Madsadgirl Is Two Today

Madsadgirl, my alter ego, is two years old today.

When I decided to start this blog one of the first things that I thought about was whether I wanted to be anonymous or to write under my real name. It didn't take me long to realise that I would probably be more honest in what I wrote if I was not easily recognizable. Yes, I would probably tell some people that I wrote a blog, but it would be my choice as to whether I told them the name of the blog, which was also the name that I adopted for myself.

I had been writing the blog for about three weeks when I told my GP that I had a blog. A few weeks later, while having lunch with Mr Smiley, I told him about the blog and he became a regular reader, and occasional commenter although always anonymously but I knew which were his comments nonetheless.

I thought that the blog might become a sort of therapy for me in my battle against depression. I was right. Originally meant as somewhere to write about how I was or wasn't coping with depression, it immediately became something more than that. I started writing about other things that were important to me and then about knitting, one of the things that has kept me going over the last few years.

I have tried to write every day, but sometimes the muse just wasn't there, and then there were the times that I was in hospital and therefore without my computer so the posts dried up. One of the things that I wanted to make sure I didn't do was write each day saying how awful I was feeling, so this led to posts about the strange, and sometimes funny, things that I saw around me. Writing about my experience of psychotherapy was another thing that found its way onto the blog, and was responsible for me being invited to give occasional lectures at one of our universities on the patient's perspective of therapy.

One of the biggest bonuses that I have derived from writing this blog is the array of virtual friends that I have made within the blogosphere. And some of them are not so virtual because I have actually met them and correspond with them outside of our blogs. And the support from other bloggers when things have not been going too well has meant a great deal to me too.

So, my third year of blogging is about to begin. Thank you for reading, and commenting. You have no idea how much it means to me.

My Most Popular Post

Since I began blogging nearly a year ago I have averaged between 20 and 30 readers a day. Obviously it's not the most read blog out there, but I am always amazed that anyone reads it at all. The blog was originally meant as a way for me to express how I felt living with depression although right from the start I said that it would also contain my thoughts on many subjects; and it has.

I knew that I didn't want to harp on about how I was feeling; that would have been rather boring and also self-centred. I wanted it to be more of an educational tool so that non-sufferers would perhaps get a better understanding of what it is like to have to live with mental illness.

I have regular readers, and some who dip in from time to time. Fortunately, readers will often drop me a comment, which as every blogger knows is a great comfort as it lets us know that someone has really read what we have written and not just pulled up the page and then passed on to another blog. I have even been fortunate enough to have met one of my fellow bloggers and we have become friends and correspond regularly.

As a blogger you wonder what attracts readers to your blog in the first place and the array of add-ons that are available for no cost that enable you to track your readership and how they have found your blog make this easy to do. One thing that I found out about these add-ons fairly early on is that they don't all register readers in the same way, and more importantly that they don't register all those who come to your blog. That is why I have four different examples of these widgets on my blog.

Over the last couple of months I have been taking a note of Google searches that have brought people to this blog and I have found that I am getting two or three visitors a day because of one particular post. I don't know how many of those visitors become regular readers, very few I would think, but I find it truly amazing that I have written a post that brings so many people here in their quest for information on a particular subject.

That particular post is What is a Shetland Hap Shawl? It was written in response to several of my regular readers who were interested in my knitting projects and when I started writing about the hap shawl that I was knitting at the time, asked me what a hap shawl was. This morning I thought that I would carry out a Google search for 'hap shawl' myself and I was amazed to find that my blog was the second result to come up, the one ahead of me being Heirloom Knitting, the company who got me interested in knitting Shetland lace in the first place.

I haven't knitted any Shetland lace for a while now, I've been too busy on other projects, but I am planning to design a Shetland lace shawl of my own from scratch in the next few months and it is as a result of the wonderful designs that are available from Heirloom Knitting and an incredible book of that name written by the company's owner, Sharon Miller. So, in the not to distant future I will be buying a huge sheaf of graph paper, arming myself with some pencils and a very large rubber, some suitable knitting needles, some yarn, and hoping that don't get too frustrated and despondent when things don't turn out quite how I expect.

Lacking In Energy And Enthusiasm

I haven't enjoyed today very much.  I'm not sure why I am feeling the way that I do, but today has been one of those days where it has been difficult to get out of bed, and difficult to summon up the enthusiasm to do anything that could be considered as either useful or meaningful.

