A foray into 30 days of blogging

I’m going to get the rough stuff out of the way with first, so buckle up because I’m about to get very real.

I feel a bit lost. I feel lost, low, and disillusioned and this has been going on for so long now that I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel this way. Some days are better than others, but the overall theme since March 2020 has been one of “What the f*ck am I doing?”

As someone who has always been pretty certain about what I want from life and who typically takes joy in the simple things, this is disconcerting.

Without going into too much detail because a) I don’t want to and b) I’m tired of thinking of the past, what I know for sure right now is that I’m a bit confused. I left Dubai in October 2019 to embark on a new adventure of a bit more travel and a lot more writing/exploration/experimentation with what I want to do with the second half of my career. I had about four amazing months of it before the world as we knew it came crashing down. And since then I’ve felt like I’m afloat in the middle of an ocean, sometimes battling massive storms, at other times floating along aimlessly while worrying about the next massive waves that are invariably around the corner.

Bloody pandemic.

I don’t need to rehash the last few years, but in a few words they’ve been exhausting, isolating, confusing, disorientating and messed up. Everyone has suffered in one way or another, let’s not pretend otherwise. I know a lot of people whose mental health is now shot to shit, a lot of people who have struggled financially, a lot of people who lost loved ones, and a lot who have had all of it happen to them at once.

I’m the type of person to always count my blessings, so I’ll also put this out there too: I’m immensely grateful to be one of the privileged and lucky ones. I didn’t go hungry. I’m healthy. Most of my loved ones are still here with me. But I’m not going to sit here and pretend that everything is okay. Because it isn’t.

Many things have been going on, which again I won’t go into detail about. I used to be very open about my personal life, but the older I get the more guarded I’ve become about who I share what with, and that’s okay. But I guess I’ve avoided writing for so long because I didn’t know what I felt comfortable sharing.

So I just didn’t write. I didn’t write blog posts, I didn’t write in-depth Instagram captions, I didn’t write articles. In fact, I haven’t even written in my journal since December 2021, and that’s unheard of for me. I guess I’ve been in some form of self-inflicted isolation.

Old habits die hard, eh, COVID-19 measures?

But spring is here, and with spring I’ve felt myself wanting to do things again. And in the midst of a lot of hiking and spending time with friends and pushing myself to do the things I’d forgotten we’re allowed to do now because we weren’t for so long, I realised that the questions I had about my career and how I want to live my life in general are still up in the air.

Now we’re wearily coming out the other side of the pandemic (fingers crossed) they’re staring me in the face, begging to be answered.

Up until my mid-30s I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was lucky in that sense. I knew what I wanted and I knew (on the whole) how to get there. This is the first time I feel so clueless. And no amount of “deep down you know what you want to do” that is said to me by well-meaning and yet annoying onlookers is going to change it. If I knew deep down what I wanted to do, I’d have done it by now. I know myself.

I believe my issue is that sure, there are things I want to do. In fact there are MANY. But how do I decipher between the good ideas and the bad? And how do I do that when there are many things I want to try but I know that’s impossible because guess what – time isn’t infinite. Well, perhaps time is, but mine certainly isn’t.

I guess this is what we call a mid-life crisis?

It’s not that I don’t want to write anymore. Writing is such a big part of my life, and I’ll always be doing it in one form or another. But I set out wanting to be a journalist, and that industry has changed so much since the early 2000s that it’s almost impossible to make a living out of it if you want to be comfortable. And this is just scratching the surface.

Also, am I the only one who is utterly disillusioned with the world at this point? People are as divided as ever, the gap between rich and poor is ever-widening, and the powers that be continue to pillage the planet in the name of economic growth as we stare our impending doom as a species in the face.

Not much to get motivated about really, but I do potentially have another 30+ years or so on this planet. I don’t want to spend them in a pool of depression, so I persevere.

Now all the navel-gazing is out of the way with I can get to the point of this blog post. I decided to get back to basics and instead of sitting around questioning everything, it’s time to act. So I asked myself what are the things I enjoy doing and that put me in a state of flow? And one of them is blogging. I’ve missed connecting with people through my words.

And so here I am. I’ve decided to embark on a 30-day blogging challenge, day one being tomorrow. I looked for prompts online, but they were all awful, so I’ve decided I’ll just look for my own prompts every day, whether it’s something that happens, or something that inspires me, or some random thought that pops into my head, or (hopefully) some eureka moments as I continue to explore my options. Plus, I live in Kathmandu, one of the most interesting cities on the planet, so I won’t be starved of inspiration.

What do I hope to achieve? Well, I have no expectations other than to hopefully reconnect with my writing (and people), and get back into a habit that I truly used to enjoy.

Hope you’ll stick around for the ride, and do let me know if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to write about.

Oh, and if anyone has any advice on how to overcome a mid-life crisis, drop me a line…