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…
When I
first started blogging in 2013, I somehow came across Zoe Sugg aka Zoella, and
I watched as she paved the way for influencers (in addition to a blog, she also
had a YouTube channel which became her focal platform) by really highlighting
the power they hold in collaboration content. She was a massive idol for me for
probably the first six or seven years of I’m NOT Disordered, and one `move she
made with her content which I was greatly inspired by, was creating ‘Vlogmas.’
This initiative was basically where YouTubers would video blog their lives (not
just when doing festive activities) every day for the entirety of December and then
publish these vlogs daily.
Inspired
by Zoe, I did attempt to develop a YouTube channel (which I still have and use
occasionally for events etc.: you can subscribe here) but quickly recognised that my
strengths and skills lay in writing – blogging. Being a huge fan of
Christmastime though, I was eager to somehow create festive content at a similar
frequency and so, in 2015, I created a Christmas Q&A and, on random days of
December, I published versions of various people answering the festive-themed
questions – the posts with my answers is here. Some people who I had take
part varied from the Chief Executive Officer of the private healthcare company
who owned the psychiatric hospital I was in for two and a half years, to a
Superintendent from my local Police force to the Headteacher of the School from
the Channel 4 documentary: Educating Essex!
Unfortunately,
even though the series was successful, December of 2016 was a rough time for
me, my family, and my mental health, so I didn’t repeat a Christmassy series
until 2017 when I created a ’12 Days of Christmas with I’m NOT Disordered’
series (you can read the launch post and my answers here). From December 13th
until Christmas Day, I featured Q&A’s – again, with various people
answering the festive questions; this time they ranged from another Blogger to
a Special Constable of my local police force to the Corporate Governance
Director of the private healthcare company! Again, the series was popular, and
I really loved how busy it made me and how genuinely fun and wholesome the
content was because it is a nice change from writing deep, passionate posts
about mental health and suicide and abuse.
So, the
following year (2018), I decided to think up something a bit different and
having begun collaborating with Cats Protection (the UK’s largest feline
welfare charity) in recent months, I launched the ’12 Cats of Christmas’ series
(you can read Day One here)! A huge motivation and
inspiration for this series was actually the loss of my first cat; Dolly, in
October that year because within one week of losing her, I adopted a cat called
Emmy and it was adopting – rather than shopping! – which actually encouraged me
to look into working with Cats Protection. So, for the Series, I created a
Q&A again with just a handful of basic questions for an owner about their
cat; and the people who got involved varied from one of my best-friends, to Cats
Protection’s Customer Engagement Advisor!
Again,
the Series proved to be really popular and fun to put together and by December
2019 I had been blogging for almost seven years and had developed the
potentially dangerous craving of always going ‘one better next time.’ Now, this
is an attitude that I still massively hold to this day; it is especially overwhelming
with anniversaries like the passing of pets, milestones like achievements in my
blog’s reader statistics, and other special dates like Mental Health Awareness
Week or World Suicide Prevention Day. It’s really about the content. It’s about
how often I’ve published it, how good I feel the quality of it is, the
importance of the people I’ve roped in with the content, how effective it is in
attracting readers, how long it took me to create, how generally special it
feels… There are so many elements that give me this notion and judgment of being
in competition with myself and it just fills me with this passion and drive to
feel that I always want to improve and go bigger and better. And Christmas is
no different a time – in fact, it’s one of the most monumental periods of time
where this attitude is rife! And that was proven in 2019 when I created my
first Blogmas…
In
creating Blogmas 2019, I had an additional attitude of ‘go big or go home’ and
decided that if I was going to do daily festive blog posts, then I was going to
do them with a really special twist and so I began contacting stores on Etsy
UK and used
December 1st to publish a piece – which you can read here – announcing the stores I was
teaming up with throughout the series. Then, each day of December until
Christmas Day, I did alternate posts with one day blogging a review about a
product one of the stores had gifted me and then the following day the content
was about something festive I’d done or some sort of Christmassy advice I had,
things like that. On December 23rd I launched a competition with the
prize being every item I had featured in the series, which amounted to being
worth more than £100. I did a reminder post on Christmas Eve and then, because
the entrance guidance was based around my Twitter account, I announced the
winner on there on Christmas Day.