The most energetic thing that I have done is to have a look at blogs on my blogroll and moderate the one comment that I have received to my post of yesterday.  And as I was reading the comment I was struck by the fact that The Witch Doctor was the first person to comment on my blog, and has been the first to comment on it in 2009.  Thank you Witch Doctor for taking the time to comment, both when the blog began, and on such a poor post from yesterday, and thank you for the hope that the tide will turn for me in 2009.  I really do appreciate it.

Six Months Of Blogging - I Didn't Think It Would Last

Tomorrow it is six months since I started this blog. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do it, but I am glad that I did. There are times when that six months seems like a life time, and others when it has seemed to pass in a flash.

I wasn't really sure what I would write about when I first started, except that I felt that I needed to explain what it felt like, for me, to suffer with depression. My depression was not something new, I had been suffering for nearly 10 years, but because I live on my own it often feels as though there is no-one who I can talk to about how I feel, and even if nobody read the blog, I felt that I was at least speaking my thoughts out loud and not keeping it bottled up inside. I have been asked why I called myself Madsadgirl, and all I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm not mad, although there are times when I have doubted my sanity, I am sad some of the time, but there are also times when I am quite happy, and at my age I am stretching a point to call myself a girl, but the name sounded catchy and I couldn't think of anything else.

Many of my early posts were about depression, but I was aware that this would make a pretty boring blog and may not attract much in the way of readership if everything that I wrote was negative, so I also included posts about being a student with the Open University, about things that I had seen in the news and that I had strong opinions about, about the way that members of the medical profession, particularly GPs, were being vilified by some members of the government, particularly as these men and women do a difficult job and rarely get the thanks that they deserve.

Sometimes I wrote about things that were happening around me, for example the dreaded roadworks that are a consequence of the replacement of London's Victorian water mains, and I wrote about the sometimes funny and sometimes beautiful things that I saw around me. Knitting has also been a subject of a great many posts, even if it was only to say that I was having to unpick what I was working on and start again because I had made a mess of it.

Of course, depression and the effect that it can have on a person still remains one of the main reasons that I write this blog. I have written about the discrimination and stigma that those with mental health problems face, and I write about them through experience. I have also written about what it is like to undergo psychotherapy, not short-term cognitive-behaviour therapy that many undergo, but long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy with the traumatic issues and feelings that this can raise, and the relief that it can bring in being able to understand why I am the way that I am.

Sometimes I write almost every day, sometimes more than once a day, and sometimes there can be days between posts. My aim has always been to write something meaningful and that will cause anybody reading it to think about what life can be like for other people. I hope that I have achieved this aim and that what I have written over the last six months has helped people to understand what life is like for someone with depression and that it has given hope to some who find themselves in a similar state.

All bloggers say that they are surprised that anyone reads what they write, but we would be liars if we did not admit that there is a hope that someone else will read what we have written. I will never have the following of some of the blogs that I read, but I am thrilled that I have managed to attract more than 4600 hits since the blog started. I am honoured that some of my posts have been considered of enough value to warrant such worthy bloggers as the Jobbing Doctor and Dr Grumble to select them as shared items on their blogs, and I know that each time they have done this I have experienced a marked increase in traffic to the blog. Thank you, Gentlemen; it has been much appreciated.

Like many bloggers I tend to see what leads people to read my blog. Obviously the word "depression" brings up many hits when a Google search is carried out, and this is a way that a few find their way to my blog. Another frequent search term is Open University, or OU, sometimes with the word "studying" sometimes without. Psychotherapy is another term that has appeared frequently, with or without other search terms. I have been amused by those studying with the OU who have found their way to my blog when trying to get ideas for the particular TMA that they are working on at the time. That has happened for both of the courses that I am studying at present, but I am afraid that they will have gained nothing from what I have written other than to learn that even after many years of studying with the OU, I still find it extremely difficult to sit down to write an essay for a TMA.

I have made a number of virtual friends through this blog, and I have met one blogger, with whom I now correspond on an almost daily basis outside of this blog and who is now much more than a virtual friend. I started to write this blog anonymously, and I still think that was a good idea. I didn't tell anyone that I was writing it until it had been going for almost a month, and even then I only told a couple of people. Six months of blogging and there are still only a handful of people who know my real name and anything about me, and I find that something of a comfort. This means that comments received on my blog mean that much more because they do not come from people who feel that they have to make a comment because they know me.

