I'm Going To Try Writing Every Day

I'm feeling guilty. I shouldn't really because not writing to this blog isn't something that I should be guilty about, but somehow I do. As each day has passed without me being able to write something I have become more frustrated with myself and it has probably added to my feeling low.

So this evening I have decided that I am going to try to write something everyday. Sometimes the posts will be short I have no doubt, but I need to make myself write even when I am feeling down because writing is one of the things that has helped me over the last nine months. And if I am going to make the best of the courses in Creative Writing that I am going to study with the OU, I need to get myself into the habit of writing something every day.

I will be honest and say that I'm not at all sure what I will write about, but then I have never really planned anything that I have written to this blog before, so there won't be any change there. But I will promise one thing. I will not keep telling you how bad I am feeling; however, I may well tell you what I am doing to try to raise my spirits and they do need raising at the moment.

I have a post half written; it is something that is quite different from anything that I have written before and its content may well prove to be quite controversial with some people, but I am entitled to my point of view and this is the only place that I have in which to put it forward. So I shall polish this half-written post over the next few days and if I am reasonably happy with it, then it will appear here. It won't be earth-shattering, but it will question the way that some people think and why they think this way.

Anyway, I need to say thank you to all of you who have kept faith with me during my relative silence over the last few weeks, and your comments and messages have meant a lot to me in my darkness. As the saying goes, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

4000

While I was writing my last post, the visit counter on my blog clicked onto 4000. I don't get masses of readers like many bloggers, but I do have my regulars, and of course I get those who only visit the once as a result of some strange Google search that has picked up my blog. I don't mind that my readership is only counted in the tens daily (the average is something around 30 at the moment), I am just amazed that anyone reads it at all.

What started off as a bit of a half-hearted experiment has become a way of life. I don't panic if I don't write a post every day, but I try to make sure that what I do write is informative, educational, or entertaining. I hope that I have succeeded. The mere fact that I get comments on a wide range of posts indicates that some people out there have been informed, educated or entertained.

I have two more landmarks coming up over the next few weeks. The first will be writing my 200th post, and at the end of the month I will have been writing this blog for 6 months. If you had asked me when I first started writing this blog if I would reach any of these landmarks, I would have said not a hope in hell's chance.

I'm rather glad that I was wrong.

The Poor Jelly Baby

Sometimes it can be really difficult to find something to blog about. I know that this blog is mostly about how I live with depression, but it would be really boring if that was all that I wrote about, in fact it would be ... depressing. This means that I write about other things too. About the knitting that I am doing at the moment, or in the case of the Shetland lace shawl, undoing; about things that I do that are out of the ordinary (talking to a lot of GPs about patients having access to their medical records for example); sometimes about things that I see on my travels (sometimes beautiful and sometimes funny); and, of course, I write about my struggles with furthering my education with the Open University.

One of the things that I do every day is to look at a number of news websites. One of these is that of the BBC, and it was while looking through that this morning I found something that I felt I had to blog about. It was an item with a link to the 'Screaming Jelly Baby'. But why would a Jelly Baby be screaming, I hear you cry. Well, it's an experiment, one of a series, that have been put on YouTube by the TDA in an effort to try to attract people to teaching science.

You can find the 'Screaming Jelly Baby' here. By going here you can see all five of the TDA videos. The idea is that the most popular of these will be replicated on a large scale at Train to Teach events in February and March 2009. At the moment the poor Jelly Baby is in the lead.

In case you were wondering, the experiment using the jelly baby is to illustrate the process of respiration, in particular the conversion of food to energy.

A Day Of Milestones

Today could well be a day of two milestones for my blog. I can't believe that I have managed to keep it going and not run out of things to write about. I don't live a very exciting life, certainly nowhere near as exciting as my working life was, but I have managed to find things to write about on a regular basis since I started to blog, only missing a few days along the way.

By chance as I was looking at various blogs this morning I found someone whose blog I had never read before, and as she has only been blogging for a few weeks I decided to read all her posts. She suffers from mental illness, and it appears that she blogs for much the same reason as I do. To keep her mind active because she cannot work, and to find ways of helping non-sufferers know what it is like to live with mental illness, and the stigma and discrimination that we suffer. Whenever I find somebody new I always look at their blogroll to see whether there might be other blogs that I will find interesting. I was surprised to find that mine was there. I had not been aware of this blogger's existence, and yet it seems she knew about me.

So what about the milestones? Well, this post is the th of the blog; and some said it would never last! And it is entirely likely that the visitor count is going to reach today. Yes, I think that we can call these milestones.

How Do We Decide What To Write About?

We all write our blogs for different reasons, although for many it is a way of relieving some of the stress and frustration that we suffer from our day to day existence. For some it is a diary of what they do, places they visit, and people they meet. One of the largest blogging communities is the medical profession; whether it is medical students talking about the trials and tribulations of their years of studying, junior doctors telling us about their lives now that they have qualified and are having to put all that learning into practice, or as they move into specialties and how they see things from a different perspective and the post-graduate exams they have to take to gain specialist qualifications. Then there are the older doctors; the GPs who tell us about life as a GP and the things that are going on that are affecting the way in which they provide care for their patients, and the Consultants who write about their experiences and how the NHS is no longer the organisation that it was.

