Illness, Relationships and Self-Reflection

I’ve been writing here regularly for over a year now, but those of you who follow me may have noticed that aside from my bitparade posts, I’ve not actually uploaded anything since my The Handmaids Tale book club post, here isn’t the only thing I’ve let slip over the past few weeks, I missed two book club meets (said Handmaids Tale one and the one for volume 2 of Akira, though I did attend the meet for A Feast for Crows despite not finishing reading it). As I’ve just alluded to, my reading slipped too, likewise pretty much everything and theres a few reasons for that.

I’ll state openly that I’ve not been well for the past four weeks or whatever, part of that was a cold that took alot of my physical energy, but also, my mental and emotional health has been poor. For personal reasons I’m not going to go into depth on what the reasons for that were, there’s probably more than I can list here anyway, but I will say that at times everything in my life has seen some element of challenge over those four weeks and its taken a lot of deep, sometimes hurtful, conversation to break everything down, figure out where I’m at and work towards some conclusion, figure out where I needed to put more focus, where I was already putting too much focus, ignore some of the darker thoughts in my mind and just generally rally myself and spend more time with those I care for and love.

This has meant other things have slipped. So whilst writing Bar Harukiya over the past 12 months has been incredibly beneficial to me, both to share with you guys the things I love, but also just to occassionally get things off my chest or just to write any old thing, I’d gotten to a point where I was stressing over making sure I met the goals I’d set myself of writing regularly but also spending so much time watching the stats on the WordPress dashboard ticking up and getting upset if/when they weren’t improving in a why I deemed fit. I’d lost sight of why I wrote on here and ultimately burned out. Thats going to change, I still plan on writing as regularly as I did before, but I’m not going to force myself to write if I’m genuinely struggling for anything to actually write about.

Obviously, I’ve already said that during this period, I’d stopped doing alot of the things I was enjoying doing, and whilst part of that was due to stuff in my personal life and relationships, it was also because, like with my old bitparade site, I’d gotten myself to a point where I was doing stuff just to write about it and maybe missing just enjoying (or not as the case may be) those things for what they are.

So, here I am, back again, I’ve got a couple of posts lined up already, but the the point is that I’m not going to be putting pressure on myself to do stuff for the sake of contributing to Bar Harukiya. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, but I don’t live to write, and thats the importance, even those of us who do this kind of thing for a living have to step away and find ourselves outside of what we type, and so, my focus is now on my partner and our relationship, her recovery from cancer and us finding enjoyment in each others company again after a very tough 18 months or so where maybe we both lost sight of that, and obviously our three kids who have had to go through all of this too. I’ll hopefully be offering a larger variety of content in future, especially now we can get back out into the garden and my partners physical and mental health improves to a degree that we can do stuff as a couple and as a family again.

I just hope you’ll join me on that journey, but if you don’t, don’t worry, I won’t be tracking the stats!