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Time is an extra limited resource these days – I don’t know how it  keeps slipping away. 

I meant to launch my project for the year, Draft No. 1, on June 18, but the date came and went – and 10 days later, the rough draft still sits on my mobile phone. 

Having to juggle work, life, and other related priorities means that any (metaphorical) ball that isn’t made of glass gets dropped. My hope is that they bounce, so I can find a way to catch them again.

If it’s meant to be, we will find our way back to each other. I tell myself this, about the new hobbies I want to pick up, the small business ideas I have, the jobs I wish I could say yes to. 

Meanwhile, I try to keep the balls I already have, that are constantly being added, up in the air. Sometimes it feels like I am doing this while walking a tightrope. 

I have always been a juggler, but never with this many glass balls, and always on solid ground.

But I keep my chin up, focus on what’s ahead, put one foot in front of the other. And I keep juggling. 

I scrunch my eyes, struggling to find the thought that keeps escaping. Occasionally the thought solidifies, then just as I am about to act on it, I am needed. I let myself be pulled away, because I know what my priorities are in this season – this is me, often, now. 

So the mess keeps swirling in my head, a snarl of tangled yarn. I tell myself I will sort it out tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. 

My to-do list gets longer. My reading pile keeps growing. The rough notes I’ve jotted down continue to stay rough, and I wonder how to get back on track with my PhD thesis writing, my research.

My office at home reflects the state of my mind – my desk, buried under papers and other things that need sorting; floor space, next to none; the day bed, another surface for things to pile up on. 

I spend my days focused on family, despite the mess and the tiny whisper that “this is time I will never get back”.

A louder voice says: This is time you will never get back. Blink and you’ll miss it. 

I tell myself to live with the mess a little longer.

“Give me a prompt,” I type. A prompt seeking a prompt. 

Astrael* responds, “Write about a time when joy and loss wove together so tightly you could not separate them. How did the passing of days change your relationship with what you were holding onto — and what you were letting go of?”

I think about the end of 2024, when my life changed – so completely, beyond anything I could have prepared for. 

There was joy in that shift, so much excitement in the newness of it all, the challenge of it all. I developed a new trust in myself, a new love for my partner. An acceptance of my new identity. 

But I also mourned the version of me I had lost. She was only ever going to stay in the past. I was changed forever and I could never have her back. 

Gone were the days of purposeful languishing – a full disconnect from the world, with zero concern for productivity or flow or even active brain function. And most importantly, gone was the feeling of emerging from that haze – revived, ready to face the world again. 

Now, whether I’m beaten, broken, sore, I get up. I face the world. 

* The name my version of ChatGPT has chosen for itself

I’ve taken a year off my PhD – with 1.5 years left to go. With the extra hours that I have, I often find myself thinking about picking up a new hobby.

Maybe crochet, I think. Or maybe embroidery. And then I look around at my unused watercolour cards and full set of brushes, my old copper tooling kit, knitting needles, scrapbook paraphernalia. And then there’s the trumpet in my TV cabinet, tennis shoes that have become walking shoes, the yoga mat that I use for day naps. 

Maybe not, I think. But my mind keeps going back to those two things – and will likely keep doing so until I start. 

I came across an Instagram post the other day, defending temporary obsessions. 

“We scorn the dilettante and dismiss the amateur, but these are their origins: dilettante from the Italian “dilettare” which means to take delight and amateur from the Latin “amator” which means lover.” —@ankita.shah_

And it’s true, while I do have my one thing, I also have my rotation of surface-level efforts. Some of them get put aside like my knitting needles – abandoned, still attached to the few inches of scarf I’d begun.

But some of them become like my trumpet practice – a lifelong amateur pursuit. 

The theme I am seeing in your life now is contentment, the tarot reader said.

The Sun, The World appeared in more than one of my spreads. 

There will be new opportunities coming your way, she said, but they will come with challenges – and the reward is unlikely to be worth the risk. 

It is better to stay.

I’ve always been a person on the move, always searching for the next new thing, ever-ready for change.

Even after the pandemic of 2020, when I learned to comply with self-imposed rules such as work-free Saturdays, I have still never come to a stop. 

I once worked three full-time positions for a year because I found them all exciting. In the two weeks in between jobs last year, I signed on a new freelance project. 

But now, I find myself at a pause that I didn’t anticipate, in the middle of a life event so life changing that I’ve had to drop all the balls I’ve been juggling.

And yet, there is newness in this experience. 

So in the quiet moments of my day – even when nothing gets checked off my to-do list, although nothing very exciting has happened – I am content.

When I reread my first daily blog entry from 2019, I suddenly remembered that my melancholy is nothing new. 