So here I am, six months on. Has writing a blog made any difference to me? The answer to that is definitely a resounding "Yes". I have written about the good times and the bad, I have written about the funny and the sad, and I have written sometimes when my heart was breaking but I knew that writing was the only way that I could carry on. And receiving comments when I have written at these difficult times has helped me through them and helped me to come out smiling on the other side.

To all of you who bother to read this blog I say a big "Thank You", you have made life worth living again, and to those who comment "Keep commenting, I love them", and to those of you who read and don't comment "Why don't you?"; although I moderate comments I have published every one that has been written.

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.

Another New Jumper

Yes, I've finished another jumper. Nothing very special this time, just something for wearing about the house or when I pop to the shops.  This time I didn't procrastinate over sewing it up either, which makes a change.  I only finished knitting it this afternoon and I got going on the sewing up immediately.

Knitting keeps me going during the evenings while I'm watching television, and as this one wasn't too complicated to follow, it meant that it grew quite quickly. I should perhaps have been doing some studying rather than working on this jumper this afternoon.  I did about an hour and a half on my Human Biology course this morning, but my eyes started to glaze over and I could feel myself drifting towards sleep, so I gave it up for a while.  I shall look to see whether there is anything worth watching on television tonight and if there isn't I shall try to spend another hour or so with the books.

There was a message on my student home page on the OU website on Monday letting me know that my first TMA is due soon.  As it is not required until 14th November, I don't call that soon.  I'm not worried because an hour or so with the TMA will see it ready to send in, but I think it may have been a bit worrying for those new to the OU because this week's reading forms part of the material for the TMA.

On a different note, I see that I have now written more than 150 posts for this blog, and this evening will probably see the visits counter hit the 3000 mark. Not a lot of visitors by the standards of some blogs, but it is more than I ever expected when I started writing this blog in the summer, at a point when I was feeling pretty low.  The fact that I regularly get comments to the things I write also helps to brighten my day.  So I must say thank you to all of you who take the time to read my blog and write comments; I really do appreciate it.

Do I Have Writer's Block?

I think that I have been doing quite well since I started writing this blog.  While I haven't written something every day, I have managed a post rate that averages out to be more than one a day. Some days the posts are short, pithy little morsels; some days they are long, and more considered pieces.  It's always difficult to judge your own writing, but the fact that I have received comments from readers saying how much they have enjoyed a post or how it has made them think about the subject covered indicates that I must have reached some people.  Just occasionally I have felt the need to write to say how desperate I am feeling at that moment. Such an occasion arose on Friday, when my mood became so low that I wrote the post almost as a cry for help.  And the blogging community is such that I received encouragement and a feeling of not being alone because of the comments that people added to that post.  Let me say here and now, I really appreciated your comments and they certainly helped at what was, for me, a very dark moment in my life.

I have gradually been coming out of that very dark corner over the last couple of days, and I knew that I was getting better, when I managed to put a quite amusing comment in an email to a friend.  It wasn't a laugh out loud amusing comment, more a case of a clever play on words type of amusing.  He enjoyed it anyway, because he commented on it in his reply; in fact he thought it poetic.

But one thing has been difficult over the last few days; finding something to write a post about. Normally I don't have to think about what to write; it just seems to spring into my mind, and the post almost seems to write itself.  Sometimes it's something that I have seen that provides the inspiration, sometimes it's something that I have read or heard.  And sometimes it is something that I feel passionately about, like trying to fight the stigma and discrimination that exists around mental illness.

Even when I have not been feeling too good, I have managed to write on an almost daily basis, because there has been something to say, but I have found it very hard since Friday to find something to blog about.  Have I got writer's block?  Is it possible that my creativity has deserted me?  No, I don't think so.  It's just a case of nothing much happening, so that it seems as though my inspiration has deserted me, when actually it is still there waiting for the right moment to leap into action again.  

After all, I've managed to write this, haven't I?

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?

I'm Feeling A Lot Better

I've been writing this blog for three weeks now, and I have to admit that when I first started writing it I thought that I would be the only person to read it, or maybe a couple of friends would also read it if I told them I was writing it. So you can imagine how happy I was when the counter clicked past 200 this morning. I appear to have a number of regular readers.

