I am currently going through a phase where I keep catching bug after bug. It is one of the main issues of having an auto-immune disease, like Rheumatoid Arthritis. Whenever people around me contracts some kind of bug, I will pick it up, and I will get knocked for six every time. This is why I am sitting writing this and being all blocked up. I got rid of a cough about 4 weeks ago, and it came back last week. Fabulous timing.
Edinburgh Pride is Saturday, and I will be upset if I am too choked up to go and enjoy myself. I am planning on doing the march again, for the 4th year in a row. It’s always a super fun day, and the weather looks like it will be super sunny. So I just need to focus on taking my medication and hopefully kick it.
It just makes me so tired, because I always seem to have something wrong.
Reading has always been one of those hobbies that I have done since childhood. I love the idea of being able to escape into another world, or learn about something completely outside of my area of expertise. Reading has always been something that is so freeing to me.
I do realise, that reading in itself, is a political act. Not every person can read, government’s don’t allow all kinds of literature to be sold. Historically, reading has been used to subdue the masses by those who are in power. Those who would benefit from people not being able to understand what is going on. This is a way of subduing people and making sure that they only receive the information those in power want them to receive.
It is why I try to read a variety of stuff. I try to divide my reading time between reading fiction and non-fiction. I could be reading period non-fiction, then read a book on the history of Scottish football, and then a book about politics. I like reading about something that I don’t know a lot on, that, to me, is part of the point of reading. To increase my understanding of the world outside of my own experiences. And also understand stuff from different points of view
As a result, I always see something I want to read when I go out. It is why I rarely leave a bookshop without a book. I always buy something. I remember seeing that buying books and reading books are two entirely different hobbies. Unrelated with each other. I am trying to do better, and am renting more from my local library, rather than buy new.
I have a rather serious post I was planning, but then WordPress pinged a notification to my phone. It’s the anniversary for me registering this blog.
16 years feels like a very long time. I started this when I was at college, studying art and graphic design. We had to start a blog to keep track on our progress in our classwork. I, obviously, kept it up.
Blogging, much like myself, has changed a lot over the years. When I first started, it was just another place to rant online. Whether it was popular or read, wasn’t important. It was an outlet, which is how I still think of it.
Now, blogging has been on a bit of a resurgence after a decline. But now, there is a push to monetise everything. Make your writing your business. Like a lot of social media, where it is about building a brand, a niche. In fact, now there are multiple advertisements in using Artificial Intelligence to help create regular posts. As if it is all about quantity over quality.
If an AI post appears on this blog, I’d advise to call for help. I’d much rather dad along on my haphazard way, like I have been doing for the last 16 years. Happy anniversary.
There is an idea that is banded about the internet by self-help gurus and people selling courses, where if you can do one ‘good action’ per day, you can get closer to your goals. Whatever they may be. Which is a good idea. You just have decide what ‘good actions’ actually are.
Because, for me, what is classed as something productive, or a ‘good action’ may change from day-to-day. Today, getting up at reasonable time, cleaning my nespresso machine and making myself an actual coffee, was pretty productive. Other days, I have work, and maybe execrise after a 10 hour shift may be the productive thing. And then, there are the days, that simply eating anything is a good thing. It all depends how my headspace is, and to be honest, as long as I step away from social media and doom scrolling, I tend to be happy.
But to see genuine movement in your life, you need to do things regularly. You need to get into a pattern, practice behaviours so that they almost come naturally to you. That is why I think that there is such a massive market for ‘self-help courses’. People think that if they spend money on something, it will magically make their resolve better and their goals more achievable. It doesn’t quite work like that. It takes a lot of effort to change, and it isn’t some task you can pay someone else to do.
Unfortunately.
Why am I mentioning this? Over the years, I have purchased many self-help guides and courses. And they have all been a waste of money, where, like everything else, I don’t have the follow through to make anything actually stick. Like all the empty journals and diaries which initially hold the promise that ‘this time will be different’. Incidently ‘this time’ wasn’t any different, and things gathered dust rather than being used. My focus is almost like the tide, the largest waves of motivation, is followed by the recoil where all motivation disappears, and eventually the motivation builds up to wave in shore again. It can be so frustrating.
I am left questioning how to start to make things better, in a realistic way. A way that works for me. Is there a way that works for me?
It is my birthday today. I am 41. Birthdays seem a lot less fun than what they used to be. I have spent the day relaxing, and contempating.
That’s all birthdays become once we get older, or that’s what they have become for me. Wondering why is it that I have have seemingly sidestepped what every other adult has decided is the benchmark for life. This belief that if you don’t achieve these pre-existing terms of service, you haven’t lived. No child. No marriage. No mortgage. Being alive, and having a job is expected, but you are looked down on for not doing certain things.