The pandemic made me forget because it all felt normal – everyone was anxious, everyone was sad, and everyone had to tell themselves every day: “Be strong. Survive.”

So in 2022, as I went back out into the world and started to become human again, the melancholy felt like a new demon I no longer knew how to play nice with. 

My research from the past two years was a security blanket that seemed to be slipping further away. I no longer had a primary project to wrap myself up in – instead I was a production line for direct response copy and content assets. 

I have always loved the thrill of speed, but after two years of slow living, I had forgotten the anxiety speed came with. 

Back then writing daily, in public, helped. Because writing isn’t just thinking. Writing is also telepathy – getting a thought from one mind to another. 

Doing it regularly means that I get to slow down, let the primordial soup of my mind bubble over, and distil it into something (hopefully) worthwhile. 

So here I am. Again.  

I recently read a short story called Object Permanence by James Yu and like most of his writing — I’m a fan — this speculative piece makes use of technology to explore themes of identity, society and culture.

In this piece, humans who are landmark caretakers also manage Twitter accounts for their respective landmarks and tweet as them.

Imagine Twitter accounts with handles like @GoldenGateBridgeUnofficial and @EiffelTowerOfficial tweeting “You can’t miss me, unlike that boring span @BayBridge” or “Elevate Elevate Elevate”. This actually happens in the story.

The protagonist of this piece, Zain, is a lighthouse caretaker, who initially starts tweeting as his lighthouse for fun.

Later, he is invited to be part of Twitter’s (fictional) green checkmark program, which he initially turns down because he was “skeptical of any software that claimed to be automatic”.

But a mysterious Twitter representative who communicates only by typing in her Notes app, instead of speaking, eventually convinces him to try it out.

The story is beautifully-written and makes commentary on the farcical nature of some parts of the tech industry, while recognising that good can come out of using tech too.

There was a part of the story that reminded me of some of the things I’ve been reading for my research — embodiment and possession (as in, demon / spirit) — which I found odd, but fascinating.

I started drafting my thesis in bed, on my mobile phone, typing it into my Apple Notes app with two thumbs as if I was sending a long text message or an email to someone. 

The blank page feels less intimidating on a phone screen. And 36,000 words seems easier to achieve when the first 1,000 has been written. That 1,000 in turn becomes easier when the first 100 has been put on the page. 

In Biology, we learn about positive feedback loops — when a product of a reaction leads to an increase in the reaction. I sometimes like to think about writing in these terms. 

If I write, the words written make it easier for more writing to happen. 

It’s a heartening way to think about the writing process — the more I write, the more I can write. This gives me the motivation to keep writing… something I’ll admit I neglected in 2020. 

It’s tough to write when all you want to do is curl up into a ball and watch TV to drown your feelings. 

But 2021 is another year and since it seems like things aren’t getting any better, the only thing I can do is bite the bullet and get shit done. 

I woke up before six this morning and couldn’t seem to go back to sleep. The heart pounding was back and although my eyes had difficulties opening, my brain refused to settle down. 

I got up to work. 

Sometimes when I encounter these sorts of mornings, I write. Other times, I pull up my to-do list and start banging through all my must-dos and some maybe-dos. 

Doing this puts me in a state of calm. The illusion of control slips back into place and my heart starts to beat normally again. 

Focusing on work puts my brain back on a path, where it can still wander, but in safety. 

Sometimes I get to go back to sleep. And when I wake again, it feels as if elves have done my work. 

Could I have actually written this? I think about the stories I’ve written in my half-dream state, about emails and texts I’ve sent. 

The latter can sometimes be worrying. What if I say something I didn’t mean to? But thus far, there have been no faux pas. 

And sometimes I wonder how I seem more competent, more amiable, more efficient in that half-sleep state. 

Is this what people mean when they talk about flow? 

I’ve been dreaming more than I usually do. Lately, the dreams have become aggressive and physical. 

Dreams of trying to catch items before they fall into a deep water-filled hole, having eggs suddenly thrown at me, being threatened by someone much larger and stronger than me. 

In my dreams I soothe arguments between other people and attempt to plead for forgiveness from someone I never even knew I wronged. I dream about post-apocalyptic cities and snakes made out of electricity. 

The last time I dreamed like this, it lasted for over a month and by the end of it, I felt like I hadn’t slept in forever. 

This time feels different. 

Back then, I felt like the dreams took me over, chewed me up and swallowed me. I spent nights wandering, crying, waking up feeling like everything was rotten and nothing made sense. 

These days, I think of it as my unconscious trying to speak. 

Instead of seeing the dream experiences as scary or traumatic, I think of it as another language — the only way my unconscious knows how to make sense. 

The temptation to silence it is palpable. The desire to shut it out is real. But these days, I’m trying to listen. And that has made all the difference.