Why Start a Blog?

Hello everyone! Although this is not the kind of writing I plan on posting from now on, I wanted to use my first blog post to just say hi. What's up. How's everyone doing? If you're handling this pandemic as well as I am, that means that your way of "handling" things right now just means that you're trying your best to ignore the dumpster fire that is the world and in doing so you have kind of lost all sense of your identity. Mix that into the pot along with the fact that I- I mean you, we're talking about you, not me- just graduated from college with a degree in English, and no matter how many times you tell yourself that you could be the next John Mulaney, you live in Iowa amidst the corn and beans and will most likely never be picked up by Lorne Michaels to be a writer on SNL. But I digress.

After virtual graduation at the beginning of May this year, I closed my laptop and thought to myself: now what? I stopped writing because I didn't have that familiar urgency to finish a paper before its due date. I stopped hanging out with friends because we had to quarantine. The state of my mental health was on a downward spiral and didn't look like it was going to get better. I had become life's bitch instead of making life my bitch. It didn't get better, I just made myself busier. It's important to know the difference between being genuinely happy and being able to distract yourself from sadness. I kept telling myself that I had no reason to be so sad constantly. I have a wonderful, supportive boyfriend, great friends and family, had the privilege of going to college and graduating with decent grades and GPA. But something still felt wrong, like there was something I wasn't doing that I should have been.

July rolls around and my boyfriend and I started looking at apartments together. We couldn't agree on which one we liked the best, I got stressed that we couldn't agree, which turned into spiraling thoughts of "what if this is too soon", "what if this is a sign that we shouldn't move in together" even though I knew 100% that I did want to take this leap with him. Luckily, we did eventually agree on one that we both loved, I stopped stressing about the whole thing, and we moved in at the beginning of August. As we began to settle into our new place and life together, I still felt that uncomfortable feeling that I was doing something wrong, that my life was off-balance, that something was missing. He encouraged me to start writing again, which I had not been doing since we graduated. I kept telling myself that writing would be too difficult to get back into and worried that I could only be creative in an academic setting. I bought a book of writing prompts from Target and forced myself to start at the beginning and just write. It didn't matter if I wrote five sentences or five pages worth. I knew I just needed to get back into the swing of things. After applying for a few meaningless jobs the other day, I decided to finish my website I had started last year, and that led me to start a blog. Blogs have never been something I was interested in because "anyone can write a blog" (I believe I've said that at least a couple hundred times to my fellow writer friends). But then I realized that's the whole beauty of this form of writing, anyone can do it. Getting off my high horse and deciding that having a blog would be a great way to not only keep myself on track with writing more frequently but to also have actual writing samples to include in job applications, would be extremely beneficial.

It's only been a couple of days now where I've written consistently, whether it's in my journal, in my book of prompts, or here, and I can already feel myself becoming whole again. Writing was what had been missing from my life for the last few months and it had taken a serious toll on my well-being. Graduating in the middle of a pandemic, trying to find a job in the middle of a pandemic, whatever it is you might have gone through or are currently going through, take it from me: keep doing that thing you love. You need it and it needs you.

-Haley (Curly)