Day 279: January in blogging

Hullo chickadees. I'm going to start a monthly round-up of my blogging, collecting all the better, or at least more interesting, pieces, both as a way for me to see where I've been and where I'm going, and for you to check in on the highlights if you don't have the time or inclination to follow me daily, but still have a vague interest in what I'm writing.

Lovely. Here is this month's:

Day 251: Insignificant - A post I wrote to help people feel less self-conscious by reminding them how tiny and stupid and meaningless they are. Also I got to make fun of my friend Mike's enormous head, which to be honest I'm at times surprised fits through my kitchen door when he comes round to watch The Wire. But though his head is enormous (and oh, how!), his life is tiny, and stupid, and meaningless - and I very much hope that this thought brings him solace.

Day 252: Deer - Creativity, I posit here (not exactly originally), is a deer in the woods - you can't go stomping after it ordering it to do what you ask. It will only flee. You have to creep up slowly, gently, wait patiently, and if you are lucky then the deer will wander up to you and nibble strawberries by your feet. Do deer like strawberries? The Deer of Creativity does! Also, you're not hunting the deer in this analogy, so get that macho predator instinct out of your head. You're asking the deer spirit to bless you, and it has to be alive and free to do so. I like this analogy a lot.

Day 258: Storms of tarantulas - Some thoughts on the Welcome to Night Vale novel, and the difficulties in delineating worlds of the imagination.

Day 259: Dried fruit - A post about challenging self-critical thoughts, told through an analogy about making portraits of celebrities out of bits of dried fruit. I don't know what comes out of my head some days.

Day 261: Cherry - About the two kinds of happiness, and how to find peace beyond the attempt to sate desire, told through an analogy about eating iced buns. I don't know what comes out of my head, etc.

Day 264: Wednesday Reviews - Roma - I've started writing film reviews once a week. Took me a while to find my feet, to remember how the form should flow, but I was happy with this one. It was a great film, as well. You should definitely check it out on Netflix if you get the chance.

Day 267: Shrapnel - Notes on how emotional pain is related to physical pain, how the same neural mechanisms fire for both, and why we let down the vulnerable in our society when we fail to recognise this truth.

... And then I got ill. Researching into mental health issues, thinking about my own struggles with such, a mass of negative thoughts that I had been ignoring since Christmas, trying to power through, suddenly came crashing in, and knocked me on my arse. It's interesting looking back and pinpointing the moment it happened, how you can sense I felt I had in some way opened the door to it, allowed the negativity room to manoeuvre, and how much guilt and shame and hopelessness spread through the whole of the following week after it leapt.

Day 270: Rumination - I wasn't well here, but I managed to post about rumination, the constant obsessive worrying about problems without ever actually solving them. Being anxious about why you suffer, rather than thinking about how to overcome suffering. This was exhausting to think about, and to write, but it helped give me insight into something that affects me every single day, and I'm trying to be more aware of it arising at the moment.

Day 272: Implicit - A little post I squeezed out about the role of character in film, how a scriptwriter must be like an animation artist, sketching telling details of a person above the surface to imply a whole mass of depth unseen below, and why for this reason they must be experts in feeling the shape of people, the shape of behaviours, hopes, fears, dreams. Want to come back and flesh this thought out sometime.

Day 276: A different realm - The day or two before this post were my worst this month, completely overcome with depression - but here I gave myself permission to feel as I did; I called in sick to work, treated myself kindly, and began the process of recovering. Weird that this was only three days ago. Truly feels like another time, another me.

Day 277: Back on track - Making sense of the previous week's depression, paying attention to the precise symptoms, making plans for dealing with them when they arise in the future. If you struggle with mental health yourself you may want to read this and see whether any of it strikes a chord, and whether any of the strategies may be of use to you in your own private battles. I hope so.