Miss Me?
You could easily be forgiven for not having noticed my absence from social media over the last few days (part of a social media blackout across sport to protest against online abuse), given how inactive I’ve been of late. Aside from a somewhat rambling Twitter thread and an Instagram selfie or two, I’ve been pretty much ghosting the social channels for weeks now, and I haven’t managed a new blog post since mid-March… which is pretty frustrating, to be quite honest. It’s not so much that I’m disappointed in myself or feel like I’ve let anyone down, more that I’m just annoyed because I never seem to learn from my mistakes and continue to bite off more than I can chew.
Starting a blog while doing all the final work for this book was always going to be difficult, and I knew that. But I figured I could manage it by careful planning and building up a stack of content that I could have in reserve, so I wasn’t under pressure to churn out a new post every week. It started out okay, but invariably the increasing workload caught up with me and I started to run out of content - and I didn’t have the time, or frankly the energy, to generate any more.
I was burnt out.
And it’s taken until now to get back on top of things. I completed all the file formats for the print copies of Blood of Ravens about two weeks ago now. The paperback was finalised about a month ago, but the formatting for the map in the hardback took forever. I am not tech savvy in the slightest and navigating the various programmes and platforms involved in self-publishing this book has been the single hardest part of this process. Write a 230k word novel? No sweat. Design, paint and produce cover art? Easy. Change the colour profile of a PDF for printing? Total meltdown. And don’t even get me started on bleed and trim sizes…
The other problem I have is that, once I’m behind on a task, I find the very thought of trying to catch up overwhelming. It’s taken two weeks away from all book and blog work for me to work up the emotional and mental strength to face this again. I’ve been pretty open about my struggles with pressure and stress over the years, and I’ve never shied away from the topic of mental health, but I’m also acutely aware that I’ve always avoided calling it what it is. The fact is that I suffer from periods of anxiety and depression. And not depression in the sad, weepy sense - I mean depression in the empty, numb, low-energy sense.
Now, part of me just doesn’t like the labels - or, more specifically, the way many people react to the labels - but there’s also a part of me that fears the possible consequences and repercussions of a rifle shooter, even a retired one, publicly admitting to mental health issues. Equally well, stigmas like that don’t just disappear on their own. The only way to resolve that is to normalise talking openly about mental health problems, and I guess part of that is calling it what it is.
Fortunately, neither my anxiety nor my depression are particularly severe. These days they impact more on the quality and ease of life rather than whether I can actually function day to day. They definitely impact on how I do things, but generally less whether I do things. The latter only really rears its head when I overload myself.
Hence the frustration.
Because I know myself, I know my anxiety and depression, and I know how to live with them - and, funnily enough, it never includes piling unnecessary stress and pressure on myself. My biggest fear in starting this blog was that I was going to become overwhelmed with generating new content every week and rather than accepting that wasn’t always going to be possible, I put myself under a huge amount of pressure to avoid that eventuality - which, of course, only hastened its arrival.
Some people may look at this and think it easy, but for me writing weekly blogs while finalising Blood of Ravens for publishing (on top of my actual job and being in a new home) was never viable and what really irritates me is that I ever convinced myself otherwise. To be clear, I’m all for big dreams and don’t believe for a second that mental illness should ever stop anyone achieving their goals - but I also understand the importance of realistic goal setting and, for some reason I still don’t quite understand, I completely disregarded that knowledge when setting out on this venture.
So I’m back to the drawing board, pulling my athlete brain out of retirement and dusting it off to try to analyse what went wrong and how to do it better next time. At the heart of it, I think the problem is that I lost sight of the goal. I didn’t start this blog to make money or grow a huge following, though there was obviously a potential business element to it. I didn’t even start it to promote my book, though again I always intended to utilise it for that.
Ultimately, this started as a platform to share my story. To pass on what I’d learned during my time in sport. To contribute to the discussions of the moment. To try, in my own small way, to make a difference. I don’t have a huge platform - I’m a middlingly successful athlete from an obscure sport - so I know I’m not going to change the world with my words. But as I’ve said before, if my story can have a positive impact on even one person, then it was all worth it.
The truth is, my blog posts are generally better when I’ve got something to say and writing posts just to fill content doesn’t really work. It’s tedious, it’s stressful, and - according to the analytics - nobody really wants to read it. The most successful posts have been those written from the heart, usually prompted by what is going on around me. They’re more authentic and meaningful, and honestly, that’s what I want to write.
So, even though it goes against all blogging best-practice advice, I’m chucking any regular posting schedule in the bin. I’ll write what I want, when I feel like it and see how it goes. Wish me luck!
