Tag: blogmas

Deep Breathing

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Uh oh!

Something has gone wrong, and I can feel the panic starting to rise in my stomach. What have I done wrong? How could I let this happen? I’ve let people down? And when this happens, there is not one iota of possiblity that can focus on anything else. 

How do I react? I start getting cranky. If my work is stressing me, giving me more work doesn’t help my stress. I just go into a spiral where I just make myself feel worse and worse. So I take it out on the people around me. Which is unfair, because it isn’t their fault I am panicking. And then, I feel worse because I took it out on an innocent bystander. 

Yep, quite a mental hole to get yourself out of, if I say so myself. 

But I do sometimes get myself out of these blocks, which does make me feel better. A lot of the time, I don’t actually do anything. It is just the ‘state of utmost panic’ passes. No reason why it comes and goes, it sometimes works like that. Very unhelpful. Most of the time though, I have to actively seek to get myself going again. 

I do that with a lot of effort and patience. I may take a ‘time out’ and go for a walk somewhere, away from where I am working. Being away from my work area, does automatically relax me. Sometimes I just close my eyes and try to breathe. I know it’s a cliche, but it is repeated so much because it’s true. 

But the best thing to calm me down, is to try and talk to those around me. It’s probably just the distraction, but when I am in work, and I can’t just run off, it does help a lot. I work with some funny and great people, and I can always find someone who will make me laugh. It helps so much. Just a few minutes of light-hearted conversation can completely change my mood, and I can return to work with a completely fresh mind. 

It’s nice sometimes, to find a way around the blocks your brain puts in the way. And the more solutions you find, the easier it gets to get on top of those mental health issues that so many of us deal with. 

Good, Good

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I don’t say it a lot, but today was a good day. A good, productive and fun day. 

I woke up with the attitude that I was going to focus on my work. Because sometimes I feel distracted, and that makes me feel a bit anxious about being useless. So I woke up rather enthusiastic to get my working week started. So I just decided to take the day as it comes, and live in the moment. Which is rare.

My issue with anxiety is that I tend to focus mostly on what’s going on around me, what could happen next and what’s gone wrong previously. And I worry. I worry that I’ll make the same mistakes, and that I’ll disappoint someone. Don’t ask me who I’m going to disappoint, I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I get. 

I am trying to live more positively, as a rule. Whilst, it doesn’t happen a lot, I feel I should celebrate when it does happen. The more positive and happy feelings I can create about having a successful day, hopefully the more it can happen. It might be some kind of motivation to help me get my life on some kind of track where I’d be more satisfied in general. Hopefully. 

Feeling Festive

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

It is that time of the year where we celebrate Christmas. Shops are busy, twinkly lights are everywhere, and everything just feels rather happy. Which is always nice.
But what does Christmas mean to me? 
I’m not particularly religious, although I grew up with Sunday Schools and the annual nativity. This causes issues with a few folk I know, why celebrate Christmas when you don’t follow the bible. Well, considering it is believed that Jesus was born in spring and not December 25th, that mutes that point. It appears that Christianity adopted the winter date because of a popular Pagan celebration, which was put in place by the Romans.
Not that it matters.
Christmas to me is about family. It is a celebration before the start of a new year, where we can show those around us, we are thinking of them. And that’s it. 
Obviously other people hold other meanings in the holiday, and that’s fine. Everyone is allowed to find a meaning that matters to them in anything. And that fact shouldn’t matter to anyone else. Let everyone celebrate moments that mean something to them, cause life is to short not to.

Computer Says No

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I have spent the last 10 minutes getting my iPhone to charge using a cable with a loose connection. Again, I curse at technology as my phone dies, and I have to search around for another cable, of which I have came into ownership of a ton. And only about half of them actually work.

This hasn’t been my only issue with technology recently. I have had to use a lot of computers at work, which are shared. Like sometimes more than one account can be logged into the PC at a time. Which is handy when there is limited computers available, but not very good when you rely on the PC being fast. To do the job I do, I need multiple programmes open at once, and I must be able to jump between them all seemlessly. This does happen, when someone on another profile jams the print queue, and just logs out. And it happens a lot, and the only way to fix is to restart everything. Which takes way too long. 

So, to humour myself the other day whilst my PC was resetting, I thought of a few things that could be done whilst waiting for a work PC to load.

1) Have a cup of tea, even watching the kettle boil would be quicker than the PC. 

2) Do the Metro crossword. And that includes colouring in boxes so that my words fit. 

3) Annoy several colleagues by singing Christmas songs. 

4) Attend a First Aid incident. It’s okay, I am trained.

5) Go for a walk and see how other colleagues are doing. 

6) Sweep the floor and tidy up. At a push. 

