Yule has come and the it marks the shortest day of the year! This year, I’m hosting a winter afternoon tea with a bunch of winter health goodies. It’s made my schedule quite packed as there’s a lot of prep work to do. The only day I could host the tea is on a Sunday if I wanted to be able to invite most of my closest. I work a ten-hour shift on the Saturday though so I had to work on a way I could do little bits at a time so I wasn’t spending all of the night before to bake and prepare everything (˘•‿•). I think this is the more ambitious of little events I’ve thrown.

In my other free time, I’ve been continuing to write. Of course, I haven’t been working on what’s on the plan (￣ ￣|| ) but I am writing nonetheless. Most of my break time at work I use for editing Rini & Butler and so that’s making plenty of headway as well. Going back to paper editing was a good choice for me. 

I’m taking some time off from work soon for my health, and I’m hoping to use that time as to really pay attention to my body and mind. I’m also hoping to spend it working on my writing habits and reflect again on my how I see my writing. I always just tell people that it’s one of my hobbies and I don’t like to say “I’m a writer”—despite that being what I do with a lot of my time—because people automatically respond with “what have you written?”. I’m not a professional writer, I am not getting paid for it (mostly because I haven’t really taken the proper leaps yet), but that doesn’t mean I’m not a writer. But I still come back to that expectation of “you should have published something then” and it just spirals into the “I’ll never publish anything” branch of self-doubt. 

I still have remnants of what it means to be a “writer” from my view as a child. The grand dream is to publish my stories and be able to continue to do so, to make it self-sustaining on its own. But that’s only how it works for a handful of writers. This idea gets used for self-sabotage. I’ll never be one of those writers anyway, so it doesn’t matter if I don’t try. We know that little monster is there and yet I think it still informs so much of my behaviour (¬､¬). There are also a plethora of other knots that I have to undo that make up the body of that little monster. Creativity is so free and binding at the same time, but I’m working on it ( • ̀ω•́ )✧