TWAS the Year of Despair

Late last year I decided to spin up blogging again. I had just left my job at Dandy to care for my Mom who was battling Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer. I figured it would be a good way to get back in to the habit of journaling. I had also been inspired by Chamath Palihapitiya's "What I Read This Week..." and wanted to keep a link log that was not in a third-party app.

So I started with a weekly TWAS. This Week As Steven. I started getting into a groove... documenting things I had watched on Netflix and interesting links that I had come across. As the New Year started I thought I would keep it up, but then my Mom's health took a turn for the worse.

My Mom passed away in early February and so too did my desire to keep what seemed like a frivolous log of nonsense. I had a lot of things to deal with and I was not in the right headspace to keep up with... well... anything.

A few weeks ago I finally put my Mom's house on the market. It was a bittersweet moment. I had spent exactly zero years living in the house she left behind. I think I can count the overnight stays on one hand. But it was still a house full of memories. The first thing I went to recover was the family photo albums. There were so many photos of my Mom that I had never seen before and many memories of my early childhood that I had forgotten.

To be sadly realistic, the vast majority of my Mom's stuff accumulated over the years was "junk". Junk not in terms of not having value, but junk in terms of not being worth keeping. We gave as much as we could to refuge families at her church, but the rest was hauled away to the dump. I was honestly surprised at how there was so little sentiment attached to the things that I thought I would want to keep. It was also very sad to think about how young my Mom passed and how 71 years of life can be reduced to a few boxes of photos.

One thing that we were able to keep though was her art. My Mom was a late bloomer as an artist. I had never so much as seen her doodle until she started taking watercolor classes a couple of years ago. She was a natural. What also amazed me was how prolific of an artist she became in such a short time. She had dozens of framed paintings and multiple portfolios of other work. We were able to keep a few of our favorites and offered up other pieces to her friends at her Celebration of Life.

Grief is a strange thing. Some days I feel like I was prepared all along to lose her, knowing how bad the cancer was. Other days, like Mother's Day, I feel the shock and overwhelming feeling of loss for someone who left this world way too soon. But three months on I do think I am starting to find a sense of normalcy again. And perhaps it is time to start writing again. I have a lot of things I want to share and a lot of things I want to document. I am not sure if it will be weekly, but I do think it is time to keep going.

As I lost my Mom I also "lost" my job and started feeling a loss of my... self. Kierkegaard once wrote, "The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed." I think I have been in a bit of a funk since then. I have been trying to figure out what I want to do next and how I want to spend my time. I have have been working on some side projects and exploring AI tooling, but I have not been able to find the same spark of joy that I feel like I had while Mom was still around.

Nevertheless, we persist. I'll be here. Riding the indoor trainer. Out riding my bike. I hope to see you out there. I hope to see you here.