Tag: therapy

#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.

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.

2091: Singular Sensation

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In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Singular Sensation.”

“If one experience or life change results from you writing your blog, what would you like it to be?”

I’ve talked about how this blog is helpful to me personally on a number of occasions in the past. It’s an outlet, mostly, albeit one I’ve chosen to make public as a means of sharing “who I am” with the rest of the world. You may like what I say, you may hate it, you may judge me harshly or you may empathise with the things I’m saying, but you can be certain that everything I write here is the honest truth at all times, warts and all.

And, to be honest, I’ve already had experiences and life-changing results from writing this blog, though I didn’t necessarily know what effect I was having at the time. My particularly tough year back in 2010 is something I keep coming back to, but I don’t mind admitting that sitting down and getting some thoughts down on “paper” on this very site each day helped me through the worst of a terrible situation. It didn’t immediately resolve anything, but it at least gave me the chance to feel like I was able to express the many, many conflicting feelings swirling around in my head at the time.

And this is something I still keep in mind when I write something here every day now. I write from the heart, without particularly planning things out or attempting to compose something with good structure; instead, this is a scratch pad for random thoughts, a place to jot down memories so I don’t forget them, a place to enthuse about the things I love and a place to rant about the things I hate. I do try not to stick to the same topic all the time, but you know what people are like — everyone likes what they like, so even with the best of intentions, I know that I inevitably find myself drifting back towards the things I enjoy writing about the most.

Actually, my occasional adoption of these writing prompts from The Daily Post is an attempt to mix things up a bit; the prompts aren’t always particularly appealing or relevant to me, but when they are, they can providing a good starting point for something to write about. Plus I’ve found that posting a pingback to The Daily Post via the link at the top of one of these posts brings in some new people who perhaps wouldn’t have found me normally. Sometimes those people stick around; at other times, they may linger for just one or two posts before disappearing into the darkness of the Internet once again. Either way, it’s nice to come across new people now and again, and know that I’ve touched their lives, even in a minor sort of way.

So, then, I don’t think I have any particular grand plans for something I want to achieve using this blog. By this point, it’s something I just keep around because I’ve been doing it for so long — and, well, I kind of enjoy coming up with something to write about each day, too. It’s part of my routine now; so much so that whenever I’m away from home I always make sure I have some means of posting while I’m away. After 2,091, it’s a hard habit to break — and I don’t particularly want to, either.

So whether you’re a longtime reader or someone who’s just dropped by after seeing a pingback on The Daily Post, thank you, once again, for listening to my nonsense, and I hope you got something out of it, even it was just the hint of a smile for whatever reason.