I’m feeling stuck and hoping things will change for the better.

This new year, 2022, started off very slowly for me. It began with me fighting yet another sinus infection, something I get frequently due to my multitude of allergies. The antibiotics I’m taking make me exhausted far beyond the tiredness my chronic illnesses inflict upon me. Put this all together, and I cannot help but feel that making actual progress in any goal will be out of my reach.

The previous year was difficult – and not only for me, I know. One of the clients I write for “ghosted” me in 2021. I had a contract that ran out. After much effort trying to contact a specific person at the large corporation – who assured me that they would “get right on” the new contract – it fizzled.

In the meantime, they let me keep working for about three months, and then stopped responding. Three months of work for no pay. The gig was half my monthly income.

I am absolutely not going to work for a large corporation this year, or possibly ever again. Instead, I’m hoping to pick up work by sending pitches to independent websites that seek writers.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, posted on Twitter (on New Year’s Eve) that it would be accepting donations in cryptocurrency. The tweet specifically points out dogecoin, ethereum and bitcoin. I found this disappointing, and I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are several comments left by equally unhappy people in response to Mozilla’s tweet. I believe the younger generations call this “getting ratioed”.

Cryptocurrency bothers me, in part because mining it has a really bad effect on the environment of our already tortured planet. In addition, I’ve seen artists on social media who sadly discover that the artwork they created had been stolen and put on the blockchain by some random stranger.

Fortunately, Safari was right there, waiting for me to stop ignoring it. This led to me re-learning how to use a browser I hadn’t touched in years, and importing an enormous amount of bookmarks from Firefox. Sorting them out is tedious, and I’ve already deleted many of them.

Deleting bookmarks I no longer care about is cathartic, and I want to keep whittling them down. My original goal was to use those bookmarks as topics for blog posts, but there are way too many of them.

We are now in our third year of the COVID pandemic. I’m immune compromised, so I will not be going outside unless I absolutely have to. My immune system was just strong enough for me to get vaccinated, and boosted, and to get a flu shot (but not all at the same time). When I must leave the house to get health care, or to buy clothing to replace what wore out in the past two years, I wear a mask. I’m doing everything right.

Unfortunately, I no longer trust other people to do the right thing. There’s a sentence I’ve seen written on social media, which goes something like: “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.”

2022 might be the year I go through my “to read” pile (including physical books and digital media). Some of it I will choose to keep, and some will be sent to a local independent bookstore. With luck, I might be able to complete some of the arts and crafts projects I started before the pandemic, and then abandoned.

These are not New Year’s resolutions. They are small steps I’ve already started taking in order to make my life safer, healthier, and happier.

These are not New Year’s Resolutions is a post written by Jen Thorpe on Book of Jen and is not allowed to be copied to other sites. If you enjoyed this blog post please consider supporting me on Ko-fi. Thank you!

Posted in MediumTagged ,