Tag: life

Hello

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

Bad Sue hasn’t been updating again. Sorry about that. I just haven’t had the motivation. The day job has left me so jiggered, that bar live tweeting the World Cup, I haven’t really been online. Sometimes a break is good for people. Particularly with the internet, as it is very easy to become too wrapped up in the bullshit that is on it.

So I think a break was good. To gather my thoughts, and focus on other things for a change. It’s been a very social few weeks, which has been nice. I am the type of girl who loves to sit and relax on my own. I can sometimes get worked up if things become a bit stressful, and I panic over nothing. It’s how I am, and in learning how to deal with it I am learning not to feel ashamed if I can’t write a blog. Because I do feel ashamed, like I am a failure. Trying to change that, by taking it one day at a time.

I am enjoying the nice weather, summer has landed. Going to start taking sun lotion to work with me, because it is boiling when I finish. It feels strange, but a good strange. Waiting for a bus is so much more bearable when you are sitting on the grass with an ice lolly. The best way to wind down after a tough day at work. 🙂

Documenting Life?

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I love capturing what is happening around me. Whether it is drawing a picture, writing things down or taking a photo, it is important for me to document it. Always has been.

Some people seem to think that by documenting every little detail, you can miss out on the simple things in life. Which I guess can be true, in some ways. But I feel like it is more me appreciating the different ways of looking at every day. Even the boring days have their moments where I might think about something, or see something that interests me. I find it really releasing to write down or draw when I feel bad.

I think it is very important that if you decide to document your life using avenues, such as blogging, that you don’t share every little thing. It is important to share my thoughts and experiences rather than the details. Like, a lot of people I know, will gladly spend time with me, but don’t want their life shared with people they don’t know. And as well as that, a lot of people don’t feel comfortable seeing or reading things that are super personal. I don’t think that you need to share EVERYTHING to document things.

I guess I find it hard to explain how I can spend so much time sharing online, without telling absolutely everything to people. But it comes natural to me, I have so many ways to document how I feel and what I experience, I am in the habit of focusing on different things. Like this blog is general pondering, Livejournal is more of what I have been up to and Tumblr is just things I find funny or enjoy. And I like having that separation. I find that it helps me organise my mind better.

Dear Younger Self

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

It doesn’t matter whether some person you don’t know doesn’t like you. It doesn’t matter what they think of you, or call you when they think your back is turned. You don’t need to waste sleepless nights on people that won’t give you a second thought. Try and associate with people who like you for you, and won’t berate you to others.

Life is a bit bumpy. It is for everyone, it’s just that the bumps can be different dependent on the person. It is okay to realise that these ‘bumps’ are too big for you to deal with and you need a little help. And when you ask, you’ll find out that those around you are struggling too. By reaching out, you will make friendships stronger, rather than pushing folk away, like I know you want to. Hiding might seem easier, but it always makes problems so much worse. Asking for help is nothing to be afraid of, and there are so many things in place to help make things better to cope. You are not weak for needing assistance because you can’t deal, so go and get some.

The careers in animal care and graphic design, don’t really go to plan. Which is sad, but you kept your head up, and that is great. Not everyone gets an attempt at trying what they want to do from childhood, and you did. Okay, it didn’t go your way, but you learned from it and moved on. That takes guts and determination. Never ever lose that. It is something that most people lose as they get older. Everyone has to try new things, no matter their age, and try to follow it through as far as you can. The end result is not what matters when you remember the journey so fondly. Go you!

Just remember to always have faith in yourself, fight for what you believe in and never change for someone else. You have a lot more than you’d think.

Love Sue

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This was an extract written in one of my old journals. I thought it was a nice idea, particularly that it is a rare thing I write about myself focusing on postive things. It was a challenge I saw on some program, where if you cheer for yourself, you can feel better. And it helped me feel awesome when I wrote it, and typing it into this blog post also made me feel better. It is a tricky thing to d0, but it does help when you feel a bit low. Give it a try.

The Loner Life

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I feel like I have always been a bit of a loner. I like my own company a
lot, rather than having to deal with people. That sounds really selfish, but it isn’t because I don’t like people. It’s because I feel like I ruin people’s free time and things. It’s part of my anxiety disorder, behaviours I had as a child, which have became worse as I’ve got older. I feel like I am a bore, so I don’t bother meeting with them, so that they can continue with their lives rather than being dragged down by me. And it totally stresses me out.

So as a result, I spend a lot of time on my own. Reading, listening to music, watching movies, browsing the internet. I do things, but things that don’t involve actual contact with other people. That way I don’t feel guilty. Because that happens way too often. I feel like I am a bit of a shit person, and that people will get angry when they find that out. So sometimes I panic, as my brain anticipates that I am going to make someone angry. I can have sleepless nights over whether I’ve said something that could have offended someone. I can panic over not having the right change when getting on the bus.

