Another Milestone

A couple of minutes after midday the 20,000th visitor to my blog arrived. According to FEEDJIT they live in Ilford, Redbridge, their computer runs Windows Vista and they use Firefox as their browser. They are also a regular reader as they came direct to the blog rather than from another blog. It's not a lot of information but it will perhaps allow the person who was that visitor to recognize themselves.

When I started this blog in June 2008 I wasn't sure whether it would be something that lasted for a long time or would merely be one of those things that was started and then became too much of a chore and fell by the wayside. It seems as though I may be here for the long haul though because even when I was in hospital I was concerned about not being able to write to let regular readers know why I wasn't able to post. And what was heart-warming to me was that several regular readers were concerned enough about me to have sent me emails asking if I was okay.

When we start writing a blog we all wonder whether anyone will bother reading it. Will it be interesting enough to attract comments? Will we be able to find things to write about? How much of ourselves should we reveal? Many of us blog anonymously. It is a way of writing about things that affect us or that interest us or that we feel strongly about. We can say things on our blogs that we might never express in person.

I started this blog with the intention of using it to record how depression affected me and how I dealt with depression. Much of it is still about depression, it can't help but be so because that is what shapes me at the moment. Here I can write about how I am feeling rather than bottling it up inside me. It helps; it helps a lot. But the blog has become much more than that. I have included my trips out to various museums and galleries in London. I have blogged about going to the theatre, about meeting other bloggers, and about my knitting.

Sometimes it has been very difficult to write about things that were happening to me. Mr Smiley has been making regular appearances in my blog almost from the start. He is a very dear friend who has seen me at my worst and my best. He has known me as a shy 18-year old who was shy and very unsure of herself and he has seen me as a confident woman who had found her true vocation in life. He helped me through the early days of my widowhood by listening to me when I needed someone who I could talk to. He has visited me in hospital after major surgery; he has even carried my handbag in public to bring it to me in hospital after I was taken from work by ambulance one Friday morning (and many husbands wouldn't do that). And most of all he encouraged me when I told him about the blog and became a frequent commenter. He told me that he thought that it had made a difference to me and at times when I found it difficult to write he was the one who said that I should just write about whatever I thought of at the time. It was Mr Smiley who, when I mooted the idea of writing about my incarceration in a mental hospital, said that I should do it because he was sure it would help other people. So the series of posts Tackling the Mental Health Minefield was begun and it resulted in me winning an award from Mental Nurse. One of the most difficult posts that I have ever written was the one that I wrote on hearing the news about Mr Smiley having terminal cancer.

One of the things that this blog has taught me is that I love to write. Maybe that was why I was so good at my job. That involved a great deal of writing and my reports were always well received. Mr Smiley has suggested on more than one occasion that I should write a book. More recently my GP has also suggested this as something that I should do. The short course that I have just done with the OU has shown me that I am not a writer of fiction. My tutor thought that a couple of my short stories were very good, but he did not realise that they were actually based on things that had happened to me. So, if I am going to write something it will either have to be factual, something that I can research and then write about, or I am going to have to write about me, but as that sounds a bit pretentious, perhaps it will have to be about depression and me.

After nearly 500 posts the blog has received 20.000 visits. I am amazed and hugely gratified that something that has been a form of therapy for me has been interesting enough for people to visit and return again to see what I have to say. Yes, it is a big day for the blog and it is a day that has meant a lot to me too. Thank you visitors, you make it worthwhile my sitting here day by day trying to think up things that you may find interesting and that may provide you with food for thought.

What Do You Write About In A Milestone Post?

This is the 200th post to my blog.  I knew that the milestone was close, so I checked the total a little earlier.  Surely such a milestone requires a really good post.  But that means that I have to wait until I have got something significant to write about.  I didn't feel like writing a summary of what has gone before.  So this post will cover some of the things that I have written about in the past, not as they were when I wrote about them before, but as they are now.

One thing that I have regularly complained about is the work that is currently going on around my area of London in an effort to replace the capitals aging Victorian water mains.  The work is still on-going and when I went to the bank today I saw that yet another road has been closed to through traffic.  So far the work within a one mile radius of my home has been going on for almost a year and I am sure that it will be continuing for some time to come.

I have continued to study with the OU; I've completed one course (which I got the result for this week) and I am currently working on two more.  I have had a bit of a rough time with the studying over the last couple of weeks because I haven't been feeling on top of the world.  However, I am going to have a concerted effort this weekend to try to get two of the three TMAs that are due at the beginning of January written, so that I can get the other one completed before Christmas too.  That way I can start the New Year up to date, or even slightly ahead of where I need to be.

Knitting has been one of the things that has helped to pass the time when I haven't been feeling wonderful.  I've knitted four jumpers and a cardigan to keep me warm over the winter, and a hat to keep my ears warm.  I also have three different shawls in progress as the moment.  The Shetland lace shawl that is being knitted for a baby due in February is growing slowly.  It is a difficult pattern to follow and is definitely not for periods when I am feeling very depressed as it just makes me feel worse when I have to unpick it stitch by stitch to correct the mistakes.  The second shawl is a beautiful shawl which has grown quickly and probably could be finished in a couple of evenings when there is nothing much on television.  It will be lightweight, weighing less than 75 grams, and very soft and fluffy as it is knitted in a mixture of mohair and silk. The third shawl is a Shetland hap shawl and this afternoon, I finished the main part of it and now I am knitting the border.  I started with 800 stitches on the circular needle which it has been knitted on, and 17 stitches on a separate needle which were the start of the border.  One stitch from the main shawl gets joined to the border on every other row and there are 160 repeats of the 10-row pattern that makes up each point of the shawl.  I have so far managed to complete 5 repeats so there are only 155 to go.

The other two subjects that have represented a major part of this blog are depression and psychotherapy.  I still have very long periods of depression, followed by short periods when I don't feel so bad.  Sometimes I can fall into a trough in a matter of hours and other times it happens over a period of days or weeks. Psychotherapy has made a difference to my life; it has allowed me to find out so much more about myself and to understand why I am the way that I am. Psychotherapy has been hard; it has sometimes been traumatic; it is often very emotive.  But psychotherapy is certainly helping me to cope with things better, to regain some self-confidence, and to increase self esteem.

So a lot has happened over the time that I have been writing this blog, and I am sure that a lot will continue to happen as the months go by.  What started off as an exercise to see if I could write anything worthwhile has turned out to be one of the best things that has happened to me for quite a long time.  I hope that I will continue to write for a long time to come, and that people will continue to read this blog.  It has been a bit of a lifeline over the last five and a half months and has brought me a lot of new friends.

This is what I have decided to write about in this milestone post.