Blogmas
2019 really set the expectations and standards high for future Christmas
content and I took a lot of inspiration from that first full festive series as
well as a lot of learning a lot of lessons from it too! One thing I had liked
was there being some sort of theme to the series with working with the Etsy
stores and so, that was something I maintained in the following Blogmas series
across the next few years. I also learnt a lot about the organisational side of
creating the content, especially in terms of creating deadlines for myself and
creating a format for the order in which I worked on and created the content.
Despite
those positives coming from it, publishing the series was such a scary decision,
and that was for a really ironic reason – that even though my content was
massively inspired by Zoe Sugg’s Vlogmas, knowing content like that existed,
provided a sense of pressure and expectation on me in creating my festive
content too. I felt that I had almost just this revolving thought in my head
that used to spin around like the revolving doors in a building and it kept
reminding me; ‘what’s so special about what you’re doing?’ It was one of those
things or one of those thoughts where you build it into something a lot bigger
than it really needs to – or should – be. Like, if you voiced it then it would
allow people the chance to very reasonably and effectively convince you or reassure
you to a degree that would actually, very likely let you put the thought to bed
and move on from concentrating on it. But because you keep it in your own head
– between you and you(!) – it continues to build and become so much more
important and, possibly, so much more detrimental than it should be.
I wish
I could say that I had used my Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) skills to
work on this thought and fear in a reasonable, effective, clever way. But
actually, I think that I coped with this worry and fear through literally just working
through it – not ‘on’ it, ‘through’ it. I just continued creating the content
and brainstorming ideas and sending emails and creating the flat lays… And it
was almost like, before I knew it, the posts and content were scheduled, and
the series had launched! And by that point, it was too late to panic, worry, or
be afraid because it was out there now; I had laid the pipework and I’m someone
who – if I say I’m going to do something, it takes a hell of a good reason for
me to not do it – so, for me, there was no option or opportunity to back down
and do a U-turn! And now? I’m so grateful I went ahead with it and that I did
so despite everything in my head doubting me, my abilities, and my blog’s
potential.
The
success of my first Blogmas, led me to doing one the following year (2020)
where I chose the theme of recommendations and every day for the twenty-five
days I gave a recommendation of a huge variety of things that went from mental
health coping skills to online courses (you can read the introductory post here). Finding that having a theme
was a good contributing factor to the popularity and interest of the series, I
decided – well, actually, my Mum thought of it but I decided to use it! – to
use the theme of budgeting the following year (2021). To add another special
element to the series, I also teamed up with Pretty Perfect Products to
advertise their Christmas Planner (I shared the links in the introductory post here) throughout the daily posts.
In
2022, I made the decision to once again create a Blogmas series, but I was
absolutely stuck on thinking up a theme for it; to the point where I decided to
run it without a theme (I explained this a bit more in the introductory post
which you can read here). Since the series still ended
up being popular and successful in leading to a rise in purchases from the
company the Planner was sold by, I decided to work with a brand again and
approached Phoenix Cove – a popular Etsy shop who specialise in personalised
items – who helped to create the series that was branded ‘Blogmas Unboxed’ (you
can read the first post here). Unfortunately, my mental
health wasn’t great for a lot of that December, and I ended up completely
missing entire days of content! Because of this, I’m actually massively
debating whether to do Blogmas again this year; I’m really on the fence about
it and I think I’m swaying toward ‘no’ but we’ll see... I do recognise though,
that I should make my decision soon because if I do want to do it, I need to
get planning and creating asap! So, stay tuned for that decision!
Unfortunately,
I’ve had a number of surgeries since that Halloween post in 2019 and so I
thought I’d put them all in one section…
The
first one was a result of on Boxing Day 2019, when I had a ‘bit’ of an accident
that resulted in a surprisingly horrific injury (you can the blog post I wrote
about it at the time here)… On Christmas Day I go to my
Mum’s house and then on Boxing Day, she comes to my home and so she was over,
and I was opening a bottle of Prosecco by wiggling the cork out with my thumbs.