There are times where I can brush it off Tell people that my 20s were where my mental health crumbled. Where suicide wasn’t even a thought, it was actively attempted. My 30s were about trying to pick myself back up again. Was diagnosed with Rhuematoid Arthritis, after years of complaints and fighting with doctors. ‘Horrific cramping in your hands stopping you from doing things? Maybe you just need to go to WeightWatchers.’ It has been hard, and I am feeling better than I did a decade ago. Still not 100%, but better.
But there are times where I feel a loss. Feel like I have been so stupid that I have not been able to be successful. So insecure, that I must be 10000% honest and share everything, and then put my foot in it. Losing out on oportunities. So I then stop saying everything, and try to only say what other’s want to hear. But somehow that is wrong too. It is like every step I take, there is a pothole that causes me to stumble and fall, whilst everyone else walks by unaffected.
This feeling doesn’t go away. And I don’t write about it for sympathy. I write about it to help lessen the weight it hangs around my neck. That getting the thinking out my head, allows me to focus on something else. Sometimes the ‘something else’ is more of the same. But, every once in a while, that ‘something else’ is something a little brighter, a step in the right direction.
Though, it has become abundantly clear, I don’t quite know where the right direction is.
My whole ‘writing more in 2025’ thing really hasn’t worked. Surprise, surprise.
Nothing of any great importance has happened. I have been working, and that’s about it. Well, there has been some nights out, meeting friends, just bobbing along. I have been getting too absorbed in the news, and wallowing in the feeling of ‘what’s the point of it all’ kind of despair. Which is all consuming.
Today, I have tried to focus on uni work, which I have done alright. This unit includes team work, which I think will be interesting, as it includes working as a remote team, like through the internet. Something that I have never done before, every group activity I have done previously has been in person. Which, I find okay. When you are working remotely, you are working alone, and it can be a harder to manage your time. Or, should I mention, harder for me to manage my time. Especially when my brain has been filled with other stuff.
The project involves the group designing a website for a fictional sports group, which should be okay. And it is building a WordPress site. And I sit embarrassed, because despite the fact that I have kept a blog on WordPress for 16 years, I haven’t really done much with designing things on it. Like, yes I have my own domain, but it isn’t used for anything other than a blog, rather than for building an actual customised website. Maybe I haven’t utilised the WordPress tools as much as I should have.
Since I started spending my time online, over 20 years ago, it has been clear that people who gained popularity, were those who focused their attention on a particular topic. Something that I have never been able to do. Even when I used to do my homework at school, I couldn’t just focus on one subject. To work best, I would spent half an hour or so on one subject, then switch to another.
If you take a dander over my blog, you will see this lack of focus, as I write about what is in my head at the time. It could be health related, news related, or just what I have read or watched. I like having a place where I can document things, and I enjoy reading through my previous posts. I like to see what I was doing a few years ago, and normally I will have a wee laugh at my own expense. Which is normal. As you get older, and experience new things, meet new people, your perspective on things can change. What matters to you today, may not be so important in a few years’ time.
Maybe that’s why I tend to ignore the advice from so-called experts, that everyone needs to find their own ‘niche’, and make their content about that. I like to have ways to document my life, a place to put my thoughts, no matter what the topic is. Maybe it is because, that is the kind of content I like best. It feels personal, without a person having the need to give every aspect of their life away.
If you use any social media, you will probably be aware of the news regarding various platforms, and various information on ownership, and the like. It’s wound up with a lot of people being angry, and a lot of discussions on things like censorship. A conversation that started over the last few years on Twitter (X). Where abuse and death threats became the norm.
It seems as if a lot of the users of social media platforms are just coming to the realisation that we users are not the customers. The customers are the shareholders, the advertisers, the marketing teams, the ones who pay money to access the data of the users. That is where the money is. Not the photograph you took for dinner, but the information of where you bought that food, what bank you used, what shop, what brand of product did you buy. A lot of these things are simply things that your smart phone picks up. And that ‘stuff’ is what marketing companies want. That is how the social media companies make money, by showing you advertising that is targeted to you. As social media oligarchs make changes that benefit the money side of the company, but alienates huge portions of their user base.
I use TikTok a lot. I like watching different videos, and I have found a lot of really informative content on it. I like the whole video diary idea, and follow a lot of people who create daily videos in this way. However, different agencies have come out that TikTok is too liberal leaning, that it attacks the more conservative viewpoints. So there came this statement where the US government was going to close TikTok down, with the app actually closing their US app down. For 14 hours. For 14 hours, the rest of the world could access TikTok, and more local content rather than the US stuff. But after that 14 hours US users were welcomed back with a message thanking new US President Donald Trump.
