Your Footing
By: S.A. Ranft
Tags: Writing, Uncertainty, Employment, Life Lessons

It’s a strange feeling when for the longest time all you’ve wanted is more time, only to get it all at once and have no fucking idea what to do with it.

Some days you realize everything is fine and that you’re going to be okay. Other days your current lack of direction becomes so overwhelming that you just want to lie in bed and start all over again the next. So you fall into bad habits. Or a lack of routine. Typically both. “A little bit of time” turns into a few weeks. Those few weeks turn into a couple months. And no, you still have no idea what you’re going to do. The strangest thing about it is that for the most part, everything is fine. And you are going to be okay.

You figure this endless amount of free time will translate into working on old projects — that manuscript of poems you never published, those short stories you never followed through on, that novel that’s been untouched for nearly 4 years — but it doesn’t. It just doesn’t. So you proceed to get frustrated because again, you have no fucking idea what you’re doing. And even worse, you have no idea what it is you really want to be doing. Not anymore anyway.

You wake up early most days but you’re not productive. You don’t work out as often as you’d like. Heck, you hardly work out at all. You use the shitty weather as an excuse, but it’s not just that. Your drive just isn’t there anymore. And even though you’re unhappy with your habits, and with how you’re starting to look, you do nothing to address it. Instead you just say it out loud thinking the issues will fix themselves. You know better, of course, but that doesn’t matter right now. So instead of coming up with a workout plan or a healthier weekly routine. you drink a ton of coffee. You play videogames for hours and before you can stop yourself, it’s nighttime again. Maybe you go out for drinks in the evening.

In any case, the routine hardly changes. You even forget how to socialize. Because while working from home sure is dandy from a flexibility standpoint, you just didn’t get out much. Now you’ve largely forgotten how to communicate with people in a quote unquote normal way. So to cope you fire off a series of stupid tweets that nobody will care about. Or should care about. After all, you don’t even care about them (even though you secretly do). Or you proceed to run a series of already beaten to death jokes into the ground. And even when they’re good and buried, you keep making them. You’re just looking to connect, but you’ve clearly forgotten how.

You don’t have ideas as often as you used to, but even when they pop into your head you no longer know how to execute them. You’re tired all of the time despite sleeping more now than you have in years. But you’re healthy, and that counts for something. Plus, other things in your life truly are looking up. Right now though, whatever this is, it sucks. It’s a funk you’ve been in for a while, but now you’ve got nothing but time to occupy it.

So it lurks around every corner. It shouts at you when you got to sleep at night and again when you wake up the next morning. It smacks you in the face as you continuously refuse to do something about it. Now you’re questioning everything you’ve ever done. You’re questioning whether or not you’re good enough to continue doing what you’ve done for the past 6 years of your life. And no amount of validation will slow the questioning down. It’s strange. All you’ve wanted all this time is, quite simply, more time. Now that you’ve got nothing but, you’ve never been more terrified. You’ve never been more uncertain.

But at least tomorrow is another day, right? Whatever that means.