Tag: life

Bad Friends

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I have written on here, a lot, about how I have been struggling to keep up with my hobbies. It’s mostly due to being in constant pain, whilst having crappy mental health, often leaves me no energy to try and do any of my hobbies. I just want to sit in my bed and do nothing. The trouble is, that it is not just hobbies that suffer when I am going through a bad patch. My personal relationships suffer too.

I have always been a low maintenance friend. The kind that doesn’t have to always be in contact, but will always be there if you needed them. Like I get messages from friends, just chatter or memes, and I often read them, start to reply, and then get distracted before I can actually send them. And when I wonder why I have heard nothing back, I check to see that it is me who halted the conversation. And, now it is too awkward to send anything, because the conversation is over. And it was my fault.

Any message I would subsequently send would serve as an interruption. Everyone has their own shit going on, they don’t need me turning up, with my complete lack of awareness. So I don’t send anything. And it all goes silent. I am not much better in real life, either. I will say basic chatter, that ‘how are you’, that doesn’t seem to really care how anyone is doing. Which is annoying, I do care, I just don’t really know any other way to try and start a conversation.

Conversation is a thing that has never been my strong point. My mum used to always speak of how I would be quiet at nursery or Primary School, to the point teachers would be worried about my speech. The truth was, I could talk fine, I just didn’t waste time talking to people who I didn’t want to. I’d much rather do a jigsaw puzzle or read a book. Not much has changed. I always feel awkward in conversation, where I have nothing to add, as everything in my life is boring. I either complain about being sore, or my work.

I think this is my problem. I feel like a background character, who is someone folk are aware of, but don’t particularly like. Think Kirk from the Gilmore Girls. He is a member of the town of Stars Hollow, he is a valuable member of the town (doing almost every job there is), but no one really has time for him. He is a person to be mocked and not one to befriend. That’s me.

I discovered this week that someone who I really trusted, was speaking shit about me. Making me out to be a horrible person. Now, I have my problems, but I do try to be nice to everyone. It has just shattered my confidence. Like, maybe that’s why I am such a low maintenance friend, because I don’t expect any of them to actually like me. Not really. The curse of my life is that mantra that used to be thrown about of ‘you can’t expect anyone else to l like you, if you don’t like yourself’. I have never liked myself, so I don’t expect anyone else to either.

I am aware that it is just another thing I need to work on. Great.

Needs Work

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

I am aiming to buy a car before winter. Because public transport can be chaotic as the weather gets worse. So, in a normal situation, I would pick up an extra shift at my work. Unfortunately, everyone at work is in a similar boat and also needs extra money. So, when overtime becomes available it is gone before I can get a chance to claim it for myself. And it is so annoying. I understand that a person shouldn’t rely on overtime, but it has been a thing for years, that I could turn to should I need money for anything, holidays, birthdays, MOT… So, now it has been absent for most of the year so far, and is now impossible to get.

It is not only me who is affected, with everyone I know at work in same situation. People are picking up second jobs, even third jobs, just to get by. And that means that once work decides it does need everyone to grind away at overtime, people will be unable to because they will have other commitments. The problem, for me, is that `I struggle with doing my 40 hours at my job, mostly with my arthritis. So, the prospect of being on my feet doing another job is unnerving to say the least.

One of my friends suggested using the skills I have. Which would be writing or drawing or something like that. And, although that is actually the original reason for me starting this blog over a decade ago, I am struggling keeping up with my hobbies as it is. Like, everything is currently so sore with my arthritis, even reading is hard. And, that is what worries me, that I start something to make extra cash, and then it gets too hard to continue. And the anxiety doom spiral starts.

This blog, for example, has been going for over a decade and whilst posting does happen, it is rather sporadic. Which means, as WordPress likes to tell me, my lack of regularity is no good for getting consistent viewership. Habits are hard to form, so maybe that is something to work on.

I guess the first avenue is going to be learning how to budget. Never been very good at budgeting. Can’t help thinking it should be something that should have been taught about that at High School.

Arrrgghhh!!

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I really am not doing very well at the moment. Work is a pain, health is horrible, and every time I sit down to write or do anything creative, I just find myself staring at an empty page. I am so frustrated. Why?

