DAY ONE | A SECRET BLOGMAS 2025

“Don't compromise yourself. You are all you've got.”

Janis Joplin

Welcome to A Secret Blogmas 2025!

Today is Day One and the very first Secret of the Series is all about authenticity, honesty, and transparency. It’s about the importance of being yourself – truly yourself. Being you 100% of the time that you spend online – but especially when you’re creating content – can be so important and influential upon the popularity and success of your content and/or the platform on which you publish it! Keep reading to find out why this happens and how you can put it into practice with your own content creation…

EVERYTHING BLOGGING HAS DONE TO ME | CELEBRATING TWO AND A HALF MILLION READERS!!!

"What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals."

Zig Ziglar

In a recent career opportunity, I found myself having a lot of moments where I was thinking ‘I know that because of my blogging’ or ‘I learnt how to do that through blogging!’ And it is these moments and in celebration of I’m NOT Disordered reaching two and a half million readers, which have inspired this blog post where I’m going to chat through all the influences and the ways in which blogging has impacted me and changed my life…

WHY RAPE & SEXUAL ABUSE ARE SO TABOO

ta·boo

[təˈbo͞o, taˈbo͞o]

NOUN

1.       a social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing.

synonyms:

prohibition · proscription · veto · interdiction · interdict · ban · restriction · boycott · nonacceptance · anathema

ADJECTIVE

1.       prohibited or restricted by social custom.

"sex was a taboo subject"

synonyms:

forbidden · prohibited · banned · proscribed · vetoed · ruled out · interdicted ·

[more]

VERB

1.       place under prohibition.

I don’t think I talk about LEAPS a lot on here because we have a very strict confidentiality agreement – but for those who don’t know, Listening Ear And Positive Support (LEAPS) is a support group for people who are unemployed. The nature of the organization means that there’s a lot of private and personal things discussed at the weekly meetings, but this was something I said so I guess it’s my decision to make it public…. A while ago, I secured Lottery funding for LEAPS with one of our budgets being to fund a group session on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). So, the other day at the CBT session we were talking about ‘errors in thinking’ and I gave a personal example about how – for a long time – I blamed myself for the abuse I went through. I’ve known this group of all men for over two years now and it made me wonder why I feel like I can talk to them about this…

THE TEN BIGGEST IMPACTS ON MY PERSONALITY | IN COLLABORATION WITH FUTURE LEARN AND MONASH UNIVERSITY | AD

I wrote recently (here) about my thoughts on personality after beginning the Monash University course (via futurelearn.com); Introduction to Psychology: The Psychology of Personality. On completing week two of the course, I got thinking about all of the things that can impact a person’s personality. I mean, I talked in my first post about how I believe that ‘personality’ is who you are but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s ingrained in you – that it’s natural or always stable throughout all kinds of circumstances and situations. I 100% believe that your personality can be shaped by external events and how you internalize these, how they change your views on the world and the way you react in different situations.