[DRAFT] CNFEssay1_JDS

Not gonna lie: this has become unnecessarily tough.
	And it’s not just online schooling that has become a lemon: after campus sessions were suddenly cut off in mid-March of 2020, everything else about our lives has taken a turn for the worse. Such misery has given way to endless lament, a deteriorating immune system and a constantly fraying mental state, one that I find is still held together with superglue but is due to collapse the next time I suddenly black out.
	My cabin fever has become the default setting, draining me of all emotion up to the release of Porter Robinson’s album Nurture (where I cried all my tears), and while I reckon I still have the capacity to deliver decent written work, it’s obvious that my output isn’t up to what I personally see as my best.
	Those things weren’t supposed to happen. At the least, I thought I could easily go back to my NEET[1] days back in 2014-2018, a time when I could laze the days away staring at four screens and being a receiver for knowledge that I should probably be using as raw material while still attending to my bedridden aunt.
	Now, however, I feel my butt slide down a waterless tube.
	It wasn’t always like this. When I took an IT course at STI-Muñoz in 2018, I sought to reintegrate into society (a roaring success) and check for rust damage (there is none). When I enrolled for UST’s nascent Creative Writing programme a year later, I saw the shift as a stepping stone for a more involved process to make me a better writer and speaker, one who can hopefully bring to the Philippines what John Oliver and Hasan Minhaj has brought to the rest of the world, among loftier goals.
	See, I was looking for something specific with CW. More than the exposure to established names and high-level instruction that I can both follow and break, I wanted to gauge just how interested I am about writing, the limits of what I can put my (alarmingly low for a mid-20s male) weight into, and if this can turn into something I can convert into money. Come December, now only did I find the campus a treat to see from sun-up to sundown, I also realized that I have a place in writing, one that is worth developing to its fullest.
	Of course, an unmitigated (still) disaster changed the methods in which I’m trying to accomplish that goal, resulting in me not bothering to put maximum effort into anything that isn’t the core subject. But here I am now, facing all majors, and a numerical Sword of Damocles hanging over my unshaven scalp. Accounting for my mistake, I echo the cries of the student body: the current system is a substandard way to learn, no matter how well we adapt to it.
	What changed, then?
	For one, I managed to monetize my blogs from July 2020 till now, and thanks to DriveTribe’s contributor system, I can finally sustain the only hobby that has kept me sane and engaged for so long: die-cast cars (think Hot Wheels or Tomica). I’ve since deviated from my hobby a fair bit (no thanks to photo editing taking way too much of my time), but after expanding to general auto news and topics, I’ve exposes myself to deeper, richer, more rewarding reads both old and new, and has allowed me more leeway to explore subjects I only vicariously watched fly past me before.
	(Also, the monthly pound sterling payout is just immense.)
	And for another, I’ve since narrowed down my focus to CNF, to blogs, to the niche I currently am playing in. This has brought me a unique challenge: to truly understand why I write here and like this -- and to help me prove a dearly-held point in the future -- I must first examine what got me here, whose voices I’m borrowing, who I have yet to hear, and why my perspective is worth listening to.

	I thought of this creative writing course as my vehicle to that finish line. Unfortunately, that car has broken down. Fortunately, I’m still holding the steering wheel.