For the month of November I’m participating in a daily gratitude challenge posted by the journaling app that I use, Day One, and here’s today’s prompt:

In what ways have I grown as a person over the last year?

My first thought when I saw today’s prompt was, what was I doing this time last year? Fortunately for me, I’ve been using this app called Day One to record/write down these thoughts and there’s a button, On This Day, that shows what I wrote on this day in previous years. Here’s the prompt that I was thinking about last year:

(Click HERE  to view my response last year to the above prompt)

I’d have to say that I still had most of that last school year to manage, so, while a month or so into my daily reflection prompt/response writing that I would end up continuing until the beginning of June, I’d have to guess that I was very much caught up in “how am I going to survive the remaining months of the school year.” The one thing that I didn’t like about “those times” was that surviving the burden of each day pretty much took up all of my bandwidth the entire year and I desperately wanted more in my daily existence than just being a drone in the classroom. 

What’s changed? I still have a habit of focusing on one project and working on it around the clock until I finish it, or something more urgent comes up, or I run out of steam. I thought that I was getting better at not just focusing on the “monster of the moment” but there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement. A little over a week ago I got a call-back for a possible job opening and for whatever reason that inspired me to plow through my Academic Portfolio  and do a massive upgrade/update (which I just finished this afternoon). The only other thing that I did over the course of the week, besides working on the academic portfolio, was doing these daily gratitude posts. Yeah, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

I’m still not sure how I want to focus my energies, particularly in regards to my writing. It doesn’t seem like the possibilities of going full-time journalist is on the horizon and that make me think about the prospects of any long-form writing in a world that can’t be bothered to even fully read headlines in social media feeds. Maybe my energies would be better used writing short stories/distributed as weekly audio podcasts (a la, the wonderful Twenty Percent True Podcast  by Carolyn Rahaman).  Revisiting all of the writing that I did, particularly the essays and short stories I did at LMU at the beginning of my academic journey, has stirred up thoughts in this direction. 

A couple days ago I posted a meme:

teaching a cat to write

“I’m the cat and this is me deciding that I prefer writing/posting short online memes while everyone around me writes books”

I know I’ll figure it out. I learned a long time ago that my connections to my past, my willingness to entertain and spend time with all of the ghosts of the past, is part of my process when it comes to moving forward and living in the here and now. That probably looks like a contradiction to someone not paying close attention. I do not long for those times, maybe the company and affection of those ghosts, but those times and those people no longer exist and I feel compelled to carry their stories, our stories into the now and the future. I’ll figure it out.

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