Work? Work has been okay, and I seem to be preforming well in the tasks that I have to do, which is grand. The problem is, that the money I am getting doesn’t seem to be going further enough. I know people say ‘get another job’, but when I have been with the company for 10 years, it is harder to leave than one may think. I have job security, hours and shifts I can plan my life around, and the benefits (like online consultation with a GP) cannot be sniffed at. It’s the lack of overtime that I am frustrated with. You see, for the last several years, if I ever needed money for anything, I could work an extra shift or two, and that extra £100+ would be there. But there is currently no overtime, and that makes things a little strained, financial wise. And, there is no sign in sight, and I am not used to that. So yeah, I’m annoyed.

Health? I hurt. I have ran into a roadblock with my medication for my rheumatoid arthritis, and I have had to stop taking the tablets that have been working. This means that I am back to sore feet and hands, where I have the energy to do my job, and that’s about it. People often remark to me, that if I can work, it’s not that bad. But, when my hands have no grip, I can’t really cook without dropping stuff everywhere, so I rely on Shin ramen noodle bowls and microwave meals. Which then means my health is shit, because I can’t hold a knife to cut or prep any salad or anything healthier. I can get a small side salad, but they don’t seem to keep well, and the ones left when I finish work seem to be well past their best. Then I have the toothache that has been on and off since the end of January. I broke a tooth when I ate a piece of pizza. They do say, what you love hurts you the most. Anyway, I am not registered with a dentist and it is impossible to find one. I am currently waitlisted for 4 in my area. Some days it is searing pain, other days it’s more like minor sensitivity. It is so annoying. I am muddling through, but I can see why some people get to the point where they try to pull their own teeth out. And then, there is my mental health, which is utter rubbish right now. I feel like I am treading water, but it is really exhausting. It’s like I am throwing everything at just not drowning.

And creativity, I have honestly had problems with my creativity for the last few years. Some would say the start came when I made the decision to formally study art at college. It took it from being a fun hobby, to something that I had to take seriously enough to be my future job. Safe to say that didn’t happen. I struggled to make work for people who didn’t like the same artistic style as me. Like, everything I did was rather messy, I suppose that is because I am messy myself. But, the whole process felt awful, and I struggle to make any kind of art now. Writing, I just feel like I complain about the same things all the time. I guess that happens. But, again, there is that expectation that a blog is there to make money. Even WordPress expects it. Constantly promoting selling stuff, and how to make your blog a business. Like… I put enough pressure on myself to post, that I get so frustrated and post nothing. This blog is for me personally, to document stuff, it may develop into something else, but for the moment it is me and my pondering. I shouldn’t be made to feel I am doing ‘it’ wrong by the very platform that I have used for years.

But that is why I haven’t been around. I am struggling to cope, if I were to be honest. But, I am hanging in there.

End of Another Chapter

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Age never used to be a thing that bothered me. I have friends both younger and older than me, I try to treat people on how they are, rather than how old they are. I say this in a time where it feels like every other post on social media, or news media, is about pitting the different generations against one another. Like, people in the younger generation didn’t have it as hard as you, so what? Is that not the point, that we are supposed to be bettering society for those who come after us?

Birthdays seem to be a logical place to stop and re-assess where you are in life, and what you want to get out of it. I always feel disappointed about where I am, and what I have achieved. That I haven’t achieved what I had expected, by this point in life. I suppose it doesn’t really matter, but seeing as I am 40 tomorrow, I feel a lot more introspective than normal. Everything, down to the celebration. A night or event to remember. None of that is happening. It’ll be just me, being off work, and trying not to simply spend all my time in my bed. I am recovering from being ill and rundown, so this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

If I was to be honest, I have certainly had a better 30s than my 20s. I struggled a lot in my 20s, really suffered much of the period in a job I hated, and my mental health was at its lowest. I was also discovering who I was, and coming to terms with something like sexuality, can be a challenging time of a person’s life. My 30s, have had me dealing with physical ailments more, but feeling more settled. Yes, my mental health has been crap, but I have felt a bit more settled, in that I know who I am, and the kind of person I want to present to the world. I do find, that I sometimes don’t have the confidence to actually present my true self. Maybe that’s what my 40’s should be about? Giving less of a damn about what people think.

