Written 26/08/20
Lockdown was actually a blessing to me personally in many ways, the main one the accessible online opportunities it offered. For several years I’ve been semi-housebound, and struggled to keep up a routine for myself beyond mealtimes. But once so many things moved online, it gave me so much structure.
I made myself a timetable based on my writing group’s Discord socials, my church service and group(s), and WritersHQ’s virtual writing retreats. It worked. I felt so much more purposeful, made much better use of my limited energy, and it helped me keep habits I’d been failing to keep for months or years previously.
But then came the summer. The heat itself, as I’ve posted about before, makes things much more difficult for me, but actually what impacted my routine most was the loss of half of my scheduled activities. My church takes a break from groups meeting over August, and because lockdown has been easing my writing group has, for now at least, stopped its online socials. And as a result I’ve been slipping. I’ve found it harder to remember dates and times, been forgetting to prepare meals, lost complete track of my bullet journal (which I started a few months ago to organise myself better), and felt a bit more isolated generally.
While structured routines don’t work for everyone, it was working for me. I was able to be flexible about what I did in between the set times, but those set times gave me a framework for my life, and I’ve missed it. A while ago my mum and I swapped our timetables (because we both kept phoning at inconvenient times!) and a while ago she asked how my poetry writing went, as I’d previously made Monday my “poetry writing day”. I had to admit I hadn’t done any for a few weeks.
Written 2/10/20
I originally drafted the above in the last week of August, then got distracted and forgot about it. Since then, I’ve made myself a new timetable, which I’ll admit I haven’t been sticking to as much but I have been making better use of my energy than I was during the summer. I’ve half-started my bullet journal again, and trying to work my way through a list of tasks that I wanted to do over the summer. One of them sorting out this blog.