Obligatory New Year’s Post

Happy New Year, everyone!

How was your first day of 2021? I didn’t bother staying awake until midnight or past that since I had to work early this morning. It’s not necessarily my thing. Wow, this makes me sound old.

2021 is still up in the air with the calendar and all. I don’t have any clear resolutions yet. I would like to do some creative things related to Ospreyshire (the spoken word project) as well as my other creative endeavors. Videography was very fun last year, so that could be something I could try. Weirdly enough, most of my specific goals involve watching and reviewing films on my other blog. I’ve been watching some interesting things including from countries where I didn’t know had their own cinema scenes. Posting poetry is something I want to do more often on this blog.

While I do have some hopes, I have to be honest with you that I have lingering depression and there was a time earlier today where I felt like I was hopeless while thinking this year is going to be miserable, but I’m not sure. Positivity can be foreign at times for me and this has been a thing even before 2020 happened.

I hope you have a blessed new year nonetheless.

As 2020 comes to a close…

This has been such a tumultuous year, but I’m not the first or last to say so.

We know about the things that happened this year with COVID-19, the racial tensions, the political circus in America, the tanking economy, so on and so forth.

There were some ambivalent things that happened.

Let me get some of the bad stuff out there first:

-I struggled with moments of depression, internalized anger, and even paranoia.
-I felt like things were hopeless after lockdown happened.
-I had to rethink so many plans due to COVID. So many Zoom meetings and phone calls happened to talk to family, friends, and even co-workers.

Now for some good things:

-I recorded my first split record.
-Getting back into doing videos of different kinds was amazing.
-I did a lot of reading and doing my best to learn some new skills.

There were so many takeaways to learn in this bizarre, yet tense times. COVID and everything else isn’t going to magically disappear once 2021 rolls around. I’m sure we can all agree with that. I do hope things can improve in some way, shape, or form, but I know this won’t be instantaneous.

There was one thing that I’ve been thinking about when it came to Ospreyshire the blogger as well as Ospreyshire the spoken word artist. Yes, I’m a man of multiple disciplines with poetry, spoken word, videography, film reviews, fiction, and music. As far as the Ospreyshire Realm is concerned (as in the blog you’re looking at right now), I feel as though there’s an identity crisis. My other blogs where I review films, documentaries, and anime as well as my fiction blog at least have clearly defined purposes. There are times where I ask myself “What is Ospreyshire in terms of this blog?”. Look, I attract bloggers of all races, nations, interests, hobbies, and content which is really cool. While blogging has allowed me to be outspoken when I’ve internalized so many things for most of my life (saying nothing about how I’m naturally introverted who pretends to have extrovert tendencies in my offline life, but that’s another story), I feel as though things are inconsistent from a content standpoint. I will still post poetry, audio projects when I do recording, or the occasional cross-promotion to friends or creators I like which is a given. The thing is I really have to rethink about how I do new projects especially with the growing irrelevance in music consumption (not that I expected to go platinum or even gold) as well as making a more clearly defined identity on this blog. Apologies for sounding like I’m thinking about what others may or may not be thinking about me since I used to have a really bad habit of caring too much of what others think, but I want to make sure people who read this blog have some more consistency in content. This doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon my art or some of my opinion pieces because I have a few in mind that have to be said like some sequels to some of my personal posts in the past for example. Stay tuned on that.

Anyways, I hope you all had a blessed holiday season and that you have a Happy New Year!

Here’s to 2021! [clinks with my glass of sparkling grape juice]