Back to blog?

It’s been a REALLY long time since I last blogged.

Why?

There are several reasons, really. For a good 12 months or so, I was writing on mental health for Metro, which satisfied the writing bug. It was a nice combination of productive and cathartic, despite being appallingly paid, and led to other media work: BBC News, BBC Breakfast and various radio programmes.

Bizarrely, despite being naturally introverted, and the intensely personal nature of what I was talking about (self-harm and suicide), I discovered I loved doing TV. It gave me a confidence I didn’t know I had, and a real buzz. I was damn proud of myself, to be honest.

Over the past year, however, the Metro work has dried up, with no explanation, no answer to emails. Perhaps mental health isn’t getting them an audience any more, but I’ve been ghosted, to use a very millennial term. And with it, my mental health advocacy has withered and died. I miss it.

My blog inactivity is also partly explained by the fact that I’ve spent much of the past two years very, very unwell. More of that to come over the following days, if the blog bug bites again, but I’ve had long periods of being too poorly to even think of writing.

And then there have been periods where things have been, well, normal. And in these times I don’t feel the same urge to write as I do when things are somewhere between low and crisis point.

So, all in all, my poor blog has been neglected.

Now, though, I find I want to write, and with no paid journalistic outlet for my (literally) mad ramblings, I think it’s time to breathe new life into this blog.

In the past two years, I’ve been through so much under mental health services, and there’s stuff I need to say. There are experiences that I need to document, to share, maybe even to bring to a wider audience. I’m still shell-shocked by some of the things that have happened, and I want to get it out there.

When I was last blogging, I was doing so privately. This followed some pretty awful experiences where my suicidal behaviour was reported to both my husband and services; the fallout was spectacular and after that, I locked down my privacy settings.

But now I’ve decided to press the ‘public’ button again. Now I’m not in a crisis situation, I don’t need to worry about what’ll happen if I blog about my experiences in the pit. I’m not ashamed of what I’ve been through, and if people want to trawl back through my old posts, that’s fine with me – maybe it’ll give them a clearer insight into the hell that is severe recurrent depression.

Maybe I’ll find my writing mojo and start to unpick some of the crap that I’ve been through since I last blogged. Maybe I’ll find that actually, I don’t want or need to write about it after all.

But this post is a start. Let’s see where it goes.