January Update: Words
Hey team.
Not Great!
So y'all didn't get an update for December and now it's almost February and I'm afraid I don't have much to show you. I'm sorry about that. The fact is, I haven't been doing great.
I don't have COVID or a herniated disc or something concrete I can point to this time. Work just feels nigh-impossible. After getting back from the holidays, I sat down to start the next segment of the Compendium video, threw myself against the wall for an afternoon, got next to nothing done, and felt like garbage for days. And I don't exactly have the wiggle room to be blocked right now - I met with a financial planner this week and I'm in poor shape! With some fairly restrictive money management it looks like I can halve the rate at which I'm going into debt, but, far from making savings and exploring new opportunities, our long-term goal right now is breaking even, and it's ways off.
While there's some trimming of expenses I can do here and there - I don't need all these streaming services - I'm not willing to cut my biggest cash-sinks, which are my trainer and my therapist(s), because those are benefiting me a lot right now and capitalism isn't worth sacrificing my physical or mental health. But that attitude doesn't make capitalism go away! So the best thing I can do is put out videos and start growing my Patreon again. Which is, unfortunately, the hardest thing in the world right now.
This is coming from a cluster of issues: I'm rusty, having not maintained a steady work schedule in almost two years; my therapists agree that I probably have undiagnosed ADHD but getting properly assessed and treated as an adult is a tediously slow process that insurers don't want to pay for; and, more than anything, motherfucking Omicron.
I didn't realize for a while how fucked up this new surge has made me. Pandemic life has been a "for now" thing for 22 months. First it was "until we control the spread," which was estimated to be end-of-summer 2020, but then Fall 2020 made it clear we weren't going to do that. Then it was "until the vaccine," but then vaccine hesitancy led by conservative fearmongers slowed that down. Then it was "until enough people are vaccinated to compensate for the hesitancy," but now there's Omicron.
There's no "until" anymore. My government has made it clear they're not going to manage the spread nor mandate the vaccine rigorously enough to stop COVID, and they're demanding we go back to school and work, so now it's just "people will keep dying until it's endemic," and the jury's out on whether that'll ever happen!
Not to be a fearmonger myself, but the subtle shift from "these are conditions I'm putting up with at the moment" to "this is just life now" has sapped the modicum of enthusiasm I came into 2022 with. My housemates are still working from home. I have no privacy - the most alone I can be is on my living room couch hoping everybody stays in their bedrooms. I'm low-level stressed all the time, and angry whenever I think about the state of things.
So I've had to step back and assess what I'm capable of doing right now.
Text
The thing that doesn't feel impossible at the moment is writing. I have three finished scripts in the can at the moment: two Alt-Right Playbooks - The Cost of Doing Business and the Compendium - as well as the second Protagony. And I've begun work on the first of the three Alt-Right Playbook conclusion videos. If I can write, then I'll write, and try to chip away at this block on animating.
So I'm going to do something I've never done before: I'm going to start sharing my scripts before the videos come out. If writing's what I can do, it's what I can give you.
I'll be sending you the script for the next Protagony today, and more in the coming weeks.
Thanks for sticking around,
-I