I’ve said before that I tend to do much more reflection and introspection on my birthday every March than I do at the start of a new calendar year, but I find myself coming into these final hours of 2023 without having any real ideas about what I should post here to close out the year. To be honest, I’ve been struggling with coming up with topics for this particular blog for weeks, and coming up with blog topics in general for a very long time. The years where I managed to post a new entry here every Monday seem like ages ago, even though I only broke that pattern relatively recently, and even getting something new up here once a month can often feel like a Herculean task.

As I’ve been coming up on this self-imposed deadline, it’s occurred to me more and more that the reason I may be having a difficult time blogging is simply because there hasn’t been that much going on in my life. This past semester, in particular, was a real challenge, as I was not only teaching an overload (for a whole semester) for the first time in my career, but I was also having to develop new course materials as part of a fellowship I’m taking part in this academic year. As such, that hasn’t left much free time for blogging or other tasks. I’ve fallen way behind on research for my next book, I’ve let some cleaning tasks here in my apartment linger for way too long, and I just generally feel like I’m having to play a constant game of catch-up when it comes to too many things in my life.

That’s not even counting the things I can’t talk about here. Without getting into details that I shouldn’t mention here, my world kind of came apart at the seams as I was researching something this past October, and I’ve had to launch a whole new “educating myself” initiative to figure out what the heck I should do. It is my sincere hope that I never even have to talk about what happened on here — this is one of those matters that I’d like to keep private — but it’s looking more and more Screaming Banshee Sean may need to make a return for at least a little while in 2024.

Maybe I’m just becoming even more boring than I was before I plod through my late forties here. Maybe the chaos and harm all around me is making it difficult for me to articulate my own concerns when I feel like I’m constantly steeped in the soup of trying to help others. Whatever the case, I feel like I’m just marking time as I type these words, and I sincerely hope that I can come up with more interesting blogs than this one over the next twelve months.