All following crow content is original content by me
Hey there, Hive community, it's been a while.
My activity on here has been tapering off for a while, for a multitude of reasons. A big one being that I lost the majority of my readers - my fiction stories just stopped getting any comments. The payout stayed stable, but the interaction had mostly vanished and with it went my motivation to write.
Then the pandemic happened, things became even harder with everyone being stressed out and me trying to somehow finish my MSc degree online.
In October I then started my PhD. Luckily, research was classified as essential which allowed me to still go to the lab every day.
It's a weird time to start a PhD. The campus is deserted and so far I haven't seen the lower half of the faces of my lab mates - as we're all wearing masks.
It's become harder and harder to interact with people, and my mental health has been dropping considerably since the new year began. Ireland has been in a 5km lockdown since Christmas, and there is no end in sight with the numbers rising and the vaccination process being very slow.
I haven't been writing, not even the academic stuff I should be working on. Like so many others, I'm burnt out but there aren't really any options to recover - can't go abroad, can't even go and see the ocean that surrounds me because it's outside my 5km.
The only thing I've been doing regularly is feeding the jackdaws on campus. They absolutely love peanuts and have started to wait for me to come to feed them. Slowly, they stop being afraid of me and are willing to come closer and closer for their treats.
I doubt things will change any time soon. Current projections say that the majority of adults in Ireland should be vaccinated by the end of June - if vaccine supply works out. But that's still a very long time to go, and even then I will need time to recover from all that has been going on.
Will I be back here to give you my fiction stories?
I don't know.
I have already decided that this year there won't be an April Fools joke from me, I didn't have the ideas or energy to make one. Maybe next year? We will see.
That's it from me for now. I hope you're all doing as okay as you can under the current circumstances. I will be around, whenever inspiration strikes.
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