The thing is, when the US users came back online, they noticed some changes. Various hashtags regarding the inauguration of Donald Trump, or LGBTQ+ things were unusable . With users being told that the topic couldn’t be referenced to for the ‘good’ of the TikTok community. People found that LGBTQ+ user pics were removed, with no indication from TikTok as to why. I, in fact ran a trial of my own after discussing the TikTok ban on my own profile, and found it go hardly any views, where as me asking whether people preferred kittens or puppies got my normal views, This, to me, proved that TikTok wasn’t sharing opinions that were negative in anyway about the TikTok ban. In fact, some users reported their videos just disappearing, without any warning or notification from TikTok themselves. This has lead to people talking about censorship, and try and understand why certain voices are being silenced.
The counter-argument was, that nobody cared when conservative voices were being silenced. But the truth is, they weren’t silenced. They maybe had accounts removed from social media, but that tended to be for threatening violence, spreading misinformation, and breaking the platforms terms and conditions. When Elon Musk purchased twitter in 2023, and renamed it X, he also reactivated a lot of the accounts which had been removed due to abuse. These people came back with gusto, as if nobody could stop them. The abuse they sent was awful. As a user who spoke up against them, I didn’t get a discussion, or even blocked, I got death threats. Every day. I didn’t even have a big account, with only a few hundred followers, but the site was rendered unusable. I closed my account in the wake of this, and ended up floating over to Meta’s Threads. Where I made a lot of bookish and formula 1 friends. And I saw the positives of social media again.
It looks like TikTok is going to be in US hands, when its CEO was trained by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. And I sit and wonder if this social media ‘fight’ has all been a ruse to make each platform more money, and whittle away the usability for us, the user. I mean, my Facebook and Instagram are currently unusable due to AI, and irrelevant US made bigoted content. What will these big tech billionaires do, if their platforms do become examples of the Dead Internet Theory? Will they simply just buy something else, or stick with their sinking ships? I mean, advertisers won’t pay for things human eye’s don’t actually see.
And then, today, I read the revelation that blogging is back. That people are going to divert away from social media and curate their own online spaces. It’s proof, to me, that if you keep at something long enough, it will eventually come back into fashion again. Look at me, ahead of the trend.
I last posted on New Year’s Day, which was almost 2 weeks ago. Not exactly the great start I was hoping to have in 2025, but it happens. I have been working extra shifts at work, because it is the busy period, and I have had the lurgy for the last week or so. Which has left me being able to function, but with little energy to do anything else. So, I have updated hardly anything online.
I spent time reading which is good. I normally find that doom scrolling on social media, distracts me from doing what I actually enjoy. But because I didn’t want to deal with people, I did some reading instead. Maybe that is something that I need to do more, schedule in social media time, so that I don’t simply waste hours of my life on it. Because when scrolling through TikTok, I find that I blink and 3 hours have gone by. The problem is, that I blame myself for being so stupid, but is it really different from anything else? People come home from work and put on the TV and watch 3-4 hours of stuff, and that’s okay. Is it only a problem when TikTok is being watched rather than BBC 1?
Honestly, I don’t know. I get bored watching a lot of TV these days, the things that are on, don’t often catch my attention. Like, I don’t really want to watch most soaps, reality TV, or yet another drama about murder. I don’t know if it is because, unless the program is really good, my brain just isn’t engaged enough, and I end up bored. So I turn to my phone, to scroll through stuff, I usually have no interest in. When in reality, I should really go and do something that I am interested in. I can’t complain that my time has been wasted, when I am not doing anything about it.
So, tonight, we are going to do a little studying, read a little, and make a start on my new journal, instead of watching TV shows, I am not interested in. And, when I am done, I’ll have a nice early night for work tomorrow. Things can only get better if baby steps are made, day-by-day.
A new chapter has started. I am closing the door on what has already happened. I can’t do anything about what occurred last year, so I am telling myself not to worry about it.
Whether that works, is something different entirely. But aim high, and all that jazz. Speaking of aiming, what are my aims for this year?
Probably to become a bit healthier, which is not just weight related. I’ve spent my whole adult life fighting with diets and ‘health plans’ and nothing really works. And I have come to the conclusion that it is because I don’t like myself very much. So being healthy, for me, is taking steps to learn how to like myself. Do the stuff that makes me happy. That is mostly hobbies, so making time for reading, writing, and creating stuff.
I also need to be more organised. My room has zero storage, the one cabinet I have, one for my TV and stuff, is broken. So, get storage sorted out, realising I have to probably get it delivered as I still don’t have a car. I am going to start looking on Pinterest for ideas, build up a few inspirational boards on what I’d like.
Stop hiding away. I am really bad at deciding I am a ‘damp squib’ and not going to social occasions. My aim is to try and go to these things, if I don’t enjoy anything, I can always leave and go home. And most of the time, when I do go out, I actually enjoy myself. So comfort zone be damned.
I am cautious not to call any of these things, resolutions. More broad aims for the year. Things I would like to do. To help make 2025 a more memorable, and positive year, than 2024.
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