7) Cry at the pile of work getting bigger, that you can do nothing about. 

8) Try to give ‘new starts’ directions, and confusing them when I say ‘right’ and point left.

9) Go to stores and refill all the paper and pen supplies.

10) Realise that I would be quicker doing everything manually.

Just Get On With It

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I always try to a person who plods along, no matter what happens. If I feel a duty to get something done, I have to be dying for me not to at least attempt it. It’s how I have always been, since I was wee girl. Never excelled, but also never really gave up. I fail, but I bloody well try hard no matter what. 

Well, feeling under the weather, as I have, has put that ideal to the test. I have been working 6 days a week, in the run up to Christmas, making the best of the opportunity and all that. Which is great, it will pay for a fair bit of Christmas. But it is so hard to do when you are not quite 100%. My temper is short, I am a walking snot factory, and I constantly want to be wrapped up watching Netflix. But the show must go on.

I go to work and do my best. Which isn’t terrible, I can get my work done in an above average speed and accuracy, so it’s okay. But my fuse is short. I bite at people for no reason. It just means I spend half the day nipping at folk, and the other half appologising for it. It annoys me because I am such a patient person normally. 

I can’t wait till this cold/cough thing finally goes away, and I can be myself again. In the meantime, I just need to keep making sure I am doing the best I can. Keep myself right. 

I hope anyone else going through the ‘winter cold bug’ gets rid of it quickly. Nobody wants to be sick at this time of year. 

Picture Post.

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I missed yesterday, and feel bad for it. So, to break up the monotony of wordy posts, have some random pictures from my phone. I take a lot of photos, and I like to share. I like the colder part of the year, as everything seems to change. 

   
    
 

Lost In It All

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

Just looking at the Internet today, not searching for anything in particular, just looking. Something that I don’t do very often. I am good at commenting on everything, and putting in my two cents on whatever is going on. 

Sometimes, I think we get too much information thrown at us, mostly by the Internet. It gets a bit hard to process it all. It is also hard to distinguish what is important, particularly on social media. Twitter and Facebook have a habit of promoting the useless twaddle that fills up the gossip sites. If you like that kind of thing, it’s okay, nothing wrong with it. But how can you tell what’s important when the going-ones in I’m A Celebrity is given more promotion than the story about Parliment voting to bomb Syria? 

It just gets a bit overwhelming at times. Like information overload. The press has always had the finger pointed at it for over-hyping one story, to mask over another one. A way of attempting to pull the wool over the public’s eyes. And that made a lot of people bored with the press, and turn to sides like Twitter and Reddit for more direct news. But when companies can pay for an allocated number of retweets, how honest is what we actually see? 

That’s what I sometimes think about, and to be honest it freaks me out sometimes. There are so many different ways to get information these days, and a lot of the time, every take is slightly different. So what has been added for effect. Is that ‘first hand source’ really telling a true story. You never know. 

As good as the Internet is for finding out information about the world we live in, sometimes I think it would be easier if all the web was used for was Netflix.

Let It Be 

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Today I got really angry about something I had no control over. If things don’t ever go the way I plan, I get really irritable. I don’t like blaming other people for why things go wrong, when I can blame myself. Which sounds silly, but that is how my brain works. 

But… things need to change.

It is not good for a person to believe that, every success and failure in the world around them, is entirely their fault. But that’s what anxiety does to me. And the worst thing is, that like all mental health issues, there is no quick fix. You have to spend time ‘re-training’ yourself, to change how you think about things. And that can seem the impossible task.

Maybe, a good idea, is trying to relax a bit more. Make sure that everything I do is the best I can do. Whatever happens around me, doesn’t really matter. Not when noticing ‘that’ makes me so aggitated. I have to try and learn that what happens happens, I can only do what I can. And if what I do is the best I can achieve, then there is no need to be angry if things don’t work out. 

Deep breaths and visions of a calm blue ocean are required I think. 

Happy Blogmas

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

It is the first of December, which is giving me a reason to try a new challenge. And that is to try and blog every day in the run up to Christmas. 

This is a thing which has been occurring online for the last several years, with both bloggers and vloggers (video bloggers) taking on the challenge to create new content every day in the run up to Christmas. Everyone who I’ve spoken to, seems to have enjoyed taking part in the challenge previously, so I thought I’d give it a shot. 

Why?

Well, when I look back at 2015, I don’t feel that I have achieved too much. It feels like just another year where I have become overpowered with lack of inspiration and motivation. It’s been a bit of a damp squib, if I were to be completely honest. So, I thought that rather than just complain about failing ‘everything’, that I would give 2015 an opportunity to go out on a high note. 

I have struggled all year with writing, drawing, everything. And that really gets me down. But, I am still here, and up for turning things around.

So, wish me luck.