Good evening. If the header looks familiar, you’ve doubtless been following this blog for quite some time and will remember that time, starting in January of 2010, where I decided to participate in a loosely organised blogging project. Dubbed “One A Day” or, more commonly, “#oneaday” due to its origins on Twitter, it was a collective effort by all the participants to write something — anything — every single day for a year.
I joined the project a little late, but ended up going the distance considerably more than some of the other people who started alongside me — including the original organisers, several of whom gave up after less than a month. I eventually managed 2,541 posts, eventually calling it a day on December 31, 2016.
Sometimes I think about that project and the value it had for me. Ultimately, I don’t think I really got a great deal out of the “community” side of things — on the contrary, when I decided to step forward and encourage a group of bloggers to do a year of #oneaday in aid of charity, I got a fair chunk of abuse from the original organisers, who still felt some weird sense of “ownership” over the concept of daily blogging, despite having dropped out of the whole process very early. But what I did get out of it was a sense of… I guess “therapy” is probably the best word for it.
My starting #oneaday first time around coincided with one of the absolute worst times of my life, during which I suffered bullying at work, culminating in me being dismissed from a job I loved because I stood up for a colleague who was also being bullied; a period during which my first marriage broke down irreparably and left me alone, without an income and staring down what I saw back then as the humiliating possibility of having to return home to stay with my parents; a time when my anxiety and depression were enjoying a particular “peak” (or is that a trough?), to say the least.
One of the things that got me through that period mostly intact was making the time each evening to sit down and write something. It didn’t necessarily have to be about what had happened that day or even how I was feeling at that point; just the act of being creative was somehow comforting. It seems that the human mind is often at its most creative when it is suffering, and I was most definitely suffering around that time. And indeed on several other occasions during those 2,541 posts.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging helped get me through that time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that daily blogging is a significant part of why I am still here to write this right now. Because believe me, things inside my head were bleak for quite some time on several separate occasions.
Today, on the 8th of June, 2024, I’m not in anywhere near as bad a situation as any of those previous instances, but my mental health most certainly has been dipping down into a bit of a trough for quite some time. So I thought it was time to kick the tyres on this here ol’ blog, which is still humming away, and make a commitment to writing something every day in the hopes that it might help, even a little.
I will hasten to add that my sudden inclination to write something on here is nothing to do with the events of today specifically, which were actually rather pleasant; some friends who I haven’t seen for some time were all finally available to come and have a day of playing video games and chatting. We haven’t done this for a long time — I’ve tried to make it an annual tradition of sorts, since our respective lives make it difficult to do anything more regularly — and it was nice. But some of the conversations we had got me thinking, and that indirectly led me back here to the “Compose” page.
So anyway. That’s what this is. I’ve rambled on for long enough for today, so perhaps we’ll talk a little bit more about my present situation and what I really hope to get out of all this another time. For now, let’s just say it’s good to be back, and I’ll see you again tomorrow.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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