#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

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.

#oneaday Day 107: Tackling Loneliness

I’ve seen quite a few news reports and political manifestos over the course of the last few years that claim “we” as a society are supposedly doing something to “tackle loneliness”.

Okay. What? What are “we” doing to tackle loneliness? Because from where I’m sitting in this extremely lonely state of mind, I can see precisely fuck all going on. I am in a position where I feel like I need some sort of help in this regard, and I do not have a fucking clue where I might go to find it.

Oh, I can see lots of statistics and reports that confirm indeed, yes, people are feeling lonely. But no actual action taking place. Lots of big words like “we need to take a holistic life course approach” and other such shit, but no actual evidence of anything really being done.

Which, of course, begs the question: exactly what can be done? “Tackling loneliness” isn’t just a case of dumping a bunch of people in a room and telling them to talk to one another — though one of our local bus companies seems to think that branding their buses the “ChattyBus” and encouraging people to make “bus friends” is an approach that will have any effect whatsoever, clearly not understanding that the sort of people who will talk to you on a bus are generally not people you want in your immediate circle of friends.

There are volunteer services that exist in an attempt to “tackle loneliness”, but I feel like these would always feel very artificial. Someone is acting like your friend because it’s their job to act like your friend. I’m sure real social connections can and do come about as a result of initiatives like this, but judging by a quick scoot around the websites for ones in the general area, they are all very oversubscribed. Which, in itself, probably says something that isn’t all that good.

Mostly I just want my old friendships back. Friendships from before an age of social media, friendships from before the worldwide political stage became the perpetual firework show it seems to be these days, friendships from when we were all just happy to hang out and do something fun in one another’s company.

And it’s not as if I haven’t tried to maintain those friendships that used to be like that. But I always seem to be faced with resistance: resistance that seems to grow by the year. I have reached a point where I feel very much unwanted by a lot of people with whom I used to be very close, and it upsets me. Like, really upsets me. Keeps-me-awake-at-night upsets me.

And this feeling of being unwanted of course feeds into other mental health issues — including self-esteem and social anxiety. If the people who are supposedly some of my oldest friends don’t want me, how on Earth can I be expected to find the confidence to make new friends? How, even, do you make new friends in 2024? I just don’t know any more.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever known. I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again, because it’s relevant.

On my first day at secondary school, I was pleased to discover I was in a class with several of the people I had known at primary school — including the person who was ostensibly my “best friend”. We had been put in a seating arrangement for morning registration, presumably in an attempt to get us to mingle a bit and get to know one another. I was sat next to a lad called Murray. I had absolutely no idea how to talk to him. I vividly remember turning around to my former “best friend”, who was sitting behind me, and urgently whispering to him “I don’t remember how to make friends”.

Because I didn’t. And I still don’t. Any friendships I found myself in tended to be ones of circumstance such as living together in the same flat at university, and I always felt like I existed on the periphery of larger friendship groups that these acquaintances had. I felt like I was “intruding”, like I wouldn’t be welcome if I tried to ingratiate myself with these people who “weren’t my friends”. Those people were their friends, not my friends, and what right did I have to attempt to call them my friends too?

It looks silly on paper, I’m sure, but that’s the reality of social anxiety. Legitimately one of my proudest moments of personal growth in my whole life is a time I was caught in a lift with a stranger I was on a music course with and I plucked up the courage to actually introduce myself. I felt enormously awkward and like a complete idiot at the time, but that one occasion actually became a genuine friendship — and several other friendships came about as a result of that initial contact.

But good Lord, did it ever feel like scaling Everest to get those words out of my mouth in the first place. And these days, I don’t exactly find myself stuck in a lift with people I might have something in common with all that often. So here I am, stuck typing this to myself at 11:15 on a Sunday night, wondering where it all went wrong and even if it’s possible to fix things at this point. Because the longer this goes on, the more I worry about what the end result of it all might be for me.

I’m lonely. That’s about it, really.

#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I’ve seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don’t worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that “free” time agonising over what we “should” be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It’s a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the “wrong” one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it’s real-time, it’s rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we’re talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the “wrong” one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more “optimal” thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let’s take video games as the example again. Let’s say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really “wrong” choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: “I would like to play a video game”. The next step is, in many folks’ minds, the harder one: “I would like to play this specific video game”. And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you’re going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only “wrong” choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you’ve just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you’re someone who does creative stuff online, I’m willing to bet you’re probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there’s that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you “should” do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you’re probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is “productive” or not.