Out of breath

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

I have had a cold brewing for a few weeks. And, with being soaked by the rain when out for the rugby on Saturday, the cold well and truly landed on Sunday. I was so ill. My eyes were swollen, I was coughing, I was sneezing, I had a temperature, I felt terrible. I spent a whole 2 days in bed, and am only now starting to feel better. Still a little blocked up, but a lot better than what I was suffering from.

Today, I had a day off work, so I went to meet my friend. I felt, because I had done so little when I was sick, that i have a ‘in between day’, where I can go out and do stuff, rather than just go straight back to work.

I obviously didn’t realise how congested I still was. I have been struggling to catch my breath. It feels like something heavy is on my chest. I’ve never felt like that before, and I had a wee panic over it. It must be because of my chest still being a little blocked up. So I’ll just have to keep on taking my medication and hope that it gets better. I hope it does, cause I’m back at work tomorrow.

Plotting A Path

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

Further education has been a thing I have struggled with, over the years. I have always envisioned a life for myself higher up than the entry level where I find myself permanently situated. It is frustrating, but, I have to keep plodding on. It doesn’t feel like there is any other option, if I were to be completely honest with you.

When I was younger, I always wanted to be a Veterinary Surgeon. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to get grades that would allow that to happen, I leaned towards Veterinary Nursing instead. Fantastic. Except, when I was staying in Glasgow, to access the Vet School, I found myself really suffering under poor mental health. I didn’t fit in with anyone, and I felt pretty lonely. I remember being shouted at by one of the lecturers because I was helping look after a dog in the hospital, and I couldn’t remember something she asked me. It was in front of so many people, and I was degraded. I think I was 19 at this time, and it just made everything worse. With my mental health already being awful, I then felt I couldn’t do anything right. It became such a distraction, I failed the end of year exam. I went to work in a local vet practice, and the guys there helped me build a new portfolio to submit and helped me study to resit my exam. Unfortunately, my confidence was already rock bottom, so I failed again. At this point, I couldn’t afford the money to re-register as a student vet nurse, to re-submit another portfolio, and sit another test. I was so stressed, I got a job at Greggs and let it all go.

Greggs was not an enjoyable experience, the manager was awful. She was a bit of a bully, and she had a tendancy of firing people who didn’t agree with her. You cleaned a counter wrong, you were written up. It was horrible, so I decided to find a way out of there. I applied to Lauder College (now Fife College), to do art and design. I loved art, and creating things, so maybe I could do this. So I left Greggs, got a part time job in a call centre whilst I was in college. I made so many friends at college, and it was an enjoyable experience. The only problem was I was at college for 8.30am, and would go straight to work after, by the time I was home it was often past midnight. I’d sit up to the early hours doing coursework, going to bed at 3 am, just to do it all again the next day. No surprise, my mental health took a major dip again, and I failed to keep up with the workload from the college. So I ended up dropping out and working at the call centre full-time. It was a horrible job.

I eventually ended up in the warehouse job, where I am currently working. I have been trying to get an IT degree through the Open University. My mental and physical health problems have made any progress slow, but I am still slowly making progress. I think. The problem is, that I have been in my current job for 10 years, and whilst, once upon a time, working hard would see natural progression up the corporate ladder, that is not the case anymore. There are so many people who have degrees these days, they come in at management level, even without experience. So, the only way I thought that I could fix that, was to get a degree myself. As said before, my health problems don’t make it particularly easy, nor does the fact that my doctor suspects I have ADHD, which would explain so much. I have had to pause my studies for a year, to try and help myself, and am trying to get back into things after the summer.

I have come to the conclusion, that as easy as it seems to be for some people, to pick a degree and simply do it. Things aren’t that easy for everyone. It might take multiple attempts to get to where we need to be, and it might never happen. I do like learning, I just need to find away that it works. There is a special type of uselessness that comes with feeling stuck in the same role for multiple years, especially when it seems like everyone around you are progressing. And, I need to find a way to get rid of that feeling. As well as the possibility that I worry that my work may no longer be around in the next 5 years, so I have to work hard and focus on next steps.

Going Down

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

One day last week, for a few hours, Meta went down. Meta is the collective name for the services under the Facebook umbrella. So, Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads. All down. Considering I message most people on Messenger, and chat all things F1 on Threads, I felt like I had lost an arm.

