I missed a deadline for this blog, for the first time in almost two years, and I feel terrible about it. This isn’t an exaggeration; I had a post in draft for yesterday, but didn’t get to finish it in time — a combination of a heavier than expected workload and my brain deciding to work slower than normal being to blame — which meant that, for the first time since I restarted doing this on a regular basis, I didn’t have anything to post for one of the thrice-weekly posts.
It’s difficult to overstate quite how badly I felt about this; it was the kind of thing that stuck in my head all evening, despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t of any importance to anyone that wasn’t me. Nevertheless, I found myself wracked with guilt over it, thinking that perhaps I needed to drop everything and sit myself back down at the laptop to write something, anything to ensure that the entire day wasn’t missing a post.
(Again, no-one that isn’t me cares about this. And yet.)
Once upon a time, I had a bunch of posts lined up in advance to make sure that things like this didn’t happen; I was three weeks ahead on average, which I’m pretty sure meant that I didn’t even miss anything when I was suffering from something that was probably/possibly COVID at the start of the year.
I prided myself on that, on having a buffer of material that I could rearrange as needs be, and when that buffer slowly got eaten up as summer turned to fall — everything being so stressful and busy that I didn’t really have either the time or the inclination to write as often as I’d otherwise like — I could feel the self-imposed pressure building, knowing that I’d soon have to sit down and handle things one way or another.
As it turned out, that didn’t happen, and I missed a post.
What makes me most frustrated, I think, is the concern that this is the beginning of a slippery slope into not writing here on a regular basis. That’s the thing that I really don’t want to happen. This space has become increasingly important to me, and the idea of it going away through my own inaction is a stressful and deeply upsetting one.