COVID and creative numbness

I have to be honest with you. I am suffering from a serious lack of creativity lately, and I believe it to be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. How, you ask, can I blame this crisis of creativity on SARS-CoV-2? It is easy. I do not watch television except to catch the occasional weather update. That weather update is now surrounded by COVID headlines, COVID commercials, COVID breaking news, COVID interruptions, COVID, COVID, COVID, and in the weather, we have COVID…  I end up not even getting the weather update because I am so tired of hearing about the pandemic that I could just crawl in a deep, dark hole and stay there, which is, in fact, what I have done. I have crawled in my basement abode, set up my desk and writing books, computer, and other various necessities within reach, and stayed here. I have not been climbing. I have not been outside much. The most contact with people I have had has been going to my doctor’s appointments. Sad, but true. I do not want to catch COVID, but I am tired of hearing about it. Recently, politics have made a comeback in the news and commercial ads on television alongside COVID. Politics is just as sickening to me as COVID is at this point. I know what I think about politics and having to endure the political ads is just as bad as hearing about the next vaccine for COVID that will not be available until next year sometime. In the meantime, I am stuck in a black hole of creative numbness.

Something good that has come out of this creative numbness, though, is the pursuit of a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from SNHU. I have not been accepted to that program yet, but I am working on the framework to prove that I can handle the program and can be competitive for admission by working on my first course in the Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing program at SNHU. All of it is completely online, which is completely foreign to me, but I am figuring it out. It gives me something to work on and work toward. It is sparking my creative juices to flow again in small ways and I hope that it can revive my creativity and restore it to full health. So far, so good. Class started this Monday. I have all of my assignments finished for the first week already, and the first assignment was not even due until today (Thursday). I had everything submitted by last night. Hopefully I did it all correctly, and we will soon find out if I need to improve (everyone needs to improve). It having been the first set of assignments to complete, I expect a lot of feedback from the professor and will take it all to heart as a good and faithful student of the writing craft. In other words, if I get shot down, I will not take it personally. I will learn from it and become better. I have a very good professor that just finished her own MFA degree and understands what it entails. We have established a very good rapport with one another and I feel confident that she will be able to lead me in the right direction. At least I have that going for me!

One thing I have to get back to, though, is climbing. At. All. Costs. Climbing is life! Besides that, I still owe you, my readers, a shoe review on the new La Sportiva Solution Comps! Gotta climb in them to know what they are capable of!