WHY I’M ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIED FOR BLOGMAS THIS YEAR!!! | REVEALING THE BRANDING FOR BLOGMAS 2025 | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2025

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear, but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”

Paulo Coelho

Having used Halloween the past two years to reveal the fact that I’m creating festive series’ of content (you can read the one announcing Blogmas Unboxed in 2023 here, and the one announcing Blogvember in 2024 is here), it almost felt natural or expected to do it again this year too! So, at the end of this blog post – when I’ve finished talking about all the reasons why I’m terrified to do so – you’ll find the title of this year’s Blogmas series as well as the logo for it! And despite my fear and reluctance, I am really excited to reveal this year’s series (which will be daily content from December 1^st – 25^th) and I sincerely hope you’re all looking forward to it too and that you end up enjoying it because it’s taken a LOT of hard work…

THE SCARIEST MOMENTS FROM THE LAST FIVE YEARS | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2024

For Halloween 2019, I wrote a blog post titled; Five Scariest Moments of My Life (you can read it here) and I thought that this year, I’d do an updated version. Because I would obviously still rank the moments listed in that original post as the scariest in my life, I thought that I’d just add to them with scary moments that have occurred throughout the previous five years since that post…

WHY HAVING NO IDEAS IS ONE OF THE SCARIEST THINGS ABOUT BEING A BLOGGER | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2022

Whilst I’ve decided to mark Halloween this year, with a piece about one of the elements of being a Blogger that can range on a scale of scary to intimidating to terrifying and back again(!); I still really don’t want this to put people off from joining the industry. And this is something I really want to get across, because I have benefited from blogging in so many ways that it’s left me hopeful that in encouraging others to try blogging, I might enhance the chance of more people being rewarded with those same – or similar – benefits. I just hope that you can be reassured with me telling you that as scary as things have gotten, they have all been totally worth it to mean I have experienced all that I have as a result of I’m NOT Disordered. To help with this, I’ve tried to also include how I cope with and manage when I’m scared…

FIVE SCARIEST MOMENTS OF MY LIFE | HAPPY HALLOWEEN 2019

“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Halloween is all about making people jump in shock and scaring people half to death; but no one ever really uses the opportunity to talk about how fear can be positive and beneficial too! Being afraid can be a natural reaction to a situation – think along the lines of ‘fight or flight.’ So, for this reason, I didn’t want to use this post to only discuss the really negative parts of my life; I also wanted to talk about how positive fear has been for me sometimes… How it has often resulted in something positive:

1.    The time I stopped breathing in 2008

I had a weekend job at my local Primark (a huge retail store) and had been folding clothes when I got a huge pain in my tummy and passed out. I remember paramedics coming and giving me morphine and then they took me to the local A&E where they gave me more morphine. After seeing a Doctor they decided that I needed to be transferred to the local Gynae ward at another hospital and en route, in the ambulance, they gave me more morphine and then failed to tell the new hospital how much I’d had and they gave me more.