It’s understandable if you weren’t aware that I had a YouTube channel as until recently there were only three videos on there…

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.

I’ve been mentioning the last few months about something going on with my job, that there’s some stress and anxiety being kicked up by things behind the scenes there. I now feel ready to let you all know what has been happening since January. On a Sunday in mid-January, the store team got notified to all be on a conference call the following day. On that call, we were told that after almost fourteen years the shop that I work at was being forced to close in May when the lease runs out. There were plans mentioned to hopefully be able to reopen and have a closing down sale before then closing down the store and sending the remaining stock and the fixtures most likely back to head office.

This week I was going to sit down and brainstorm ideas of what blog posts to write this month, and then Carrie Hope Fletcher who I follow on Instagram and YouTube posted an Instagram story about her thoughts on posting a video on her YouTube channel every day for the month of May. She's calling it 'May, Myself and I' a title which I love!

She asked her followers to suggest video ideas and here are the prompts she's picked from their suggestions.

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.

I've had a bit of a break from the dating site this year, part intentional and part unintentional. The first week of the year I was ill with flu, I was off work for a few days and the dating site wasn't at the forefront of my mind. The second week I was back at work but still, not one hundred per cent so only went on the dating site a bit.

How is everyone's January going so far? How are you doing with your new year resolutions or your 2019 goals if you do them instead? My January has been mixed with some amazing secret things that may or may not happen (so I won't disclose them at this point. If they do happen, I will most defiantly write a blog post about it, don't worry!) And some less amazing, more mundane things have been going on as well.

I've never been a fan of new year's resolutions. The odd time I made some in the past, I ended up either forgetting them or breaking them, so instead for many years, I've set myself goals that I would like to achieve that year. I thought that this was a much better idea and over the years I have accomplished many goals.