The End of 2020, The Beginning Of A Blog
By: C. J. Melyn
Tags: Change, Goal Setting, Adhd, First Post, Introduction

Prior to the madness, I was a productive member of society. I had a job, albeit not a prestigious one; I was a dog walker in New York City and there was a lot about that life that I loved.

Pre-everything I was outside every day getting oodles of exercise. I would get dressed rain or shine, and venture across Brooklyn to all of my clients.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Now? I live in Kentucky with my partner and his parents. They are nice people and this isn’t a post about shitting on your inlaws. All families are weird. Mine is no exception.

My parents are Trump supporters, which led to disagreements and the accompanying drama. We were in Colorado before landing in Kentucky. Now here, in Kentucky, we are not subjected to a certain animal named, conservative “news” network for several hours daily. For that, I am grateful.

What we are subjected to is a lot of stuff. Rooms full of things that hold sentimental value or items that could maybe be useful someday. This 4 bedroom house has 2 spare bedrooms packed so full that you can hardly open the inward swinging doors. Don’t ask about the garage.

Frankly, this isn’t a post about decluttering. I apologize to the Marie Kondo in all of you.

In recent months and recent moves, I’ve found it hard to feel productive. Focus and routine, which have always been difficult for me have become next to impossible. So I’m going to start writing about my journey and posting about it.

In an effort of full disclosure, I wrote that pre-pandemic I was a dog walker and that is true, but that was almost a year before the pandemic. 2019 also atypical.

My partner and I decided to leave New York City and buy a sailboat. I quit my job as the manager of a dog walking company in Brooklyn and my partner kept his job and worked remotely. The goal was to sail around the world. Did we have any sailing experience? No, but we learned fast.

Then, while we were bobbing around on a mooring ball in Miami, COVID-19 first showed its face. We decided we didn’t want to be living in a completely unprotected mooring field until travel restrictions lifted so we decided to get the boat hauled out and stored on land.

With my parents’ blessing we rented a car, packed up our two kitties and most of our belongings and drove from Florida to Colorado to wait out the pandemic. We stayed in Denver for 6 months and once again we packed ourselves and the cats and road-tripped to Kentucky where we have been for about 2 months.

All of this change, all of this moving, all of this loneliness, has taught me the importance of routines. I am happier, more confident, more productive if I have a routine, but I am notoriously bad at equalizing after big changes. I am horrible at keeping a schedule, particularly a self-imposed one.

Part of that, I am learning is due to the fact that I have ADHD. I just got diagnosed a couple of months ago and while it does make a lot of sense, this would have been nice to know YEARS ago.

This blog is going to be a lot of things, but primarily it is going to be about goal setting and creating routines to achieve those goals. Or at least that is my current intention.

I am flawed and inconsistent. Sometimes I can focus for hours and other times I am incapable of remembering why I walked into the kitchen.

Mainly this blog is a place for me to track my progress and my journey. I’ve spent a long time feeling stupid and lazy. Now is time to embrace ADHD as the superpower that it is and try to build routines and habits that work for me as a neurodivergent person.

Here I will be honest, share my triumphs and my failures and my thought process along the way. I hope that you will also share your story with me.