I’m trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say “tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5” and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you’re supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y’know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don’t care what. Just go and do it now.

#oneaday Day 48: Not So Great

Today was not so good. I spent a significant proportion of the evening having a fairly major panic attack. I thought I was just having a depressive episode, but when I realised I was shaking, my heart was racing and I was just generally feeling “afraid” to do anything, it became pretty clear what it actually was.

I decided to try and sleep it off, and while I don’t feel great now, I think the worst has passed, and in the meantime I certainly had what felt like some interesting dreams. They were the kind of dreams that evaporate as soon as you wake up properly so I unfortunately can’t say any more than that — aside from the phrase “it’s stunning, so long as you already have the suspension of disbelief required for modern VR”, for some reason — but they were certainly interesting.

This, of course, has pretty much taken up my entire evening and prevented me from doing anything more interesting, but sometimes you just have to try and take care of yourself the best way you know how. And when you’re suffering from some form of mental health breakdown, sometimes the best thing to do is just find a place or situation in which you feel comfortable, and ride the damn thing out. There’s a reason why so many folks make a connection between mental health episodes and “storms” of sort; the principle behind surviving them with minimal harm is very similar, albeit with one being physical and the other being mental.

Anyway, all that regrettably means I don’t have a lot of worthwhile things to say this evening. I’m hoping I feel better tomorrow — and I’m hoping the cat doesn’t keep me awake as much tonight as she did last night. I feel my struggles today may be related to this, though I can’t blame her or be mad at her; she wasn’t being malicious or deliberately trying to cause harm.

On that note, then, back to bed I go.

#oneaday Day 39: Breaking Point

Had a bit of a meltdown earlier. Thankfully, I managed to direct it inwards rather than at anyone else, and I successfully channelled its energy into tidying some of the shit up around the house. So that’s something, at least. Now I just feel kind of drained and empty.

I’d been building to something like this for a while, and I suspect I’m not out of this particular funk just yet, but heading along to Slimming World this evening and discovering I’d put a bunch of weight back on was just my mind’s breaking point. I was upset and angry at myself, more than anything, because I know that weight gain was entirely deserved — I’ve not been focusing on the things I’ve been eating as much as I should be if I want to see results, and I’ve gotten away with doing so for probably more weeks than I should have.

A situation like this is a good opportunity for a change, but the frustrating thing is that when such a thing occurs, I find myself wishing that I could correct the mistake immediately. But it doesn’t work like that; undoing bad habits takes time and effort, and you don’t necessarily see results right away. The important thing is to acknowledge that you fucked up, be at peace with the fact you fucked up, and then take steps to ensure that you do not fuck up again for at least a little while.

So I stopped at the shops on the way home and got some healthy eats that will see me through the next few days. We’re in a bit of an awkward position food-wise right now in that Andie is suffering some sort of mouth malady (likely an abscess under a root canal she had done a while back) and can’t really eat much. That means I’m generally having to sort shit out for myself, and if anyone has ever attempted to feed themselves well as an individual person, you’ll know that most things tend to be sold on the assumption that you are cooking for two.

That means you inevitably end up with too much stuff, which either means cooking too much stuff and having leftovers — not the end of the world — or using half the ingredients and risking the other half going off. I think we’ve all been successfully conditioned to (rightly) recognise that food waste is a bit of a sin, so I always feel a bit bad when I have to chuck stuff out, but it always feels a bit… constricting when you know you’re either going to be eating the same thing two days in a row, or having to come up with something creative to do with the other ingredients you have in the fridge.

Anyway, long story short: this upset in our normal routine has kind of disrupted me making an effort to watch what I eat. To be fair, I was already kind of falling off the wagon a bit before Andie’s troubles happened, but the situation just sort of compounded itself. But I know that is silly, so the stuff I picked up earlier should last a few days at least, and be suitable for individual portions or making an easy big batch of stuff that I can portion out and have the remainder as leftovers as required.

You may think I’m overthinking this and I probably am, but that is the nature of my autistic brain and its thought processes. I am now doing my best to not sit here stewing being pissed off at myself, so I think some well-earned video games are probably in order.

