After the obnoxious events of last October, I had no hope for November. If you recall, I was exhausted, psychologically drained, and quite certain that I would have started digging. Instead, the thing that happens every time I stop caring happened: I start doing things without overthinking them, I put myself in unpredictable situations, and – as a consequence – things changes.

October was supposed to be ”The Month.” After a complicated summer and an awful September, I had my October well planned. It was meant to be filled with things I wanted to do, fun events, enjoyable travels, and inspiring experiences that could have helped me reverse the spiraling downward momentum of the last few months. Instead, everything went down the toilet.

In early September, I found myself in an emotional slump. For the first time since late 2019, I was overcome by crippling anxiety and disheartenment. It’s not that I hadn’t experienced anxiety since 2019, but I had never reached this level of intensity (which isn’t a bad accomplishment considering I had to navigate a global pandemic). Fortunately, I have some experience with these situations, so I was able to regain control in a week instead of the three months it used to take.

I know, I am late, but I have a good excuse: I was on a short holiday break in my nearby town of Terracina. I had also planned to publish this article on one of those lazy afternoons. However, when I arrived, I noticed that the mobile connection was practically non-existent (I hadn’t seen 1kbps since the early 2000s), so I gave up. No real damage, I suppose. I guess nobody lost any sleep over it.

Notwithstanding the Sud-European heatwave, I survived. This is already a good result for July, per se. Hailstorms and high-speed winds scourged Northern Italy, while forest fires tormented Southern Italy. I, in the middle, only had to endure 45°C. If you look at this in perspective, it is not so bad. However, surviving was not enough. While the world slowed down, burdened by the sluggish progression of an overheated July, I felt more in tune with myself.

June was fine. I wish I could express more positive sentiments, but that’s how I feel. It was, however, a big step forward compared to May. Not because I resolved anything (on the contrary, my frustrations grew stronger) but rather because I put a certain emotional scar tissue around my problems so that they interfere less with my intentions. June was also the month in which I was supposed to get the new car I ordered back in January.

In the previous issue of the Changelog, I mentioned that May is my apathy month: a time when my motivation plummets, my mood darkens, and I become more introverted than usual. Unfortunately, I was right. Over the past 30 days, I have felt myself slowly sliding to the bottom of my emotional pit. Moreover, my “preventive care trip” to Ferrara got canceled due to the extensive and destructive floods in the region, so I had no other option but to accept the sliding.

They say that to err is human, but to persist is diabolical. If that’s the case, then I must be the devil himself. April has been grossly underwhelming; I had little motivation, energy, and found myself in a persistent state of low-level anxiety. Unfortunately, this has dramatically impacted my ability to mentally organize my things. For example, I usually follow a seasonal schedule where I reevaluate the previous three months at the end of each quarter to see what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next quarter.

This damn month. It went fast. It went weird. It went backward but also kinda forward. So it went technically sideways, in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of “something went wrong or didn’t go as planned,” but also in the more precise feeling that I don’t know if I made any progress on anything or not. With a quick statistical exploration of my diary, “kitchen” was the third most used word, followed only by “things” and “do.

There is a little trick I find helpful to get unstuck. Take the one thing you would like to do. Take the smallest related activity that you would consider a goal. Divide that effort by ten. I wanted to actively come back to fiction writing for a long time, but I never managed to get myself to do anything in that regard. So this month, I followed my own advice and asked myself to write for 30 minutes three days a week.