Sometimes it is best just to be alone and not having to panic. It’s actually pretty good to not having my brain run 100% miles an hour.

Quickly! Quickly!

~ Sue ~ 2 Comments

I am a person who always seems to be running late, or struggling to get things done. This means that things can end up not as well done as I would like. It is super stressful.

The silly thing is that other than my job, I don’t fill my time with anything notable. I tend to have small brainwaves of projects that I could do at work, or in bed, when I can’t really do anything about it. So, when it comes to actually doing something I either squeeze it in to whatever time I have left when I remember it, or I just completely forget. It is very annoying, because I suffer from creative blocks, and so when I get inspired you’d think I’d do my best to grasp it with both hands.

What I need to do is to create a plan. If I think of an idea, write it on my phone or whatever. And when I get home, I can look at the ideas and hopefully create something new. Because one of the things that has stopped me blogging is that I feel I am constant repeating myself, caused by me not being so forward thinking.

That’s sometimes all that someone can do, look to make changes to be better.

Unsocial Media

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I am going through a strange time with my relationship with the internet. For years, since I started blogging, I have found myself thinking more about what goes on when one posts things online. It has always been something, that has felt like a huge sense of relief for me, but recently, that hasn’t been the case.

When I post something, it has been done because it is personal to me. There has been some thought in my head, which has made me want to communicate how I feel about a certain something. It has always proved as being a very therapeutic way of organising my thoughts, and has previously helped relieve a lot of stress, so I can focus on other things. But, recently, I have found that what I post has been getting negative comments. As if I post personal things because I want attention. As silly as it sounds, attention is the last thing that I have on my mind. I have found before, that by sharing my own experiences, other people can sometimes feel not quite so alone. Because when you are experiencing difficulties in your life, it is easy to feel completely alienated from those around you. So, when you read about someone feeling as bad as you are, it can be quite comforting. In fact, when I was struggling with depression, it was reading blogs and online forums that helped encourage me to get help. So to me, social media is fantastic, because it can help people get the support that they may not have the courage to get from those around us.

Recently, I decided to do a major life change, and try to change my eating habits, I joined weight watchers. Something I have never done before, but felt encouraged to do so, by checking out fitness forums and things. On these sites, there are a lot of help points, to try and help you get motivated.  One of the points was keeping a foodlog. By posting photos of food on instagram and Tumblr, it reaches the online community, which can support you in your efforts. Seeing how sharing online has helped me before, I thought that this would be an excellent way to keep note on what I am eating. As if I feel too embarrassed to post about something I want to eat, then it is a sign that I shouldn’t be eating it. To me, this makes sense. I have a habit of eating without thinking about it very much, most of the time, I am not even hungry.

This sounds a very postive change, right?

The biggest social network is Facebook. Where people seem to take offence if you post something personal to you. Particularly, as with depression, it can come in cycles, people start complaining that it is done for attention. So when it is something personal, these off-hand remarks from supposed friends, hurt. The same thing happens when I started posting about photographing food. I am called names because to these people, food isn’t something that is deserving of their Facebook feed. Because, if you didn’t know, Facebook is exclusively for stolen memes, game requests, pictures of children and drunken nights out. People are very intolerant of Facebook. I believe this may be because some of the people ‘friends’ with you on there, aren’t really your friends, they just want to spy on those that they shared a college class with once. On every other website, if someone doesn’t like what you post, they unfollow. For some reason, that doesn’t happen on Facebook, people just post vague complaints about the content posted by folk they follow. It’s laughable, really.

With the bad experience with Facebook, I stepped back. Because speaking about any of my feelings is still so hard, to have it treated so harshly is horrible. So, I took it time to think about it. These comments that people post, are about that person’s hang-ups, and they reflect more on that person than they do me. I also have to try and toughen up, and that I have conviction to write something, then I should stand by it 100%.

Panic Stations

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I am a stress head.

When something happens, good or bad, I stress over it. When things get quiet, my brain goes into overload, and it panics over what has been done during the day. I pick over every detail, and worry about what I could have done differently.

When I was at school, I would fall out with friends sometimes. Have petty arguments that lasted one day, like most kids do. I would stay up all night, worrying that I had upset someone by doing something stupid. I was forever apologising for things that didn’t seem to bother the person I was actually apologising to.