#oneaday Day 35: Lay Me Down to Sleep

I’m exhausted, physically and mentally. I think mostly mentally, but that in turn is making me feel physically exhausted. The world just seems to be such a frustratingly relentless parade of shit at the moment that just existing is tiring. So although it’s not even 10pm at the time of writing, I think I might just go to bed after this.

Unlike times gone by, I can thankfully say that it’s not really my life that has gone to shit as such, but I’m not sure that’s any great comfort. At least if there is something wrong in my life — and plenty of things are, don’t get me wrong — it’s possible to take action and do something about it.

But when you feel like the entire world is just collectively going insane, and there’s fuck all you can do about it? That’s exhausting. Whether it’s the constant enshittification of today’s services, the ever-increasing cost of living or the utterly stupid obsession with AI — all three of which are related to varying degrees, I’d say — it just feels like the world is moving in an unhealthy direction, and no matter how much you say “hang on a minute” there’s nothing that you, as one person, can do.

I won’t lie, I’m a little concerned for my pals in America right now, because they seem to be staring down a bit of a no-win situation when it comes to the upcoming presidential elections. On the one side, you have Trump, who is just an outright fucking maniac, and on the other, you have Biden, whose age is starting to make people question his suitability for the role. Given the choice, it seems like picking the old man is the sensible thing to do, but America never seems to make things that simple. After all, they already elected Trump into office once; while most people would probably agree that was a terrible idea, I have a strange feeling that it might happen again.

And while I feel a certain sense of solidarity with others online expressing similar concerns about the immediate and medium-term future, I also feel very alone. Ever since COVID hit, I’ve felt completely isolated aside from being with my wife, and it’s done a real number on my self-confidence and self-esteem. I feel like I could do with some sort of support network when I’m feeling like this, and I just don’t have one. Worse, I don’t really know how to go about putting one together — or indeed reassembling one that I maybe once had.

I always used to think that as you grew older and became more of an “adult” that things would fall into place and become more straightforward. And perhaps they did for previous generations. But for me, right now, each passing year just feels worse and worse, like a sense of comfort and stability is just slipping further and further away. The world has been a place that I don’t feel like I quite fit into for as long as I can remember. And in recent years, that feeling has only been becoming more and more pronounced with everything that’s been happening.

If only it was possible to just completely disconnect from the bad things in the world, and spend your time surrounded by people who care about you, and whom you care about too. I guess I should feel lucky that I have my wife and cats, at the very least; some people don’t even have that.

I’d apologise for the maudlin post, but I made it clear back when I started all this shenanigans again that it was going to be a form of “therapy” for me. And that means getting this stuff off my chest once in a while. I’m sure you understand. Perhaps you even feel the same way. I unfortunately cannot offer any advice or comfort if so, but know, at least, that you are not the only one feeling that way. Not, I suspect, by a long shot.

#oneaday Day 8: Escaping a Rut

Hello. As has probably been quite apparent from my last few posts, I’ve been in something of a rut mental health-wise for a little while now, and I’ve reached a point where I actively want to do something about it. Starting up the whole #oneaday thing again is part of that, but I also need to make some more active changes to my lifestyle in order to make progress.

Specifically, I need to get properly back into the swing of following Slimming World, as I’ve been a tad lax on that for the past few weeks, and I also want to try and get a bit more exercise. Along with that, I want to try and start my day a bit earlier rather than rolling out of bed and immediately into work.

Thus, what I would like to start achieving from the beginning of next week is getting up a couple of hours earlier, going to our local pool and having a swim before work. One of my big mental blocks with exercise is when I feel like it’s encroaching on “my” time after work, and so going first thing in the morning is a good way of getting around that, since I don’t count the period before work starts as really “my” time as such. This may sound daft to you, but it’s the way my brain has always thought of things.

The difficulty is going to be actually getting up a couple of hours earlier. The reason I’ve fallen into the habit of getting up pretty much immediately before work starts is because I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to get up “for”, but conversely this means that I don’t want to get up any earlier than I do because my brain has come to think of those last few moments of sleep as somehow more precious than the rest of the night.

Part of this is to do with the “trapped inside your own head” phenomenon that I talked about the other day. I’m most likely to feel like I “can’t” get up because I “need to finish” the dream I was having first thing in the morning, and that, for quite some time now, has prevented me from getting up at a sensible time. That, I feel, is going to be the most significant battle I face on the road to making a bit of morning exercise a regular routine.

