It's my Blog's Birthday!
On April 10th 2018, I posted my first ever blog post on Blogger after only creating it the day before. I'd been thinking about starting a new blog for a while and then one day I decided to just do it. What did I have to lose? Absolutely nothing! I started with prompts from The Blurt Foundation who did thirty days of word prompts that month which they called a Self-careathon where the words were things like; obstacles, support and recharge. I managed to do all the prompts even though I started late as they were for the duration of April. I found that while writing the posts that it was helping me to feel a bit better as I focused on how the cues reflected my mental health journey.
I discovered that something that was stopping me from launching a blog for so long was deciding what to write about. When I found this month's worth of prompts it was a perfect starting point and enabled me to get into a habit and practice of posting. At various times in the first few years, I was posting twice a week; on a Wednesday and Sunday but whenever my mood dipped too low I struggled to keep up with that so I now focus solely on the Sunday post. Over the last three years, I've unfortunately sometimes been unable to manage that and had unintentional hiatus from posting.
Many years ago I had a friends-only LiveJournal blog where you could also do public posts if you wanted to but all mine were friend's only posts. I've not updated it for many many years and I can't even remember when I last posted onto it, but it must be over a decade ago at least. So it's amazing to know then that have kept up with this new blog for the last three years after having so long off from it before creating this one. I know that on my LiveJournal I shared more general and private things about my daily life than what I share here, which would be a blog equivalent of what a vlogger does today over on YouTube.
In 2020 I moved from the Blogger site to this Wix one as I could share additional content and design the site a bit more although I don't regret starting with the first one because it taught me so much along the way and also made me realise what sort of blog I wanted to create in the future. With everything we do, each activity is a lesson and a building block to the next thing so nothing is fruitless, it is all-important and it all mean's something.
If you've been around here for a while you'll know that I like to journal daily into a notebook which I do as a stream of consciousness writing; literally getting all the thought out of my head and onto paper so that I can see patterns in my thoughts and actions etc. It also enables me to catch the thoughts onto paper so I can focus on them easier instead of them swimming about in my head where I am unable to grab hold of one to unpick it and start to process easier.
When I started blogging again three years ago and began to share about my mental health journey, I discovered that it helped me to have a finished piece of writing about some of the things that I was going through. Almost like the journaling was my sketchbook and the blog post was a finished piece of art. Over the last few years, I have shared so much more than I thought I would when I began on this journey because I've got more comfortable with being open about my story is.
Mental health still has a stigma around it and by sharing my story and journey, I’m hoping to lessen that stigma and get more people talking about it as we talk about other illnesses.