The nursing community also has a number of regular bloggers. There are student nurses and those that are qualified, those who work in general medicine and those who work in mental health. There are the paramedics who tell us about what happens to those who man the ambulances that ferry the sick and injured to hospital.

Then there is another group of bloggers who are neither doctors, nor nurses, nor those in the ambulance service. They all tend to have medical blogs on their blogrolls, and are often seen to post comments on medical blogs. They have just as strong views about the NHS as those that work in it, and are constantly frustrated by the things that this government is doing to the NHS. This group of bloggers are patients.

Many of these blogging patients suffer some form of mental illness (though this does not apply to all), and they blog for the same reasons as anybody else. They, too, require something to help them get through the stresses and frustrations of everyday living, but for many of those who suffer from mental illness, it is also a real attempt at a therapeutic process. I, as regular readers will know, am one of those bloggers.

Depression has ruined my life. I have been told a number of times to keep a diary recording how I feel, what I am thinking, and every other aspect of my life. Several times I have started to do this but I have always fallen by the wayside after only a few days. Then earlier in the summer, when I should have been studying but couldn't summon up the enthusiasm for it, I started to read a few blogs. Nothing specific to start with, just general interest to see what people were writing about and the sort of things that caused them to start writing a blog in the first place. After a while I decided to limit the blogs that I read to those written by people living in the British Isles. Perhaps this was a bit insular, but it was mainly because the things that they were writing about were easier for me to relate to.

Then I decided to have a go myself. I wondered how to go about it; I did the obvious thing and Googled it. After a few minutes I realised that if I used Google Blogger I could be working at my own blog in a matter of minutes, so I chose my template, added a couple of widgets, and wrote my first post. I didn't tell anyone about it, it was one of those things that I started and wanted to see if I would continue with before I said anything to anyone. Anyway I was writing it anonymously and to tell people about it would mean that I had lost the anonymity that I had created for myself. This was going to be a means of me writing about whatever came into my mind, and if I didn't like it I could delete it, and no-one need know that I had written anything at all. There was one question that I pondered over though. If I wrote things and posted them on my blog they were no longer my private thoughts, they were there for other people to see. How did I feel about that? No problem, if I kept it anonymous, didn't use any names, then perhaps I could write things and if the unbelievable happened and somebody other than myself read them, they would undoubtedly have a very hard time trying to find out who I was. It wouldn't be impossible, but it wouldn't be easy.

The day I wrote my second post I found out that somebody had found my blog and read it. How did I know? Because they sent me a comment to the second post welcoming me to the blogosphere; that was the Witch Doctor and the mere fact that someone had read what I had written made me feel good. As I read more blogs I started to gain a little in confidence and started to leave comment on them when there were things that struck a chord with me. Then I started to write more posts myself. Usually one a day, very often because of something that was in the news, or something about the way that I was feeling and how it was affecting me. After a few more posts I had another comment. This time it was the Jobbing Doctor who thanked me for writing the post that he had commented on and that he was going to make a link to it in a post of his own. Two comments, and both from the medical profession. It just goes to show what really nice people they are. Then I found out that Dr Grumble had added the post to his shared items. Another nice doctor. Why was this government so intent in trying to turn the public against doctors?

More posts followed, the subject matter varied as things struck me as being worthy of being written about. How I felt missing my god-daughter's wedding, how difficult it was when you live on your own and you have something that makes it difficult for you to do things, my anger at the government's decision to stop students who were studying for an equal or lower degree to one they already held, and the catastrophic effect that this could have on those of us who study with the Open University. The comments started to come in more frequently and I found that there were people who seemed to be reading my blog on a regular basis.

Then I wrote a post that came from the heart. it was entitled 'How To Deal With Meeting A Person With Depression.' I put a lot of thought into this post, it was something that I feel passionately about. The fact that those with depression and other mental illnesses are treated with so much fear and discrimination is terrible, especially once you know how many people will suffer from depression during their lifetime. This post attracted comments from Nice Lady Doctor, and from as far afield as Australia (a medical student) and New Zealand (a patient with bipolar depression), and the Jobbing Doctor put it as one of his shared items.

I've continued to write posts to my blog. This has proved to be far more long-lasting than the attempts that I had made at keeping a diary, and it was certainly proving therapeutic. At the beginning of May I had started psychotherapy; this has been the subject of a couple of posts and for anyone who has read them they try to give an idea of how difficult it can be. The combination of psychotherapy and this blog have made a difference to me; I'm still depressed, but I have found out a lot about myself and found a way of expressing myself that helps to raise my mood.

The number of blogs that I read regularly has continued to grow, there are a couple of bloggers who now know who I am and we correspond outside of our blogs and this enables us to encourage each other without the need for anonymity. We'll probably never meet, but that doesn't matter, for we have forged a friendship that can easily be carried on at a distance and is not considered unusual because of differences in our ages, or the fact that we are disabled in some way.

Us bloggers are all different, we have different interests and different things that we care about, but we all find the time to let other people know that we do care about those things and that we do not want them to be changed or destroyed without us putting up a fight. We also let others know what life throws at us and how we deal with it in the hope that someone else might benefit from our experiences.

So that is how we decide what to write about. We write about life in all its various guises and we try to write about the wrongs that are committed by others. Simple, isn't it?