The first episode is an introduction to me, the podcast and I also share my testimony. I thought that this was the best place, to begin with, a faith-based podcast. I’m going to be sharing all the things that I’ve been through since becoming a Christian as well as all the other struggles I come across along the way.

I used to worry that I had to post every week here, but sometimes that wasn’t possible for me to do, so I started to give myself a lot more grace and post when I could. Suffering from anxiety means that I’m not always able to post on any of my platforms because when I’m in a dip, my main priority is my mental health, my well-being and getting out of that dip.

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.

On April 9th 2018 I created this very blog [originally on Blogger], and the next day I posted my very first post on here. The post was called 'Blurt's Self Careathon Day One' which was the Blurt Foundation's self-care prompts for the month of April last year. I decided to write blog posts for them and I managed to complete all the prompts by writing a few up on a day off and scheduling them to go up on the designated days. I was a few days late to the party, but it was a very beneficial thing to do to get me into the habit of posting content, and also thinking about possible future content as well.

On Friday it was my birthday. I'm not one to be the centre of attention so don't really do big parties or gatherings for it. One time a few years ago a couple of my friends threw me a small three-person (including me) birthday celebration which they did about two weeks before my birthday and they made me believe it was just going to be an afternoon of catching up. Very sneaky but it was unbelievably nice of them to do that.

Another Christmas tradition of mine is to get one or two new decorations for my Christmas tree. Last year I got two new ones but this year I got a couple more than I intended. My tree has a colour theme of mainly red, white and silver.

Christmas traditions always change and evolve and that is okay. That's part of life. They change because of circumstances or because children grow up or like in my case, we move country. I spent some of my childhood years in Germany and we had one set of traditions at Christmas that then changed when we moved back to the UK.