Blog Posts

At the beginning of the year I promised myself that I would try to write something on this blog everyday. Okay, so I knew that there would be days when it might prove difficult, but equally there would be days when I would suffer from verbal diarrhoea and would write more than one post. When I suffered from a sort of writer's block last year, Mr Smiley told me not to worry about it because I would soon write something meaningful because that was the way that I am; I don't waste words when I have nothing to say.

In January of this year, I managed to write more posts than there were days in the month. February saw me sinking into deep depression and being admitted to hospital again, so it stood to reason that posts may be a bit sparser. But I managed 22 posts for a 28-day month so not too shabby a total. March is now approaching its end and this is post number 31, so even if I don't manage to write anything further today, or tomorrow, I will have managed to average one post a day for the month of March.

I have never written this blog as a way to win friends and to influence people, but I have probably managed to do both during its existence. I have certainly made friends through blogging and some of them are not just 'virtual' friends never to be seen, but real-life, living people who I have met and with whom I conduct a friendship outside of this blog. The influencing people is perhaps a little more difficult to quantify, but if anything that I have written about living with depression has made a difference to someone, then perhaps I can claim that it has had the power to influence.

I know that I don't have the huge readership of many blogs but I do have a band of loyal readers and I worry if certain readers seem to be absent for a while. Before I went into hospital last year, the highest number of visitors on a single day had been 47. I thought that this was fantastic number until Mental Nurse found my posts about Tackling the Mental Health Minefield and highlighted them in TWIM. The number of visitors increased overnight and it meant a great deal to me that others should find something useful or interesting in what I wrote.

Over the last few days there has been a slight decrease in visitors but this is probably because I haven't been posting rather than any other factor. I'm not sure why I haven't been able to write anything, but I have tried a couple of times and nothing seemed to flow from my fingers. Perhaps Mr Smiley was right when he told me not to worry about not being able to write every day because the words would come when I had a message to pass on. I think that Mr Smiley would be really proud of me at this moment because that is what I have done; I haven't worried.