2021–A New Start

2021 has been warm (a bit too warm for me–I’m not overly a summer person!) in the Bay of Plenty. I didn’t stay up to see the end of 2020–I held it to its word that the year would see itself out. Saying 2020 was hard is inadequate and I wish I had something inspirational to expound on.

2019 ended on a strange note for me. I had gone back to the States for the first time in years and went on a FAM that had me looking up real estate prices in Montana. I was slammed with an unexpected sense of homesickness. It was an amazing trip and I didn’t do it justice in any of my usual outlets. My brain was a swirly mess–the girls were already thriving in New Zealand and I really wasn’t going to move, but I had an undefined unhappiness that I couldn’t shake. I worked hard on finding things to look forward to and that all came down to travel. I pitched my heart out and lined up an amazing year. The plan was to “relaunch” the blog as I started an epic year of travel. I was excited and felt like I was finally getting my act together.

Have you read On the Beach? You know how much I love a good post-apocalyptic story and this is one that stuck with me even more than most. It predominantly takes place in Australia and the main characters live out their fairly normal lives while waiting for the inevitable cloud of radiation that has wiped out the rest of the world to reach them. I felt like we were living out an updated version of the book as we watched the first reports of a virus outbreak turn into city, then country lockdowns with all of my flights being cancelled one right after another. We watched as New Zealand got its first cases and panic buying started to set in. Fewer and fewer kids were in school. On the last day of school before we went into our own lockdown, Matilda’s class had five students.

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Our lockdown remains the strictest I know of in the world and while it felt surreal at the time, it feels even more so looking back on it. It was easy. It was difficult. We comfort ate our way through it and stressed a bit over the unexpected supermarket rationing. It was summer when we went into lockdown and winter when we emerged. I started out thinking I would pivot my plan for the blog and be super successful at crafting my way through this weird time, but what I ended up doing was focusing on just getting through what needed to be done and then taking an afternoon nap with Luna (the kitten we got right before lockdown) and then Skye (the puppy we got right after).

As we got further into the year, life just got stranger. I had content to post, but it felt wrong to me. I know bloggers all handled it differently, but I couldn’t bring myself to post happy crafts or talk about travel that couldn’t happen. To be honest, I’m still having a difficult time scrolling through social media (I kinda hated it before the pandemic, but it’s extra surreal to me now).

And here we are. I love my blog–it’s part of what makes me happy and a part which has been missing. I don’t have the right answers on how to proceed, but I know I’m not willing to let my blog go. I know we can’t travel right now (and man am I feeling it!), but I’m going to put up the posts that should have been up long ago. I’m going to start putting up the crafty posts I’ve been sitting on and share new projects (I have a shed studio being built as we speak and I am more excited for it to be finished than anything in a long time). I’ll probably have chatty posts like this in there, too. One of the good things that came out of losing all of my brand partnerships due to this last move is that I’m not beholden to anyone–I can do what I want with this space. This is a new start and I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.