I turned 30 in June...

I'm currently at work super early.

It turns out my shift doesn't officially start until 10am, even though the website management of my position stated that my call time was 8:30am, so just in case, I came earlier.

It's 9:26am now and I've been prolonging this blog post. I've been trying to post something here, but life has been in the way.

Now that I've turned 30 years old, there's a lot of responsibilities that I have to take care of, such as money, bills, student debt, credit card debt, my parents, searching for a house, etc. All this has pulled me away from writing my own thoughts or creating stories that I've been embellishing over the years, hoping to post someday.

The problem with that is the possibility of others stealing my work. I saw what that did to my mother when she used to write stories in Canada, but she never saw her royalties because the person who was supposed to help publish her work had written her own name in there, taking advantage of my mother's short term memory loss with certain names and features of people and items. My mother's memory is broken during that time in Canada, and I know this because she can't even recall the story plot she wrote, but she remembered it was a romance novel. My sister doesn't believe her, and I, myself, am trying to believe her.

This brings up the other subject about life - family.

My mother is deeply ill. Terminally ill. As in, she needs a kidney transplant as soon as possible. For both kidneys.

June was not only the month when I turned 30, but also when my mother started surgery to get weekly dialysis treatment.

The stress of keeping her healthy and happy has led to me not feeding into my creative passion after last summer's graduation project. It has been nearly 1 year since I've officially graduated from a private Catholic university with an MFA in Creative Writing, and I haven't written anything because I've been destressing by playing video games on PC at most afternoons and evenings.

Don't get me wrong - diving into the world of gaming since the second half of 2020 has brought me joy and friendships in all sorts of places. Due to my experience of online groups in different genres and getting catfished about 5 times now (could be 6... I need to recall a previous nonfiction essay about being catfished because I have detailed accounts of it there), I made friends with different kinds of people and was able to become civil with people who I frequently am at odds with.

It's these types of friendships that I've also been juggling in my online life, along with my friendships I've managed to keep in real life. These relationship dynamics are the inspiration to some of my best works, and I've been slowly working my way up into someday actually writing something.

I wish to start small and publish. Although the smart thing is to copyright my work before sending it out to promising publishers/journals, it isn't advisable when I don't have enough money in the world to copyright every single piece of work. Instead, I'll be going over small works so that I miss them less in case people try to publish my works with their names on it. (Although I have receipts, so they can't legally copyright something that isn't theirs to begin with.)

Work is starting in 10 minutes now. I was about to add a sticker of some sort with this blog post, but I'm running out of time and I keep bumping into inappropriate images as I scroll through to find something simply cute. I'll try to blog post more often in the near future.

xoxo Nikka