Winding up the A-Z

 

Most years I have done the theme reveal and the reflections posts – sometimes no theme reveal but still a reflections post. And because my normal size posts for A-Z are quite shamelessly beyond any acceptable word limits – I have usually done a long version and a short version. Options are essential in my book. Not last year though. No reveal, no reflections. This year again, I didn't do a reveal - I was in India, too much going on. I don't know if this can be classified as a reflections post.

 

Any which way it's sliced, my life is split down in the middle – I exist in two parallel worlds, all expats do, not just me. In Bengal the favourite idiom for this kind of split is ‘to sail in two boats with a foot in each.’ The halves are not reflections of each other though, they are not mirror images, there is very little in common in the two lives in fact. Watertight compartmentalisation might just describe it accurately.

 

The same thing applies to what goes on offline and here online at M-i-V. Two different halves which have no common axis of symmetry around which to coalesce. Since 2020, April has been a tough baby to tackle offline due to deaths in the family, also various other less catastrophic, but still major changes. This year was no different - April was the best of times and it was the worst of times as well. I logged in here and closed the door on my other life, the one that's a little more difficult to navigate right now - sometimes I wish I could just lift one foot off one of the boats and jump into the other one and stand squarely planted there, but of course I can't do that. The blog is the next best alternative and the A-Z provided structure, direction, relief, however temporary - a toehold on sense amidst the chaos elsewhere. Just that has been enough.

I did this A-Z a little differently from last year - my name was back on the master list and I started with the idea of visiting the entire list of participants at least once. I visited more than 95%, not a bad score. What it meant was, unlike other years, I wasn't able to visit the blogs I like as frequently as I wanted to. I read wide and not deep, I ended up visiting most blogs just once or twice. This doesn't agree with me as well as I thought it would.

I found it tiresome that quite a few people signed up and then dropped out after a couple of days, and their blogs remained on the list for other bloggers to click on even at the end of April. Several blogs I visited did not have the A-Z posts upfront and easy to find, one had to rootle around to locate them, I stressed and fretted, patience is not my strong suit - but felt I had to make an honest effort because of that arbitrary goal setting. This isn't something I'm doing again, no way I'm setting this cent percent visiting target. 

For the first time this year, I didn't use the graphics that A-Z provided in my individual posts. I did have the badge up top for the benefit of first time visitors. Didn't use the alphabet badges because 1) I had rather a lot of photos to share for most posts and I didn't want to make the site even slower by making it more image-heavy. 2) I miss the original 'postmark' graphics! They were unique and uniquely associated with the A-Z and it feels strangely odd replacing that with something so radically different. I miss Jeremy Hawkins' amazing work and sense of colour that made the A-Z badges extra special. I'm not complaining about the new graphics, honest, thank you to 'Anonymous' who did the badges. And thank you to the host team who do the work to keep the A-Z going. 

Did I have fun? Mostly, except the days when I was too heartsick and couldn't compartmentalise efficiently. I'd read, or write, and the the words would jump about like drunken grasshoppers and make no sense after a few lines. No matter how hard I tried to balance on the two boats, one of them would rock most unnervingly, I'd have to switch off from blogging and focus on riding that out. 

Will I be back next year? In the years past, I've answered with a resounding yes without any hesitations. Now I am not so sure. Who knows where I'll be, what things will be like, whether I'll have any headspace left for blogging challenges after coping with the offline challenges life keeps throwing up. I'm just going to leave that decision for next year, I'll make up my mind in March 2024. There's lots of time. We'll see.