I know that the Jobbing Doctor is one, because he kindly put a link to my site after he had read one of my early posts. He now has me on his blog list as "from the other side of the fence" and has linked my post about what it's like to suffer from depression as a shared item. The Nice Lady Doctor also reads my post and has made a couple of nice comments about things that I have written and of course that is much appreciated. Yesterday I had a comment from a blogger in New Zealand, so I am truly reaching an international readership.

So what has this got to do with me feeling better? Well, I've been to see my GP this afternoon, and it is the last time that I will see him as my GP because he is about to retire. I had been for my daily constitutional and I had ended up at the surgery about 40 minutes early for my appointment. I didn't mind having to wait because I had a book with me so I could read to pass the time. But I was lucky; he called me in to see him 30 minutes before my appointment time and we had a long chat about things. He asked me about how my psychotherapy was going and we chatted about that. Then we got a bit side-tracked and we started talking about the Internet, about websites, and about blogs so I admitted to him that I had started writing one about three weeks ago. I also told him that my readership seemed to be increasing as the days went by and that I found writing these posts quite therapeutic. My readership is going to increase again because he asked me for the name of the blog so that he could have a look at it when he had finished surgery.

He said that I appeared to be looking better than usual, but admitted that how I look physically often bears no relation to how I am actually feeling and then I realised that I was feeling better. For the first time for a couple of months I feel as though there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm not sure why this is, because I have something coming up that I am actually quite worried about, and yet here I am feeling quite jolly. Maybe it is because I am getting somewhere with the psychotherapy, but I have a sneaking feeling that it is sitting and writing this blog, and the lovely comments that I am getting, that have helped me turn a corner.

As I said yesterday, nobody who has depression wants to feel the way that they do, and no amount of people telling you to snap out of it, or look on the bright side, can lift that weight that you feel pressing down on you. It is amazing that a simple message from somebody who you don't know can lift your spirits and help you on the road to recovery from the depression that you are in. Even though you know you may slip into the hole again at some time in the future, the fact that somebody is there across the ether who appreciates what you have written and takes the time to tell you so can make all the difference in the world.

Happiness Is ......

Happiness is, as the saying goes, different things to different people. I feel that it is a very long time since I could honestly say that I felt happy, but I am sure that as I come out of this period of depression that happiness is something that I will feel again. I suppose that is what keeps me going.

Since I have been writing this blog, a number of other bloggers have left me comments. Some have said that they liked a particular post, some of them have read all my posts and have added me to their blog list, and all of them have given me encouragement. One of them is Lemon whose blog can be found here. Lemon has left comments for me on several posts and has told me that she has added me to the list of those that she reads regularly, and that warms my heart a little. Actually, it warms my heart a lot, because after she had left what was, I think, her third comment, I sat down and read the whole of her blog. When I read her comments I knew very little about her, but having read her blog I realized that Lemon is a young lady for whom the compilation of her blog is a way of releasing some real frustrations that she feels because she is unwell, and nobody is absolutely sure what is wrong with her.

I'm sure that Lemon is happy sometimes, she does her best, but her illness makes her feel tired and she has lost much time at school and yesterday she made a post saying that she was sad and that her life seemed to be moving on without her. Having read her blog I felt that I had to leave her a comment; so I did. Lemon has been blogging for a little longer than me, and she is a very articulate young lady for her age, but no-one had ever commented on her blog before. When she read what I had written, I think it made her happy that someone had bothered to read her blog and taken the time to comment on it.

Some write their blogs as a form of diary of what they have been doing; some as a means of venting their frustration. Some hide behind a curtain of anonymity (for very good reasons). while others are quite open about who they are. But we all write our blogs in the hope that someone will read what we have written and find that they have something in common with us.

We are a strange group of people. We sit at our computers writing about all sorts of things, very often saying things that we would never dream of speaking out loud because we are too shy, or frightened to let others know what we are thinking. But the fact that we can remain relatively anonymous behind our blog names means that we can stand up and be counted over things that matter to us. The list of blogs that I read regularly grows daily as I find new ones that I may find interesting, and I am starting to make more comments on them as the days go by.

In this post I said how nice it is to be read. It is nice, but it can also start to bring happiness to one who is usually so down through no fault of their own.