As of 12:24 a.m. on Tuesday, my total NaNo 2019 wordcount was 19,790. I expect to end the month with between 20K and 25K words.

Obviously, this is not what I planned. I prepped hard in October. I told everyone this was my year. I started strong, reaching 5K in three days. I had the outline, the freezer meals, the free time in the schedule – everything. So what happened?

Well, for one thing, this project was more emotional than most I’ve worked on. I wasn’t prepared for how that would affect the writing process.

Then, like most fallen NaNoers, I missed a couple days. That alone doesn’t always derail the month, but it definitely created a setback.

The real knockout was a larger one-two punch, which has been building since long before November.

First, this year had unexpected developments for me professionally. At the beginning of the year, I was still working at my first post-college job as a news journalist. I loved the gig, but a series of events led to a toxic working environment. Since my lease was expiring soon and my boyfriend lived a while away in a pretty nice city, the timing for a move fell into place. I left that job.

I thought my savings and the few months I still had on my lease would give me the perfect buffer to find a new job and place in my new city. None of that went according to plan. I wound up working a sort-of-temporary job and staying sort-of-temporarily with my boyfriend.

The temporary living situation became permanent when we moved in together in August. That worked out really well. Despite a long, tedious series of job applications, phone calls, and interviews, however, the job situation did not improve. To complicate matters, my health began interfering with my ability to do my temporary part-time job.

I reached a point where the options presented to me were (1) stay at the job and inevitably be eventually fired due to missing too much work, or (2) quit that day and have a positive evaluation be placed in my file. Obviously, I chose door number two. This left me unemployed.

All of this built to my current work arrangement: self-employment. Or, more accurately, on the path to self-employment. I have a website, a P.O. Box, a name and business plan. I’m still working on the clients part.

As you might guess, it takes a lot of time to start a business. Yeah, I may be “unemployed,” but with my boyfriend both working and studying full-time (with frequent overtime) to support us and earn his degree, I do what I can to manage the household by myself — groceries, cooking, budget management, cleaning. Meanwhile, that “free time” I was kinda planning to use for writing is eaten up with a combination of pitching clients and learning more about this very new world of small home business and freelance work. There’s a lot of reading involved.

TL;DR: not much writing time.

Now, I’d imagine if the data was collected, one of NaNoWriMo participants’ greatest challenges is finding enough time to write 50,000 words in a month. If I were up to my usual summer productivity levels, I’m fairly sure I could still swing it, tight as it would be.

Welcome the second of that one-two punch: my old friend, bipolar disorder. Which, for me, tends to partially mimic annual seasonal depression and offers an uncannily predictable schedule. Almost exactly Nov. 1 every year, a depressive episode hits, not to be lifted until the dawn of spring or March(ish).

I don’t know if you’ve ever had depression, but just getting out of bed, eating food, and taking showers can be exhausting. Starting a business? Maintaining a social life? Meeting word count goals? Yeah, that’s not all happening.

In conclusion: I faced missed days, shrinking free time, and emotional project setbacks, but what drove the final nail into the coffin of my word count was bipolar depression.

In light of all these factors, though… 25K is pretty impressive.