Like everyone else I’ve had a turbulent month and I’m adjusting to the new normal. It is a new normal, although hopefully one that won’t stay with us for long. Adjusting mentally is harder than it sounds.

This is only the fourth blog post I’ve written on Themself in 2020, an average of one per month, quite far off my height of two a week. I’ve written more than four posts though this year. Most of them have been written in the last three weeks, since I’ve been at home. I’ve made an effort to keep a journal, with photos, of life in the pandemic. It’s one of the things that keeps me relatively sane and functioning. Given the change in subject matter I put it on its own domain, although hosted on the same cloud server as this. You can find it at https://www.the-kemps.org/

Rewriting Fierce

Before March my writing effort was going into editing Fierce, which accounts for three of the previous five blog posts on Themself. I’d identified some new scenes that need written, and also done some research to help with both writing those and the edit. I was halfway through one of the key scenes, a ritual to remove a geas. When I stopped writing. That was down to the pandemic. I had a different illness that took me into hospital for a few days, but I managed to write when I recovered.

Mental paralysis

What stopped me writing was not having uninterrupted time to think, and the mental load of working out how we were all going to live in isolation. I was pretty stressed for the first week or so, I’d not quite recovered from sepsis, and resented that my recovery time was filled with other people when I just wanted to be able to breathe out and not have to do things. It’s not a very charitable way if looking at the world, but I wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to share. I was also worried that I might get sick and it would kill me. I’ve got past that now, but it was a sort of mental paralysis briefly.

I’m sure lots of people have had very similar feelings. Our world has been up-ended by the pandemic. We’ve all been adjusting to the situation. I’ve felt like we’ve been in the start of a zombie movie or something, although thankfully it isn’t quite that bad. Not yet anyway.

Adjusting at Work

I’ve not been in my office since 10th March 2020, and I’m not sure when I will be back. There’s a bit of me that would be very happy to work from home as a default option, with visits to an office being like the business travel I used to do before all this. Maybe 2-3 times a month.

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