Back to WordPress, after a long twitter related absence

So I have been absent from WordPress for quite some time now. I started a new job, and seeing as it is the first time I’ve been actively employed for the most part of the day, Monday to Friday, for just over thirteen years, it has taken some getting used to.

I’m working as a support worker for a homelessness charity, and whilst I’m really enjoying it, it is a demanding role. The stakes are high, when working with vulnerable, chaotic people; and it has taken me quite a while to get used to the feeling of having such a sense of responsibility in another persons life. I am learning to handle that sense of stress, and the high intensity of the job as well. Luckily I’m working with a great team, and my manager has been really supportive and understanding of my situation, which has been crucial in allowing me time to find my feet.

Coming back to employment has been strange, and challenging on a lot of different levels. I get up in the morning at 6.30am, and am usually back home by about 6.30pm. This isn’t too unusual, and my commute isn’t too bad- but it’s forced me to up my game, so to speak, and summon new tracts of energy, both mental and physical, to carry me through the days and the weeks without becoming burnt out. I decided, before I started work, back in July, that I would just throw myself in, and not spend too much time contemplating my new schedule and relative loss of time and freedom.

There have definitely been days when I haven’t wanted to get out of bed, and the whole notion of full-time employment seemed only excessive and unhealthy. But I didn’t wait around to follow those thought-processes through to their logical conclusion, and instead forced myself to get up and get in the shower and then out of the door. This was sensible, as I knew that eventually my desire to get better at the job, and my enjoyment of the role would take over and mean that I actually looked forward to getting into work in the morning. This has all happened, and I haven’t looked back.

The second reason I’ve been absent has been because I’ve developed a slightly worrying addiction to Twitter. I started tweeting about a month ago, and in that time my follower number has jumped from about 35 to just over 300. Needless to say this fast increase has kept my glued to the site, the app on my phone and on my laptop; and has turned me into one of those terrible people who tweets about the food their eating, the horrendously busy day they’ve had at work and the fact that they could only find one clean sock in their draw when getting dressed in the morning. #NightMare #Catastrophe

Oh dear god.

I’m getting to the point that when something, anything, mildly noteworthy happens in my day I’m instantly wondering whether or not I can capture it in 280 characters. It’s become slightly ridiculous. However, the jump in followers has been kinda great in the sense that I’m using Twitter, like WordPress to an extent, to plug and promote the book which I am still working on. So I have a dream, lol, that once I start going to agents, having a small online presence will help to sell my work.

The book is also going well. I’ve come to the end of my fourth edit; and the whole thing is in a much better state than it was at the end of the third edit. It is now less like a series of year 11 level essays, and more like an actual book where each chapter holds significant anecdotes and descriptions of relevant personal experience. It’s a very different book, at the end of this stage, than it was before, and I’m excited about that. This next edit, the fifth one(!), is going to be a polishing stage- tweaking everything so that the right words are in the right order. I am actually at the editing stage now, after two years of planning, and writing, and re-writing and re-writing.

Lastly, and perhaps most exciting, is the news that Mental Health Charity MQ have published one of my article’s on their site. It’s an account of my first couple of months, after I first started showing symptoms of mental illness, and you can check it out here:

https://www.mqmentalhealth.org/news-blog

I’m also hoping to take up an ambassadorial role for the organisation, which could be great as I have a lot to say on the subject on mental illness, and loads of ideas relating to how best move forward with Mental Illness research and illness prevention in the future. When I say a lot of ideas, I’m not exaggerating and so will leave that for an entirely different day and blog post; but I hope that this ambassadorial role will allow me to get out there and start doing some work to raise awareness and raise understanding surrounding mental health issues and the reality behind mental illness.

So my life could, potentially, start to become even more busy over the next little while. I can only hope that my time management skills will improve as well, and I’ll have more time to devote to WordPress again 🙂

 

 

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