What can I say, keeping up with a professional blog is hard in any school year. Keeping up with one in the previous school year... not even remotely possible for me. It seemed to take everything I had in me to just show up and do my job most days. That's not to say there weren't some really great experiences tucked into the overwhelming madness, there were, but the general sense was one of sustained stress and residual trauma. And honestly, just because I made it to summer doesn't mean that stress and trauma aren't there, it's just that I have more time to address it now.
It's been nearly 9 months since the last time I saw my husband and 18 since we were in our own home together. That's hard to believe. Poor guy is trapped in his parent's basement waiting for a work project to start up again or for the Chinese borders to open back up to dependents, neither of which seem to be on the horizon. And while my situation here hasn't been ideal, I at least have work and cats to keep my mind off how terrible things are. That's pretty on par with how I handle stress anyway; throwing myself into work and avoiding difficult emotions. The first step is acknowledging it though, right?
At any rate, I've really wanted to get back to this blog for months, and there's no excuse now. So here it is, my first post in a year to say... I'm back. Again.