It’s not unusual, to be honest. Not these days. We have become so attached to our phones, that social media has become a major part of our social lives. And during the pandemic it became many people’s only way to socialise with people outwith their household. Something that has stuck, apart from the Zoom quizzes, thankfully they are mostly gone. I like a quiz, but when people are picking questions, it is a reminder that what is well known trivia for one person, isn’t always that for all people.

I have always had a connection online, I remember going on band forums to chat to people about music. Even when you had arguments with people, you closed your computer, and that was that till the following day. So, you had a natural break before you would go back, and usually by then, things had de-escalated. Everyone was friends again. But now, you are never really off-line, or I certainly am not. There is no escape for things when they do escalate.

Which made me think. Maybe the social networks need to crash more often.

A Change Is Needed

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

I have been using this blog for almost 14 years. And, although I do sometimes update rather sporadicly, it has documented a huge section of my life. Something that is tangible, that I, or anyone, can browse through at their leisure. For a person who is as indecisive as I am, it is a pretty big thing to have kept up. It’s become a snapshot of what has been on my mind at a particular time.

I have tried a lot of things over the years. Most of them writing challenges that I have done for 2-3 days, and then proceeded to ignore. I have tried other blogs, ones with a ‘niche’, so that I could turn a blog into something that is more than a blog. But, they didn’t even last the length of time it took for me to register an official domain name. There are other sites, like my Livejournal, which is much older than this site, but… that has fallen into defunct mode, given that any community that was once on there, has now fizzled away to nothing. WordPress, still seems to be going okay. I think.

The problem, right now, is that I don’t know how to personalise this blog more, make it more fitting on where I personally am. The layout, in itself, works, but is that maybe because it has worked before. Maybe, I am comfortable in it. I think this may be a ‘do some research’ on what I like kind of thing. But then, it may just need me being creative and making a new header, maybe creating a new biography. Make sure that any links work (note: they do not work). Maybe I will feel a bit better if I freshen things up a little.

I always have this hesitancy to change things, though. Because, I am a creature of habit, and I don’t really do well if things change too much. But then, all the tools I use to post will be the same, so I suppose not much will change. Maybe. It feels a little bit like redecorating my bedroom, if I make things too different it might start making me uncomfortable, rather than be a relaxing space of safety. I understand that it makes me sound like a 3 year old who doesn’t want to try anything apart from their Turkey Dinosaurs. It wouldn’t be me, if I wasn’t overthinking something so silly.

Let’s see what happens.

Busy Busy

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

It is the busy period at my work. as it always is after Christmas. I am working long weeks, and am rushed off my feet. Though, I say that, it is normally a good kind of busy. The kind where you are constantly working away, so that the time flies by, which is good. I don’t have the time for my brain to wonder onto something else, and get unfocused. And yet, it is not so busy that I am swamped and stressed. It’s a good kind of busy.

I have been trying to make time for reading, which is entirely dependant on how sore I am on any particular day. I currently have a physical book, an ebook, and an audiobook, all in progress at the same time. It is normally my hands that get sore. so I find it hard to hold a book. or even my phone or kindle. Especially as I am travelling to work. I have been listening to audiobooks a lot more than I used to. It’s nice to hear a story on the way to and from work. This year I want to read more, and having a variety of ways to do that, even when life tries to get in the way, is helpful.

As the world seems to be getting more busy, and more intense, it is important to make time for hobbies, things that you enjoy. Over the years I have had lots of hobbies, by the joy has fallen away from them when I found myself stressing over whether or not I can do it. I have always loved drawing, writing, and reading. I am trying to take the pressure out of it, so don’t be worried if my posts on here, as an example is a bit sporadic. Trying to make my hobbies fun again.

Rambling Away

~ Sue ~ 1 Comment

It’s Blue Monday. Supposedly the most depressing day of the year. I am okay though, just feel like I’m treading water, as usual.

Yesterday I went to Dundee, and visited Groucho’s Music Bar in Dundee. It used to be a good music shop, that I had bought CDs from, years ago. It’s nice that they were mindful of the history before opening it. And it looked so cool.

Today, I went to visit my friend for a coffee, and hobbled about being really sore. My foot and my hands have been super sore all day. I think I’ll have an early night, as I have 50 hours of work this week. Not great when I am sore already.