Thing is, swimming is an activity I actually like doing, in contrast to a lot of other forms of exercise that I tend to feel negatively about. I find swimming both relaxing and invigorating; I know I’m not very good at it, but it’s something that I simply like. And since it’s something that, done enough, can actually be good for me, I feel like I should take advantage of that fact.

So, then, the challenge is going to be ensuring that I actually haul myself out of bed in time to go for a swim of a morning. My local pool does morning sessions every weekday morning between 7 and 9, and ideally speaking, I’d like to try and go every day. I feel like that might be an unrealistic target to begin with, though, so for the upcoming week I’m setting myself the goal of getting up and going swimming before work at least twice during the week.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. I’m trying not to contemplate “likely failure” before it happens, and go into this with a positive mindset. But we’ll see, I guess!

#oneaday Day 5: Trapped Inside

Do you ever feel trapped inside your own head? I mean obviously we’re all trapped inside our own heads, our eyes our only windows out of our self-imposed prisons, but what I mean is, do you ever find yourself finding it, say, difficult to wake up because of what your imagination is conjuring up?

I’ve been feeling this for a while. I’m not entirely sure what causes it, whether it’s a side-effect of the medication I’m taking, whether it’s a symptom of my mental health conditions or if I’m just naturally predisposed towards this sort of thing. Regardless of the cause, though, there are mornings where I genuinely do feel absolutely “trapped” inside the scenarios my imagination has conjured up for me; part of my consciousness is saying “wake up, get up, you need to go to work”, but my brain is saying “no, you need to stay here and resolve this completely fictional, made-up scenario before you do anything else”.

Another way of putting it might be that I feel sort of “addicted” to dreaming. I have quite vivid dreams — always have done — and those dreams tend to be at their most vivid in the morning, particularly if I’ve already woken up once and fallen asleep again. In those circumstances, I suspect they’re probably an interpretation of my brain being aware that I need to get up soon, if not now, and expressing that source of anxiety through somewhat surreal means. But it ends up being counterproductive, because I inevitably find the dreams so interesting that I don’t want to leave them behind and wake up.

I’ve genuinely had mornings where I’ve felt like I didn’t want to get up because I thought I needed to “finish” whatever was going on in the dream first. Except because the dreams themselves were so abstract, there was no real “win state”, for want of a better word; no means of “completing” or “resolving” them. And so I just end up being drawn back in, often repeating the same situation over and over again rather than making any real “progress”.

The human mind is fascinating. I wonder if one day we will be able to better understand and explore the things that go on in there. I’d certainly be fascinated to explore the worlds within in a more “lucid” manner. But for now, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with sleeping in slightly longer than I should in the morning, in the vain hope that I might actually “finish” a dream.

#oneaday Day 2: Taking Stock

So I said yesterday I’d come on to my present situation and what got me thinking that starting this nonsense up again might be helpful. It might as well be today, as that acts as a good introduction to what will come afterwards, as well and perhaps a means for those of you who are stopping by for the first time to get a better idea of who I am, what I do and why I’m typing this at all.

As I type this, I am 43 years old and, for the most part, broadly satisfied with my life situation. I am happily married to a wonderful wife, I have two delightful cats and I am gainfully employed in a field I actually have some enthusiasm for. I’m not what I’d call especially “wealthy”, but I make enough each month to both get by and to be able to indulge my interests. Nothing to really complain about as such.

And yet I can’t honestly say that I’m happy. Part of this is down to the depression and anxiety I have been suffering… well, probably since always, in retrospect, but which I’ve definitely been actually conscious of since my 20s. Part of this is down to the current state of the world in general, which just seems to be inexorably sliding towards self-inflicted oblivion in more ways than one. And part of this is down to specific things that occur on a day-to-day basis, which can have a fairly major impact on the way I’m feeling.

Yesterday, during a conversation over dinner, one of our assembled group of friends posed the question “when was the last time you felt joy?” — and it proved to be a bit of a stumper for several of us. One of our number — the one who, and I mean this with no disrespect to him whatsoever, is probably the most “privileged” among us due to the combination of his upbringing, the hard work he put in to get to the position he is in now and said position that he is in now — is routinely fairly cheerful about most things, so he had no problem in pinning down some recent examples, but he also noted that there are plenty of stressors and difficulties in his own life, and there had even been occasions that had brought him to tears.

