It’s the fall holiday right now and it’s officially been about 2 months since I started my (hopefully) final internship as a teacher. I’ve started properly teaching at this point and I’m getting decently used to my new environment. Which is good because the first essays and exams are getting awfully close. Early November I’m going to be quite busy and I hope to pass some of my assignments in one go for a change. It’s been a little while since I’ve done uni classes and it’s been even longer since I’ve done them with success. Covid’s really thrown a wrench in a lot of my plans. At least I managed to do a lot of writing in the meantime so not all that time is lost.
So let’s talk a little bit about exhaustion. I don’t think I’ve talked about it much here, but my dad has been struggling with bad sleep for the past few years. He went in for a shoulder surgery a few years back, thinking that this was the source of why he couldn’t sleep. He was in quite a lot of pain from his shoulder and they had to cut through it and anchor it to the bone. That all healed wonderfully but he still wasn’t sleeping. Then he went in for tests and got a sleep apnea machine. This fixed his apnea at night, which I learned during all of that is something you can actively monitor to see if it’s getting better or worse. He still wasn’t sleeping though. Several attempts later, he finally settled on medication against restless legs and he’s now sleeping a bit better than before. He’s roughly sleeping as well as I am, which is almost kind of funny, because for him that’s now a good amount compared to before where I am still exhausted from the same amount of sleep.
The thing I want to highlight is that many people have to deal with exhaustion for many different reasons. People burnout at work all the time and exhaustion can play a big role in that. If you have no energy to do the fun things in life, eventually it saps all motivation out of you and you can’t be bothered to do the necessary things either. Now obviously when it gets to the first stage it should already be a major red flag. We shouldn’t live to work, but work to live instead. If you can’t find the energy for joyous things, something is going wrong. But I’ve recently been feeling this exhaustion pretty badly. August and September were my weakest months when it came to writing as well. Not that they were bad months, I still got in over 25.000 words each month which by my standards is impressive. But I was definitely feeling the exhaustion. October has so far been good and with NaNoWriMo coming up, which I’ll talk a little bit more about next week, I’m well on track for a great year of writing. One of my long term goals is to write 1.000.000 words in a single year. This is still very far out, even doing half of that is going to take a lot of willpower and effort. To give a comparison, last year I wrote around 270.000 and this year I seem to be beating that by about 100.000 if all goes well. If I can write 500.000 words in 2023 that would be a major success.
That brings me to trying. I’m someone who is uncomfortable and anxious all the time. But I keep trying. Why, sometimes I do not know. All I know is that I’m not happy when I stop trying and if I keep trying I might arrive somewhere better. I’m a pessimist at heart and I’m well aware of this. I’ve been trying for years to be more positive and it works pretty well these days, but it is still something I need to actively try at. I’m trying my best to be a good teacher, I’m trying my best to pass my classes and I’m trying my best to write more stories. I’ve been getting a lot of good ideas lately but I don’t have the time and energy to put them all down on paper. It’s unfortunate, but I’ll get there soon enough. Hopefully.
Anyway, that’s kind of all I have to say. I’m working hard on preparing for November, so that I can still post two or three times a week even while I’m focusing on the second volume of The Hesitant Hero. After that’s more or less done, I should really face the truth and start editing the first volume. It would be pretty bad if I get started on the third one and still haven’t finished the first one properly. That way I’ll never ever get published. Either way that’s still a long way away, but I do want to get there eventually. Until I get there, I guess I’ll have to just keep trying my best.
Thanks for reading.
Opal Kaharis 