Getting Started

I’m going to start with writing something like a ‘mission statement’. Perhaps ‘mission’ sounds a bit grand, and I intend this to be anything but, but it’s my personal mission, so mission it is.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is no stranger to starting a blog. From the days of livejournal where I poured my troubles onto a page and posted them for all to see, to starting a travel blog only to realise it’s an incredible amount of work when really I wanted to be enjoying my experiences not tapping away in front of a screen. Not to mention the realisation that in order to make money from your writing you need to understand algorithms and… lots of other things I have absolutely zero interest in as well as taking quite a stubborn refusal to engage in out of principle.

I don’t want this blog to be like that. All these incredibly polished things you see all over the place just fill my inner perfectionist with fear, horror and a spectacular feeling of inadequacy. I don’t want that. I don’t want to spend hours agonising over the perfect layout, which picture to use and how I write a particular sentence. All things that have paralysed me and hampered my progress and eventually led me to give up in the past. All I want from this is to attain some sense of ‘flow’. Something I often experienced as a younger person whilst writing, but as life has bruised and battered me over time, something that once brought me joy and a sense of peace became something I must do ‘right’, something I couldn’t bare to get wrong.

I want this blog to be full of imperfections. I don’t want to employ a thesaurus, I don’t know if this thing will correct my spelling mistakes, but if I make them, I warn you now, I will not be meticulously editing things before posting. Someone once said to me “embrace the imperfect mess that you are” – it probably comes from somewhere, who knows, I suppose I could google it. Anyway, I love it, and I want to try to do so.

What to write about? I just want to write about things I’m passionate about, and to use what I write to make some sense of all the ramblings that tumble around in my brain.

Over the last few years I’ve struggled to come to terms with the fact that my brain doesn’t work like the majority of other peoples. I don’t think. Who really knows, we are all individual creatures with our own subjective experience, but I will likely waffle a bit about that.

I also want to write about my work. I work in the NHS and I’m sure anybody who either uses the service or works within it knows that it just aint working how it should. It’s hard, I often want to leave, I often want to stay. I love what I do, or at least I love what I would love to be able to do, but it’s so hard at the moment. I need to be a bit careful about anonymity but I’m sure that can be overcome without too much editing. I suppose I hope exploring different areas of my work through writing will help me build some better understanding of the challenges I come up against, perhaps generate some ideas around how I could approach some of these challenges, reignite the passion I once had for working in the NHS and improving the quality of the service we provide, and perhaps even convince myself that there’s a really good reason I’ve not just up and left already.

I’ve been trying to cultivate a collection of hobbies over recent years having finished university with the realisation that without studying, part time work and partying every chance I got, I didn’t really have much of a life. We all know how important it is to recharge outside work, and for that reason, I don’t want to write solely about work, so I also intend to document some of my adventures in trying to build a life life.

I did it! I wrote my first post, I only edited a couple of phrases (progress not perfection!) and I didn’t agonise about whether anyone would want to read it. Result 🙂