12/4 (let’s catch up)

Hi. Wow, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been on here. For a while these past few weeks I’ve been kind of encapsulated in the college research/SAT prep bubble and everything else has seemed to fall by the wayside. I’m definitely not as active on here as I was in the spring and summer but my attention span for this kind of thing tends to kind of wax and wane over time.

    I think for a while I was super caught up in the statistics of these sorts of sites, and I’d tell myself something like if I didn’t gain 10 followers a week my account was failing, but obviously you can’t gain without putting something out there yourself, so there were also a lot of pieces i did specifically for the internet. I would look up what trends were rising or falling that week and try to very subtly add that sort of thing into a poem, and it made for a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of and didn’t feel fulfilled from. People--most people I know at least, including myself--fall into that little game with themselves and the internet after they realize that people like what they are putting out. I’m not going to get all motivational-speaker on you here, but really, if you put out something you don’t love and aren’t proud of, any praise will start to make you feel pretty not good.

    There’s an old writer’s adage that pretty much says that if you aren’t having fun writing something, nobody’s going to have fun reading it, and I think that can be true, but only to a fault. I write to process, to vent, to just get it all out (ugh that’s so cheesy) and while of course it can be fun, sometimes it isn’t. One of my more popular pieces, “burning things like trucks and my white privilege,” for example. It’s definitely something I love and I’m proud of it, but writing it was definitely not a happy or fun time, if you know what I mean.

I think basically what I’m getting at here is that something I’ve really come to realize here is that it isn’t about pleasing people or making them happy. If I put out something I’m proud of it really doesn’t matter at all what people think. Of course I love all of you and hope you stick around, but if you don’t like my writing that’s okay, too. Going into the new year I’m going to start posting more of what I want, maybe some of my funnier side that I tend to kind of not show online, all that kind of thing.

Anyway, I’ve been pretty good. School is insane, but everyone says junior year is the worst so I was kind of expecting that, and online classes are...interesting, to say the least. It kind of feels sometimes like I’m living inside of an SNL sketch and everyone is playing their parts perfectly but someone forgot to write my cue cards so I’m just standing there kind of absorbing all of the insanity, not really positive what’s going on around me.

    Also included this month--Christmas. I think a lot of people aren’t really thinking Christmas will seem strange this year because they got over that initial shock with Thanksgiving, but my family actually does tend to do Thanksgiving alone half the time so it didn’t feel out of the ordinary at all. Christmas is kind of a big holiday, though, and it’s a busy season typically so I think I’ll either really like the slowness of this year, or it will just seem really depressing and empty.

People in my area talk about 2020 ending like everything will go back to normal the minute 12:00 hits. I mean, I get it. I think we all want to wake up on January first and get the year we all think we missed out on and have this all just feel like a weird fever dream. But that can also be a really toxic way to think because they’re setting all their hope of normalcy on a day and when it comes and, inevitably, nothing’s changed, reality is going to feel like a slap in the face.

    All that to say, I’m not doing this as a “Yes! 2020′s ending!” type thing. I just thought it would be something fun and light to end such a heavy year on. My friend (not on here, unfortunately) suggested I call it blogmas and do it like youtubers do their vlogmases, a good mix of fun and cheesy, but I couldn’t stand the name and thought it would take too much time. But I came on today and saw someone else do a 25 days of stories and one of my wtw buddies doing a December Poetry on Prose (shout out to Samina) and I was just like, why not? So I’m calling it a countdown and taking my friend’s advice and doing it like fun/cheesy youtube videos, and that’s this.

Happy almost holidays, everyone. As the semester ends, remember we’re all in this together and I’m so thankful I can be a source of light for so many of you throughout the year

xx- Riley