The rest of us didn’t feel so positive, to varying degrees. A common thread of frustration and upset was how the world is today. Bombarded by advertisements, annoyed at the lies and misinformation routinely spread online, concerned about the yet-to-be-seen long-term consequences of innovations such as social media, we all found ourselves feeling somewhat despondent about certainly the near future, with the far future having some fairly severe question marks hovering above it.

And yes. There is a lot about today’s world that I do not like. There is a lot about it that I do not like that I am not in a position to do anything about, either, which is doubly frustrating. But there are some things, closer to home, that I probably can do something about.

For starters, one of my biggest frustrations about “the world” in general is that it doesn’t feel like it’s built for me. This stems from a combination of factors, including the social anxiety I feel as a result of both my depression and anxiety and the underlying autism spectrum condition of Asperger’s syndrome, and also physical factors such as my weight.

My weight is probably one of the things that upsets and annoys me the most, because I know it’s entirely self-inflicted, but I also know that it’s a symptom of other factors.

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with my weight, but since the COVID lockdowns of 2020 or so, it’s been particularly bad. I got bigger than I ever have been before, and I was already at a size where certain activities were completely inaccessible to me. Couple this with the fact that I have a hernia which the doctors won’t treat until I lose some weight — which itself causes physical pain and discomfort on a fairly regular basis — and you can hopefully understand where I’m coming from when I say that I physically feel uncomfortable in a lot of situations in today’s world.

My weight problems can be tied to my mental health, because I know that I often use food as “self-medication”, to use the clinical term. I get depressed, upset or angry about something, and I reach for something tasty to “make me feel better”. I recognise that this is a problem; I even recognise the behavioural patterns as being alarmingly similar to someone with a substance addiction — without going into details, I have some experience of helping someone who went through such a scenario and thankfully made it out of the other side, though not without leaving me with some lasting trauma that I suspect will never go away. But that doesn’t always help me in doing something about it.

The old cliché is that the first step in solving a problem is acknowledging it exists, though, and I’m already a few steps along that road. As you can see above, I recognise the problem, and I’ve sought support for it — specifically in the form of Slimming World, an organisation with which I lost a lot of weight nearly 10 years ago. So far it has been going reasonably well — though I had a bit of a setback last week and am expecting another this week — but it’s hard work.

The trouble is with the concept of “normal”. In confronting personal problems like this, one of the biggest difficulties is in acknowledging that you are not “normal” by societal definitions, and that means you are going to have to do some things a little differently, perhaps for a long time or even permanently. On some days it is easier to make my peace with this than others. When I am in a position where I can mostly be in control of things and have some support standing by when I need it, I can generally muddle through without making too many mistakes.

But I do make mistakes, and confronting those, acknowledging them and dealing with the consequences is something I struggle with. If I deviate from a “plan” or even a “hope” that I have for myself, I beat myself up about it a lot. It upsets me and frustrates me and I become afraid. I’m not even sure what I’m afraid of — or perhaps it’s not just one thing. Sometimes it might be being afraid to face those who are trying to help me, like I’ve let them down somehow. Sometimes it might be being afraid of my mistake having irreversible consequences. Sometimes it’s just plain, simple fear, with no real source; it’s just there.

All of the above doesn’t just apply to attempting to bring my weight under control; it’s something I struggle with in daily life. If I make a mistake at work, it can utterly ruin my day, even if no-one else thinks anything more of it after the initial acknowledgement of the issue. If I make a mistake in a social interaction with someone, I’ll play it over and over in my head, wishing that I’d done something differently. If I make a mistake in something I’m supposed to be doing “long term” — like losing weight — I can easily feel a huge hit to my motivation and wondering why and if I should bother.

All this might sound a bit bleak and, I’m not going to lie, it is. Despite being in a life situation that is more than satisfactory, as noted above, I am still struggling right now. Every day is a battle against myself; some mornings I even feel afraid to get up. That’s not something one should be feeling.

Perhaps talking about this stuff, even if it’s just to myself, will help matters somewhat. That is at least part of the intention of resurrecting #oneaday. It’s helped me before, so I suspect it may be able to help me again. And in the meantime, I’m thankful that I do have the support I do when I need it.

#oneaday Day 1: Blogging Therapy

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.