Solitude – What’s the Big Deal?

To be alone, or to be lonely. There’s power in it… somewhere.


Happy Monday.

The phenomenon of the long weekend gives me a feeling of pure bliss… but once those few days are over, I realise it shouldn’t be normal to feel this much excitement at the thought of having a couple of days off work. So I end the weekend angry as hell. Slaving away shouldn’t be the norm –  I don’t want this to be my life, because living for the weekend is one of the things that reels my depression back in every time it feels like running away from me. Not so fast, we have work tomorrow! But, alas. I spent the Bank Holiday weekend on such a high, that being alone and back in reality right now just consists of me trying to pick up the pieces of myself after going splat on the floor. To be dropped from such a height is soul-shattering, and resuming normality is a long, painful process.

I’m one of the many people who has always loved my own company. The libraries, the lone cinema trips, the late nights with movies and a blank word document, the early morning sunrises with coffee shops and books. I’m always ecstatic at the prospect of having a few days to collect myself and bring myself back up to date with my life; maybe it’s the anxiety, but I need time to reconvene with my thoughts. I need to nurse my mind and cleanse my energy, to pluck off the remnants of the work-week and start brand new. ‘I’d get bored if I didn’t have work’ doesn’t apply to me, and I think you’re either attention-seeking, boring, or lacking in substance if you say such things. Probably all three. I have things to do, hobbies to engage in, plans to kickstart; so if you were to offer me three weeks off work, fully paid, I’m snapping it up without complaint because there is so much to be done. Everybody who complained about being bored on furlough deserves a kick in the face, I hate you all. I could check myself into a hotel for weeks on end and come out a much better person than I was before I went in. Either that or dead. Tomayto, tomahto.

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Clocks Go Forward


We all felt how violently that hour lurched forward, right? We all heard the big ‘fuck you and fuck your sleep’ in the sixty seconds between 00:59 and 02:00, right?

Daylight Savings, the horrible spoon of thick medicine we all needed, the forceful push into British Summertime as we had an hour thieved from us. The quintessential sign that summer is just around the corner, regardless of the fact that it’s horrible and grey outside, that we were plagued with torrential rain just the other day.

Today I woke up to the sun shining through my window, ate way too much brunch way too late, and sank into the sofa for an incredibly tense, nail-biting race. The first race of the 2021 Formula 1 season: the Bahrain GP. I saw Nikita Mazepin spin out on his first ever F1 lap, I watched Verstappen relentlessly fight like the charging bull he is, failing to snap first place back from the king himself, all whilst being gifted with little fiery battles between some of my favourite drivers. It was a great end to a horrible week, taking it from an almost-2 to a strong 9. There is a special place in my heart for Formula 1; I’ve always known I love the sport in the decade-plus that I’ve followed it, but I really sat there, after the first race of the season, and thought about how it feels like a void has been filled. Is that sad? It’s quite sad, isn’t it?

Credit: @MercedesAMGF1 on Twitter

No, it isn’t.

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Four things I’ve learnt this decade

Processed with VSCO with p5 preset

Every time you try to forget who I am, I’ll be right there to remind you again

 

I know. And yes I did mean this decade. And yes I am here again, a mere week after my last post. It’s pissing down outside, which makes it a fine day to rant.

We’re only halfway through February, we’ve barely grazed the new decade, and I feel like I’ve been hit in the face with a million lessons and gained another five years of life experience. I’m just hoping it doesn’t show on my face, so I’m frantically blurting it out onto a new post in the hope that it doesn’t settle into my fine lines.

Lesson number one, typing on a MacBook with long ass nails does not a good idea make.

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My intuition is telling me there'll be better days [Things we're leaving in 2018]

Number one: calling yourself a blogger when you only write blog posts once every few months haha fuck those guys haha.
Anyway, I feel like I have to end 2018 with a post in my true fashion. By telling you about things that get on my tits and asking you to stop doing them. And nobody is going to listen anyway, so watch this space for the exact same post, word for word, in 12 months. There’s a lot of swearing in this one, hold tight.
Disclaimer: when I say ‘we’ or ‘us’ or ‘our’ throughout this post,  I don’t mean myself because, of course, I’m not a fucking idiot. I mean u man.
1] Filming our generosity Read more

It's all gonna be so much better

I just wanna let you guys know that I fulfilled a big fat dream I’ve had since I was about 14. That’s an almost 10 year old dream that I’ve FINALLY fulfilled.
I saw Poets of the Fall.
Yeah. Anyway, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, did I tell you I finally saw Poets of the Fall?
Let’s begin. P.S I’m like a giddy little girl who finally saw her favourite band ever. (Yeah, don’t talk about HIM unless you want me to cry).
So world mental health day was the other day, and I’m always a bit iffy when it comes to the ‘narrative’ on mental health. Said narrative nowadays is always surrounding the ‘destigmatisation’ of mental illness, and I don’t agree with it. I’ve spoken about this time and time again, I’m always thinking about it, I wrote my dissertation on it;  destigmatising mental illness is a bad thing. I think it’s a horrible, dangerous, erasing thing. Destigmatising mental illness essentially means to make it “normal”, and mental illness is anything BUT normal. The idea is good – make it easier to talk about. But it’s all gone in the wrong direction; making it ‘normal’, making it something that everyone and anyone has, makes it harder for people who are actually suffering to speak up. There is nothing normal about a mental illness, the same way there’s nothing normal about tuberculosis or gangrene.
Social media sites make it even worse. I get that we’re a generation of self depreciating folk. I get it. Teenagers are depressed and this economy makes them want to kill themselves; we’re all anxious and we’re all a mess. But the schizophrenic kid reading all these memes about depression isn’t going to feel comfortable getting help, because even in a world where everyone is mentally ill, they’re still psycho.
I guess I’ve always had this thing about psychotic illnesses being left out of every single narrative on mental health, and therefore the narrative cannot be complete. You can’t just romanticise the mental illnesses that are easier to have and deal with. Don’t fucking romanticise any at all. Anxiety isn’t cute, depression isn’t edgy, bipolar disorder isn’t something you can switch on and off whenever you feel like it. Not in reality, anyway.
So yeah, I once again have a few not-so-little things to say about Mental Health and here they are.
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Damn what a pity fam [10 hard truths]

Haha, is that me?
I’ve been so busy recently, but at the same time… not. I’ve been speaking to more people, landing myself in new situations and, more often than not, have been increasingly finding myself staring into an imaginary camera. Some days I’m Jim. Other days I’m Michael. But most days I’m Jim. I am, however, always Patrick Bateman… And Dwight.
There are things I believe that I thought were common sense, but obviously not. I quit my job, I reconnected with people, I decided I was gonna be done with bullshit once and for all, and, as of recently, have decided to become the me I always tried to be. Uncensored and transparent. You thought you liked me before, wait till you see me now!!!!!!!
So I guess this post is inspired by the reason I have so many frown lines, and the reason I look into the aforementioned imaginary camera. Sometimes you just want to pick someone up and shake them and scream ‘I JUST WANT WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU’ but you can’t because you’re 5″2, so you have to settle with a rant on WordPress.
Let’s go, the clock is ticking.
Institutional education doesn’t make you a better or a worse person  Read more