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.

Out To Lunch

It was another bad night for sleep although I'm not at all surprised. I am planning an early night for later which will have all the things that should ensure a good night's sleep; hot bath, hot chocolate and sleep medication.

I have decided that it was just not worth my while busting a gut to get the final assignment of my OU course done for midday. I tried several attempts at writing the required short story, but nothing was very good and all were far short of the word count required. I just have to accept that I did the course at a bad time. How was I to know that I would have a mammoth period of depression which would delay me starting the course and as a result I have never been able to tackle it with anything like the enthusiasm that was required.

So, in order to make sure that I don't just sit here moping all day I have phoned Lily and we are going to meet up for lunch. This will make a change from our usual cup of tea and it means that I can have a long chat with her. I can get up to date with how her current placement is going and what she is going to be doing next. I will probably also get an update on what the ferrets have been up to.

While I was trying to pass the hours when sleep would not come I started work on another post in the Tackling the Mental Health Minefield series and another one on a subject that I have never covered before but which is pretty topical at the moment. Hopefully they should both be published later today.