Why I’ve been gone so long

DEPRESSION! 

That’s the short answer. But like most simple answers, it excludes a lot of important nuance. And the complicated truth is much more involved.

But yes, I stopped writing, I think, because I stopped travelling. Travelling and writing for me go hand in hand. If I’m travelling, I am writing. But in 2016 I went back to uni, getting a new undergrad degree in Economics. I could have made some time for travel (if I had the funds, but I didn’t) but I was trying to hurry through my course as quickly as possible, as I wasn’t getting any younger and gave zero fucks about the college experience. So I clocked an average 25 hours a semester, taking classes between terms, and taking classes at other nearby unis to transfer to my uni later (because my uni has a cap on how many classes you can take in a semester, even though I got special permission to take 21 hours, it still wasn’t enough to complete my degree in two years.)

Not to toot my own horn (who am I kidding, that’s exactly what I’m doing) I came out with an almost perfect GPA, ruined only by B in calculus….(grrrrr.) My confines to the ivory tower kept me in the United States, and worse a constraint was my time, which was given over completely to finishing the degree.

I continued immediately with a masters in economics, going to London for an MSc in Global Economic Governance and Policy. While I was there I did almost no travel. Only a day trip to France for my anniversary (just the ferry to Calais for crepes and walking along the beach) then back to London to take an exam the following day.  And throughout all this schooling, I was doing a lot of academic writing, but none creatively. 

Then, after I finished school I immediately landed a dream job. A wonderful opportunity with a promising future career! It was mostly WFH with a London based charity/think tank on a project to improve lifetime outcomes of girls in Africa and the Middle East. Exactly the kind of work I wanted to do. And I even got to travel for work. To Ethiopia and to Jordan, and the potential to travel to Rwanda and more! But those work trips were so busy that I didn’t have time to see Addis Ababa at all, nor Amman. Which… was fine. I still had a flexible enough schedule and was finally making enough money to be able to travel without extreme budgeting. (Ramen noodle meals and taking a piece of fruit and some bread from hostels’s breakfasts, putting it into a napkin and secreting it into my rucksack, to have for lunch.)

So, I was at a place where I had the time and the money to travel!

But… the pandemic…

I had been in Amaan for a month when the travel bans were announced and I decided to go back to the US. Where I stayed, stuck, to this very day.

The data collection stopped in Jordan the day I left, and without new incoming data, I didn’t have much of a job to do other than the most basic and mundane of tasks that grew painful to even contemplate. At one point I remember thinking, “If I were dead, I wouldn’t have to do this.”

I took that as a sign and left my job because I assumed that wasn’t a indication of excellent mental health. But appointments with psychologists were booked up for months, and leaving my job actually helped.

Turns out I have severe depression and ADHD and my brain in the pandemic was dangerously under-stimulated, made even worse by the tedium of what my job had become, which rapidly depleted what little dopamine I had until I had none left. Quitting was the right choice.

I rested.

I spent more time out of doors.

I started treatment.

I started to write again.  It was crap, but it was something.

I also took some online classes.

Because of a shoulder injury, I couldn’t do most forms of fun, so walking was the thing. I walked. I wrote. I read. 

I am still walking, and writing and reading.   

But now that I’ve been vaccinated, and it looks like the world might be opening up slightly, I mean to make my way through it. 

I have no doubt unrealistically ambitious plans about my writing from now on, but still, I have several projects and deadline goals and plan to pursue them. I won’t share them just yet.

But know I know my brain needs the stimulation of travel to thrive, and it isn’t just a quirk of my personality. So I shall travel and I shall write.

I’ll have to start small.

But that’s still a start.