Earlier this week, I sent out an email letting you all know that I’d be taking some time off from writing to deal with a family emergency. I hadn’t expected to hear anything back from any of you but, much to my surprise, I was inundated with your responses.
So many of you read that email, not knowing my situation, and proceeded to send your best wishes and prayers. For that, I can’t thank you enough.
As a writer online, you never really know if people resonate with your words. Sure, you can crunch the numbers and analyse the data. You can look at stats and figures. But there’s no metric that tells you how you make people feel.
That being said, to read so many of your emails of support, encouragement and, above all, of genuine thanks for my work so far was just wonderful. It warms my heart to know that these daily snippets of my imagination have actually helped some of you out there.
The Daily Grind has been an experiment of sorts. I’ve dabbled in newsletters in the past, but nothing daily, and nothing quite like this. With anything new and unpredictable, fear of failure always looms.
Thanks to your emails, I received the reassurance I needed to keep going. To keep writing. You’ve given me a new metric - the metric of emotion. And so far, it’s looking pretty good.
I’ll be back soon. I don’t know how long. It may be days, it may be weeks, it could even be months. But I’ll be back.
- Adrian
If you’d like to know a little more about what’s happening in my life at the moment, my fiancé has brain cancer. She’s had it for more than a year. Recently, the one large tumour she had became two tumours - both inoperable.
Sadly, there’s nothing the doctors can do from here on out. Chemo isn’t working anymore. They’ve estimated she’ll have around three months left at most.
Rather than writing, I want to spend that time with her. Of course I do. Anybody would. But knowing precisely when I’ll be back to writing full-time is difficult to gauge, since anything could happen at any point and I have no idea how I’ll take it.
That being said, these things are difficult, but there’s only one direction we can travel. Forward. I can’t suspend my writing commitments forever, and I’m certainly not giving up after all of the work I’ve put into my career so far.
The Daily Grind isn’t over. I mean that. It will continue, and I’ll be back better than ever before with new stories and insights - I just don’t know when. You’ll wait for me though, won’t you?
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash