According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "A hiatus is a gap or a pause taken amid a series, sequence, or process." That is what I'm going to call the long silence of this blog, Coasting Along: A Writer's Journey. Since last posting on this blog, I have been busy living and writing. However, the pace of life coupled with the arrival of the pandemic in early 2020 have made it necessary for me, along with millions of other people worldwide, to reorder their priorities.
While often a hiatus is planned for in advance, I give you the idea of taking a sabbatical, in my case the gap was not intentional. One of the perils of being a writer is the tendency to stray away from the task at hand because of other events and demands. During the last two years, for that's how long it's been, I was busy finding a new home and moving, learning how to navigate the waters of the pandemic, and spending inordinate amounts of time redoing and reworking different aspects of my life as a writer. For some, the pandemic and its subsequent stay-at-home orders have meant having more time to be more creative. For others, it has meant feeling like we were crawling through hot tar in our underwear. For me, it was the latter.
Already used to working from home, there was little to get used to. What was most difficult for me was maintaining the energy, focus, and motivation I needed to do as much writing. My focus and attention was instead lazer-focused on what has been going on in our culture and the political environment. How close we came to losing our democracy and system of government. Anything that distracted me from learning all I could and doing what I could to fight for my country, my energy was drained, and my motivation was diminished. As I look back at the two years, I could catalogue the many ways I channeled my time, but that would not accurately capture the meaning of this time as it had a impact on my life as a writer.
This morning when I woke up in the wee small hours of the morning (a newly acquired pandemic and political disruption habit), I read an article written by a member of the British military. He wrote about the importance of learning to cope with the effects of traumatic events, for him, PTSD as a result of his experiences in war. For me, as has been the case for far too long, the effects of trauma were more akin to those who experience what is called contact trauma. Primary trauma results from direct experience in a traumatic event or series of events. Contact trauma is when you are directly affected by trauma experienced by those with whom you are in close contact. For example, a spouse might experience contact trauma when her/his partner is in a dangerous situation. A husband or wife whose partner is in an active war zone, or a rape victim's partner.
Overlap between primary and contact stress often occurs, especially when many people are experiencing an ongoing traumatic event. The pandemic is an example where large numbers of people, in this case, most of the world's population, experience ongoing trauma and a variety of diverse reactions and responses from their experiences.
I wrote this article last year, and never posted it, as my hiatus from writing my blogs began before I finished this piece. As 2021 has brought much-needed change and some relief with it, I am now tracing my steps to see where I left off with life, including the blogs. Today I will publish this piece, but it wasn't the only thing I've written nor will it be my last blog post. It will be, I hope, the first of more regular posts that reflect on my writing life. Hope you are finding ways to continue your creative life as well, and I look forward to a new season ahead.
On this last day of Winter, 2021, I wish you a fruitful year ahead, a healing one, and one which like a seed planted last fall, begins to poke its first shoots through the ground into the light of Spring.
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