Celebrating Five Years Of Blogging

The 31st of December 2017 marks my blog’s fifth birthday. Technically it is quite a bit older than that, my original WordPress account was made around 2010. Since I’m no longer blogging on WordPress.com I don’t count that as a real anniversary. Anyway my blog turned 5 and I’m genuinely amazed that I’ve managed to reach this milestone.

The last 5 years haven’t been easy, I originally made this blog at the start of 2013 to go along with my YouTube channel. I enjoyed posting occasionally but that was it. At that time of my life I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with myself. I was working at McDonalds and went to college to study graphic design so I had something to do. Then Autumn rolled around and I got sick, really sick.

I had an ovarian cyst the 6 weeks between diagnosis and planned surgery date was some of the hardest in my life. Unfortunately I didn’t take the news I needed surgery very well, I genuinely thought I was going to die. In fact during all of this I had to get a bus early one morning, the bus driver said something which upset me so much I didn’t get on a bus for three years. Because of everything that was happening my mental health took a huge hit. I actually tried to continue blogging during all of this but those posts weren’t great. Which is an understatement. I was basically falling to bits.

In some weird way when the time came round to it I didn’t have to sit and worry about the odds of me dying during surgery. Just a few days before my planned op the cyst twisted meaning lots of pain, septicemia and being rushed into hospital. This resulted in a whole set of different problems.

Though I had got out of the hospital relatively quickly after the operation I still wasn’t well. A lot of the symptoms that at the time I put down to the surgery were signs of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (technically it was post-sepsis syndrome). When I got home from the hospital my sense of taste had changed, I could barely eat, I was throwing up everything, I couldn’t sleep and I was getting out of breath from the simplest thing. I literally couldn’t stand and talk at the same time.

Those symptoms slowly got better but I was still tired all the time. I was having problems with dizziness, and blacking out, even simple things like having a shower was an effort. Getting used to that change was hard. In a short space of time I went from being reasonably active, working long shifts and spending most of that time on my feet. To being tired just from getting out of bed in the morning. On top of all this I had to deal with anxiety from the fact I knew I would need to go back to work at some point.

2014-2015 was a dark time for me. I tried as much as possible to not let that show on the blog, though it did result in some popular posts. I wasn’t working, I wasn’t really well enough to leave the house. For a while blogging was the only commitment I had. In a way it kept me sane because it gave me something to do every day.

It sounds great at first, having no responsibilities. I wrote a post around then about my typical day, and that was pretty much my life for almost a full year. Having basically nothing to do does start to get tiring after a while.

All that ended when I went back to school. It’s actually quite strange being almost halfway through my course now and going back to read some of those early posts where I talk about all the stuff I wanted to do which I am now doing. Studying graphic design was just an idea, I didn’t know if I would actually be well enough to achieve it. I still have those same thoughts on an almost daily basis. But I managed it. And I’m really enjoying it. I’ve gotten to take part in so many fun events because I decided to go back into education.

FINALLY

I continued blogging while in education because I wanted to maintain that commitment. Having something which you have to do each week is really useful. Especially when I had no other commitments. But I am now in this position where I have other things I could be working on. Blogging takes up a significant amount of my free time, it also impacts on the time I have to spend on coursework.

I love blogging. I am proud of what I have created here. But I want to do more. I want to try YouTube. Make products to sell. Work on my design skills. That’s not to say I’m never going to blog again. But I want to try other projects too, which means less blogging