Please forgive me, for I have sinned.

@ Jesus, @ you all, @ myself, @ everyone who has supported my writing and/or this blog. I’m sorry, y’all. I haven’t written for months now and I know: I am the worst for it. Please forgive me.

BUT. I’ve got a lot of valid reasons. To name a few:

1. For starters, I’ve been traveling somewhere about every two weeks (and I’d be willing to bet this is an understatement). My life has been a touch more hectic than I’d prefer it to be (read: a lot more hectic than I’d prefer it to be) over the past five months or so. I’ve been zipping back and forth across the country (or world) and jetlag can be a real drag on top of all the other adult things to keep up with. Living out of suitcases isn’t fun after awhile and weekends that are eaten up by travel time alone tend to feel pointless.
2. Speaking of adult things… I have a dog now and a serious boyfriend—both of whom deserve my attention. I’ve got lots of bills, and way more responsibility at work. And more bills. And a lot of stressors in general. If I’m not working or traveling, I’m planning or fixing or coordinating something that needs my attention, or else feeling guilty about not walking my dog enough. I barely talk to friends anymore, let alone read or workout (this last one breaks my heart and, arguably worse, my confidence). I feel whiny when I think about how blessed I am to have such a full life though—to be able to travel so much, to have such a great boyfriend, to have the cutest dog in the world. But damn, I would kill for a pause button sometimes so that I could properly appreciate these things. If there were ever a break that lasted for more than two hours (and one in which I wasn’t extremely exhausted), I’d be back to writing here. Alas, anything that even resembles a break now is usually spent catching up on something I forgot about or, God forbid, relaxing for half a second over Netflix & wine with my boyfriend.
3. At this point, I should also mention that I’ve been writing a novel. Yes, folks. A novel. As you can imagine, writing a novel while concurrently living a normal, working life is pretty overwhelming. My free time is usually spent writing and editing, meaning that it doesn’t quite qualify as “free” anymore. Anyhow, please do not mistake my absence here for a full-on failure to write.
4. And, the last reason I’ll note (for now) is this: the internet is fucking discouraging right now. Sure, the first few months’ hiatus was my fault, but November brought a shit storm that I just cannot engage with. Every time I sit down to write or spend more than five minutes on social media, I want to either vomit or die, or both. It’s enraging and disappointing at the same time. Simultaneously, I feel guilty for wanting to write about anything else because nothing seems important, comparatively. People are suffering, and will continue to suffer for a long, long time with the setbacks we’ve already seen. And I tried. I tried to write a blog post while I was in Madrid recently about the political atmosphere of the United States. I did. I tried. But I had to stop midway because I just couldn’t handle how immense that task was. I bawled my eyes out in a foreign country because I was losing hours of sleep at a time—my mind racing, trying to articulate all of the reasons why it is not okay to be flagrant with human lives; why we should not be a vicious and volatile country, corrupted and motivated exclusively by money and absent of any basic moral standard; trying to understand why so many people still selfishly hang onto false exclamations from a babbling idiot while basic human rights are being torn away from all of us, including them; and so much more. But these things shouldn’t have to be explained. These are fundamental truths that we tell our children and yet, I wouldn’t trust that babbling man anywhere near my children, for fear that he’d grab their pussies or lie and shout “loser!” like misbehaved children do, amongst other things. The fact of the matter is, I realized, that if you can’t see what’s wrong with the current administration (or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say that you choose not to), then there’s absolutely nothing I can say—no string of words I can craft—to show you the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong. Mind you, not the difference between republican or democrat, not between conservative and liberal, but rather the fundamental difference between good and evil. I won’t take credit for this, but I was talking to one of my execs at work and he said it best: “You can’t teach someone how to care about people.” And if you consider yourself to be a caring person in smaller, day-to-day versions of these issues, but cannot mirror that care in your sociopolitical actions, then your care is shallow and limited and you are not as good of a person as you think you are.

Anyway, that’s not the (whole) point.

The point is that in January, I spent a lot of money to renew the web hosting I have set up for this website. Lord knows I hate wasting money, so I promise that I will resume posting, once again!

And apologies again for the delay, my friends. Rest easy knowing that you will soon have more snarky essays to read. I plan on writing a post this weekend to commemorate my amazing experiences in Madrid (I’ll come up with something that goes beyond me crying about political turmoil in a hotel room, alone). So, stay tuned and keep me accountable. There is so much to be said.