If I Took a Holiday…

Good morning darlings, I hope you had a pleasant IMCRD. I did, thanks for asking – I did paperwork in front of the TV and found a spider living in some socks. Rock ‘n’ roll!

I’ve had this page open for maybe ten minutes, which isn’t long in blog terms, and do you know I can’t think of a single thing to say. Not a thing. It’s been happening more and more: I open a tab, I think about something in the news or my life or both, and I haven’t got a clue what to write. Sometimes the tab stays open for an hour – again, that’s not long because the biggest part of writing here is editing my swear words – but increasingly I get two paragraphs in and spend the rest of my time looking for a GIF with minimal relevance.

Maybe it’s burn out. I really, really, need a holiday. I took on a lot of freelance work in March, and I’ve been trying to work maximum hours, cramming in two or three clients or internships, Etsy admin, design for Etsy, copywriting and this. The most I’ve ever made from here directly is 72p on The Little Book (thanks Ruby!), so it’s not a priority. Maybe by the time I get to here I’ve run out of words. I get paid for about half of the work I do, which is okay most days… usually at the start of the month, when I send invoices. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in this job to buy a Lamborghini and a house in Belgravia. But when you’re trying to work out if you can afford to meet a friend for coffee when they’re home from uni, it grates. Don’t read this as a sob story – I chose it, and if it doesn’t work out financially then I’ll just turn it all back into a hobby. But the most irritating part, other than having less cash flow than people who elected £27k uni fees, is that when I finish every evening I have zero inclination to make anything except dinner. Financially I can’t justify spending a lot of time on things that don’t pay, so my fiction writing and here have both declined in quality to the point where I’m half-considering a ‘normal’ job just so I can enjoy myself when I open a computer tab again.

God, I sound like a whiny gap year kid who’s got an office job that doesn’t finish at five on the dot. Realistically, I think I just need a break. Maybe take a month or so away from blogging, which I’ve never actually done (how the fuck did I come up with shit to say when I took 12 subjects and spent half my life in a classroom?). Maybe I need to rediscover, or redefine, what this place means. It used to be somewhere I could talk about anything I fancied with my friends – and, weirdly, members of the public – but they’ve moved on. Motherfuckers. I know it’s narcissistic, but my favourite part of this whole thing has always been the conversations it starts, even if the kid at the other end just tells me I’m full of shit. I’d love to say I’m totally fine with faceless stats pages – if I was in this for the international fame and fortune I’d be talking about fashion and kale – but even though I started Indifferent Ignorance for me, and will end it for me when the time comes, I really miss comment threads. Is there any point in spending two or three hours of my already overly-Internet-focussed time on an essay no one with a name will read?

But I also don’t want to be someone who uses other people’s validation as currency. I don’t want to be the person who only ever asks for comments and who talks about nothing but work in real life (for the record, my job is really interesting. If we ever meet in public, ask me the logistics of posting to multiple Instagram accounts. I’m a professional hipster). If there are any of you who come here regularly, I don’t want you to feel like you should respond to every word I write. I’d like you to say hi or tell me what you think of a topic I talked about, but I shouldn’t have to ask you to.

So part of me wants to be really outrageous just to garner a response. Part of me wants to go to blog school to learn how to write better pieces. But most of me just wants to stop feeling bad about the things in my life that aren’t going the way I want them to, to cut my losses and to focus on what’s actually important.

When I work out what those things are, I’ll let you know. Or I’ll write a blog about my pets and/or the socio-economic situation in Ukraine. I have no idea.