What a week. Started off kinda crappy with some on-going trouble falling asleep, which tends to cast a pall over everything else since, you know, being tired constantly sucks. But Monday started off strong with a Spotify Discover Weekly playlist that was nearly perfect. There were a few terrible misses, but it’s probably the best Discover Weekly I’ve had since before the summer. Just a bunch of absolute bops with a pile of songs to add to my upbeat and cheerful playlists, and it starts with a great sequence of eight songs before the first song I had to remove.

Then, at work, things have been good. I’ve been busy as hell, more so than any time so far this year, with just a hundred things that need doing at any given time, half a dozen people who need something from me, and a list of tasks that have looming deadlines. Plenty to do without ever reaching truly overwhelming. Temporarily overwhelming at times, as it has been difficult to take the breaks I need, but it’s been a whole slew of things completely within my ability, almost nothing I had to push up the ladder to my more experienced coworkers, and landed me in the position of being people’s go-to resource. I feel super valuable and capable this week and, since that feeling has been missing at work for while, it feels super great.

Outside of work, I’ve not only kept up with my “write daily” goal, but I’ve also passed the National Novel Writing Month daily average every single day, in an hour of writing time or less. I feel so very on top of my game, even if I’ve been tired or worn out. It’s such a great feeling to sit down (or stand) and start tapping away at the keyboard, make some significant progress in the story, and then realize that I’ve written enough for the day.

I’ve actually had to stop myself from writing more so I don’t over exert myself, which is a great feeling. I don’t know yet if this will be a long-term sustainable pace. I tend to run into discipline problems on the weekend when there’s no obligations to stop me from playing twelve hours straight of Ghost of Tsushima [editor’s note: this exact thing happened two days after writing this], so we will have to see if I can keep it up through the weekend (I usually at least wind up being much more distractible when I’m not trying to get my words down in time for a D&D session I’m about to run or so I can go eat dinner and play video games after work).

I might still be struggling with solitude and loneliness, but I’m making progress on everything else. All the other parts of my life seem to be going well (knock-on-wood), so maybe I’ll feel up for trying out online dating or, I dunno, meeting people. Still not sure how to do the latter given the pandemic and incoming wintery weather, but I can probably figure something out once I start working on the problem.

I don’t know how long this feeling of not quite posivity so much as capability will last, but I’m gonna ride this wave while I can.