My previous job was in a call center, for a customer services department. I took it because I love speaking to people, and wanted to help folk out. But telling loyal customers that there was nothing I could do when they were experiencing times with financial hardship. No discounts, no reconnections, no nothing. And me, being in a bad financial state myself, I sympathised with them. And because I know that I couldn’t help, I lost my confidence. I would go home at night, worrying about these customers that I wasn’t able to help. I would cry in bed, cry on my way to work. I became so stressed that I was of no use to anyone, because I couldn’t even help them when I needed it.  It wore me down, and I fell into self-harming. Something that I hadn’t done in years. It was hard.

I am trying to stop over-analysing everything going on, and that not everything that happens is a direct result of my actions. It is difficult, I still panic if I think I say something wrong to someone. It is hard to change a habit of a lifetime, but it is something that is long over due.

 

Snatched Away

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

In an idea world, every person that we meet, every relationship we have, ends as clean as the conclusion of a well written novel. There are no broken hearts, maybe a few nursed tears, but nothing serious. When everything ends, everyone involved feels validated and secure in themselves.

But, that’s not how things work, do they?

Bruised egos and broken hearts. They are what’s left behind when something ends unexpectedly. The feelings of self-doubt, where a person’s thoughts re-tread, in a bid to see if anything could have been done differently. The depression that follows, once we are sure that things changed because of your failures. This is a horrible part of our nature. We, as people, seem to want to take full responsibility for everything, even when things aren’t a reaction to what we have done. At all. We feel like we must have done something wrong.

I guess, the world that we interpret, is one that surrounds us. As if you are the main character in some made for TV movie, where characters just seem to disappear. Soap opera characters may be able to move on after losing something, but most people struggle. TV. The very thing that we use to relax, actually has the ability to stress a person out. People do take time to get over things when they suffer a loss, and ‘time’ is longer than a 30 minute episode.

Sorry, rambled a bit. Back to my point.

Because our view of the world is from our point of view, everything happens around us. As egotistical as it sounds, we really are the centre of our own world. And I think that this is where we get our need to control everything.

The hardest thing for a person to accept is that we will never have a definite answer for everything. And sometimes we have to leave a situation with no completion, no end and no reason for the end. Part of maturing as a person, is learning to accept that ‘perfect endings’ don’t happen. There is always something that you could do differently, always, but it doesn’t mean that the ending would be anything different.

Headstrong!

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

One of the hardest things in life is to keep motivated when things don’t go your way. It is not how a person acts with their successes that defines them as a person, but how they deal with their failures. Because as much as we pretend otherwise, everyone experiences failure at some point in their lives.

Honestly, I never used to be good at dealing with failing at things. In fact, when it did happen, I ‘dealt’ with it by cutting myself off, and giving up on whatever had bettered me. Which, although it was intended as a bid to protect myself from any further disappointment, all it did was waste the time that I had put into it. Which, when every moment we have is a gift, is not a good thing. If there is something that we really want, we owe it to ourselves to keep trying to reach our goal. Any failures are minor setbacks on a path to success.

Or that’s what I keep telling myself. Try to keep my head up, as things seem to keep setting me back. I have started to tell myself repeatedly that life isn’t a flat journey, it needs the bumps to make it exciting. Kids think that life is an adventure, every day is exciting. To live life successfully, we need to get that childish wonder back, need to have a sense of fun about life. Sometimes when life is taken to seriously, it is when we start to struggle with it, and everything becomes a stressful mess. All that is needed is a step back and a deep breath to make the world that little bit easier to deal with.

Never Enough

~ Sue ~ Leave a comment

I work best when working through a list. Doesn’t matter what the activity is, I have to structure it out, so that I can get everything done. I panic when I get overwhelmed, so placing things in some sort of methodical order seems to help me not panic.

But, it isn’t just panicking that I do. If I don’t have a list and order to focus on things, I don’t focus very hard at all. I will maybe start something, but my mind will wander, and I will end up doing something else, without finishing my initial task. Which would be okay, if there was only two or three tasks to do, but give me a day of non-focus and I could ‘half do’ around 10-15 different things. And, then I get frustrated. With myself. With the work. With everything. And then nothing further happens.

Sometimes, despite writing lists, I get bored and do something else. If it is something which uses active thought, like blogging, I’m fine. When it is something like doing housework, I just mentally clock out and end up doing something else. I guess I have to just find a way to become more involved in every task that I set out to do. Try not to become distracted.  I feel, that sometimes it is like I need to have someone watching over me, to push me seeing things through to completion.

I guess I sound like a teenager, who thinks that they have better things to do. But it can honestly be very hard to get things done properly. But, one thing has changed from school-age me. I no longer give up on things, if I have had a bad and unproductive day. I just take a deep breath and carry on at the next opportunity, be it the next hour, day or whatever. I take a moment to take in what I haven’t done, but no longer berate myself on my failures. I might have a whine, but I will put my head down and try to work hard round everything.

I guess the important part is never giving up on anything. You only truly fail when you give up.