I originally wrote something on Twitter about preferring journaling to blogging and the second I posted it, I knew it wasn’t true and I deleted it. Because the truth is I love writing here. I do enjoying journaling more than I ever thought I would and it has it’s place for helping me work through personal stuff I’m not comfortable, or not permitted, to share here, but I also like writing for an audience. I haven’t had the chance to write here as much I’d hoped this year, but the recent shut down of society has slowed my life down enough that I have time for lots of things I want to do. Upcoming life changes will also contribute to me having more time for things I love, especially writing related things.

Over on Twitter–which is my main social outlet, so a societal shutdown isn’t anything to me because I hate hanging out will people in real life most of the time anyway–folks were mentioning that they were having trouble being productive and getting stuff done. I know I’m saying this from a privileged place, but I’ve had the opposite reaction. I’ve been incredibly productive because it feels like I have permission to ignore the rest of society’s demands for the time being and only focus on myself and my family.

I feel terrible at how much I’m enjoying this. It was just the hard stop in our crazy life we’ve been looking for. We’ve been wanting to cut off our dining out habit for a while, check; we’ve been looking to get the kids out from under a pile of nonsense schoolwork, check; and we’ve been looking to spend more time together as a family, check. I’m reading more, walking more, cooking more, writing more, and stressing less. The only one really suffering is Becky who is in banking and has to deal with crabby customers all day and detox when she gets home.

Hopefully all of this mess shows us all how broken our country really was and maybe some meaningful changes can finally come in time to save our sanity before we all work ourselves into early death and leave behind a generation lost and poor and responsible for cleaning up the dumpster fire of a planet we left them.