish writing and sleep. What else can you do?

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.