By Emmie
The past couple months I have struggled to find motivation to write my blog post. I think this is due to multiple things but I think that the pressure from my own expectations has been a key factor in my lack of motivation.
I started my 2023 with COVID. Literally January 2nd I tested positive for COVID. Being stuck in your room and sick for 10 days sucks. However it sucks even more when it happens to be the 1st week of January. Even though I don’t consistently make New Year’s resolutions, I still associate the new year with a time for new motivation. I mean it’s hard not to because there is a cultural and societal pressure that with a new year there is a new you. I felt very motivated about the new year but being stuck at home and sick for 10 days made me feel less motivated giving my year a slow start. The start to my 2023 wasn’t just slowed down by my COVID test though because the day I was supposed to return to dance it rained, something Southern California is not equipped for. This left me stuck at home for another 2 days. I think I felt less motivated because my year didn’t start right away or the way I expected it to. My new year did not start the way I expected and I think that is another thing that has contributed to my struggle to motivate is my expectations I have had about the year. I think I had this expectation about this year that every aspect would be amazing and there have been some really amazing moments, like having the opportunity to perform The Nutcracker with a professional ballet company, or seeing the improvements and growth within my dancing but there are also a lot of just mediocre or challenging moments. This winter there were a lot more mediocre and challenging moments like getting back into dancing shape after having COVID or moments where I didn’t feel good about my dancing but still having to go to dance everyday or just the challenges of living away from home by myself for the first time. Having more of those challenging moments made me not want to write about them because I was still buying into the expectation that every moment of this year has to be amazing to be worth sharing. I felt that the only thing I could write about in my blog was the really awesome things. But that is not what this blog is for, its to share my experiences of this year, not my expectations of my experiences of this year. Not all of my experiences are going to be amazing and that’s okay. And these experiences have helped me grow but not necessarily in the way I had expected as of January 2023.
