A revision to my story...

In the words of the Counting Crows, there's reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last.

When I posted a bouncy recap of my 2023 on Instagram, I felt an immediate sense of ick.

Not exactly an accurate portrayal, I thought to myself.

Despite the buzzy images and catchy tune the montage was set to, 2023 absolutely whooped me. I had been sprinting for so long, that when I hit the figurative wall last year, I burst into flames; I was, in every sense, totally burned out from trying to keep up...with everything and everyone.

I don’t mean to elicit the Streisand effect¹ with my utter vagueness about what went down, but I’m not yet ready to talk about it—you’ll know when story time has arrived, of course, but it’s been heavy enough that I need to deeply process before I can talk about it in a way that isn’t coming from such an emotional place.

In some ways, I’m still recovering from spending a lot of the year groping around in the dark, trying to find the light. But last month, I finally found a switch.

In early January, I accepted a position as an adjunct English professor at Union College (more commonly known as Union County Community College), and literally every free moment since then has been devoted to creating lesson plans, building syllabi, grading papers, and other professor-y things that I thought I may never get to do, despite earning my master’s degree a few years ago.

And because I live for chaos, I’m teaching in addition to my full-time career in media and podcasting. I’ve got every food group on this plate of mine.

The new position is also why I recently declared in this very newsletter, “I’ll never ghost this email list!!!!!” and then promptly, ghosted.

I’ve been trying to scrape together some deep thoughts about how I got here, but today is not the day you’re going to get them. Honestly, I’m too tired, and I need to put together a lesson plan on compare and contrast essays.

But before I go, I need to let you know one more important thing: this newsletter is going on hiatus until April. In the meantime, I’m going to get comfortable with the title “Professor Temple” (sofa king weird).

My brief absence is no indication of the end of Write All Along. Not only am I coming back, but I’m doing a couple big things behind the scenes right now to incorporate in the future and make this newsletter an even better place on the internet.

And speaking of a better place, let this whiplash-inducing turn in my life be a reminder to you that things can be extremely bleak one moment, and coming up roses the next.

For most of this year, I was clinging to the ledge by my fingertips. And though I certainly earned this new teaching position of mine, the magic is that when I was without much hope, life surprised me, yet again.

It reminded me that it’s cliché but true, that it is darkest before dawn. Even when it’s too painful to imagine the future, it is still there, existing with infinite possibility.

Even when your lizard brain tells you that this life is not worth it, that there’s nothing left for you here on this earthly plane.

There is more—as much as you can grab—if you can fight to keep your eyes open.

It’s not the end if you refuse to write it that way.

See you in a couple months, my friends.

Oh and, is there a teacher on this plane? If so, please drop your tips in the comments.

1. Streisand effect, phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. The name derives from American singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit against a photographer in 2003, which drew attention to the photo she was suing to have taken off the Internet. (Encyclopedia Britannica)