Comebacks

So – yeah. WordPress tells me it’s been many months since I blogged. Like, an embarrassing number of them. Much like with vacations, the more fun you are having, the less time you’re spending documenting all the fun you’re having.

See what I did there? Now you think I spent all this time off exploring the world and having amazing adventures, and now I just have to humblebrag about it. The truth is so much more complicated, like with anything else in life. Have I been travelling the world? Yes, part of it. But the trip to Scotland was just two weeks of those many months. Have I had amazing adventures? Sure – a few, some of them lasting only an hour of those many, many months.

So why the radio silence? The parts that aren’t fun to put in a blog. The long days slogging through projects at work, followed by long nights watching TV as I berate myself for not doing the all-important-thing-what-must-get-done-or-i’m-a-failure-for-life. Exciting psychological terms like “impostor syndrome.” A dose of plain old depression spiced with a pinch of fat-shaming. I’m pretty brutal on myself; more to the point, just as we all hate humblebrag posts, no one wants to read self-loathing mental diarrhea. Not even me, and as a rule I’m pretty interested in reading about me.

So we come to the nature of comebacks. I could have just abandoned this blog. Called it a failed experiment and flitted to the next shiny thing that crossed my path. Yet here I am, boring my 3.5 readers with musings about my absence. Why?

Because we too often believe that once we stop something, we can’t ever start again. Happens at the gym with exercise programs. Novels get abandoned more often than they get finished. I have three sweaters, a two scarfs and an afghan stuffed in a drawer with the crochet hooks still clinging to the last half-completed stitch row.

But you know what? Those balls of yarn don’t care how long it takes to be stitched into useful items. A publisher will never know that novel’s first scene got written two decades ago. My butt certainly doesn’t hold a grudge over the number of hours it spends sitting in a chair versus laboring in a Bowflex machine. Because they are inanimate things, while I am the consciousness that gives them meaning and purpose. I’m the one who decides what’s been abandoned or when that long absence has only been a resting period.

It’s time I came back to my life.