I can’t really describe the sensation I had – it was sort of like a pop and my
thumb on my right hand just went limp. I remember my Mum saying, “what do you
want to do?” and I said “go to hospital!” So, I paid an exorbitant amount of
money to get a taxi to the local Minor Injuries Unit only to be told by a Nurse
that I had either pulled or jarred a muscle in my hand and needed to put it in
warm water and slowly try to move it again. They had done an x-ray and only
when I kind of disagreed that nothing was really wrong with it, did the Nurse
ask a Doctor to look at it but we saw him simply glance and say “yeah, looks
ok.” The thing was, they were looking for breaks and fractures, not ‘soft
tissue’ injuries. And so, I was sent home.
After
two days, I was still unable to move my thumb and I’m a huge believer that I
know my body better than anyone and I just knew that there was something wrong
– that it wasn’t about a pulled muscle. So, I took myself to Minor Injuries at
a different, but still local, hospital and literally as soon as the Nurse
Practitioner saw it he said “that doesn’t look right!” I felt so relieved and
validated immediately and I was so thankful that I’d persisted in getting it
seen and getting the right diagnosis. The Nurse had me have an x-ray and then
the Plastic Surgeon came to see me and told me it was either a torn ligament
(which would heal over the following weeks) or a snapped tendon (which would
require surgery) and gave me an appointment to see a more senior Surgeon the
following day.
At that
appointment, the Surgeon almost immediately concluded that it was the tendon,
and he told me that I had the option of accepting that I’d lost the use of my
thumb or having a painful surgery that might not work well because of how long it
had been since the injury. I chose the surgery and was given a general
anaesthetic. When I woke up, it was explained that the EPL tendon had
completely ruptured, and another had frayed. I was in hospital overnight to get
on top of both the pain and the sickness I experienced from the anaesthetic and
went home on New Years Eve.
Unfortunately,
a few weeks later I lost movement in my thumb again and the pain became worse
so the Surgeon suspected that the repair hadn’t held, and I needed another
surgery (I wrote a blog post about it which you can read here) – which she said was the last way
she could fix the tendon. That was obviously really hard and upsetting to hear
because it scared me to think that because of a pure accident, I could lose the
use of one of my thumb’s. I think that it was largely the fact that it had been
a complete accident and not self-inflicted that made it so difficult to cope
with. Whenever I’ve caused myself an injury and it’s required treatment of any
sort, it’s obviously been hard and painful, but I’ve felt a sense of inability
to complain about it because I’d done it to myself. However, having to go
through painful surgeries for something which I had no control over it
happening? Well, I think it was such a struggle because I had no one to blame
for it and being able to do that is somewhat cathartic and soothing for me. In
my second surgery, the Surgeon took one of the two tendons in my forefinger and
used it to fix the EPL in my thumb and luckily, it was successful and after
months of physiotherapy, I have full use of thumb back and purely nerve damage
to the area as a permanent side effect – which is terrible, but I fully
recognise that it could be worse!
Aside
from surgeries to fix damage caused by self-harm (I wrote a blog post about one
of these which you can read here), my next accidental injury
which resulted in surgery was just over two years ago when I had a seizure at
the top of a flight of stairs and fell down the entirety of them. I broke the
Ulna Styloid (that bone-y bit in your wrist that sticks up) and the Radius and when
I had to see Orthopaedics the following day they told me that the Radius was
out of alignment and I had to have emergency surgery to straighten it and put a
plate on to keep it in place.
Around
six weeks after the surgery, I was still in so much pain and my GP surgery
accused me of being addicted to my opioid painkillers before eventually
referring me back to Orthopaedics who sent me for an x-ray. The Surgeon called
me into the room and told me that the plate had been put too high up on the
bone so that it was rubbing on the bones in my hand above it and the break in
the Ulna was still there and hadn’t healed at all! Similarly to when I
eventually got the diagnosis of my thumb, it felt like a relieving sense of
validation and that as bad as the news was, I was actually grateful for it
because it confirmed that belief in me that I know my own body. I mean, I think
that when my mental health is poor, that knowledge really deteriorates, and I
lose the instinct because it’s as though I become so detached from reality that
I don’t even recognise my own body and the feelings etc from it. And so, the
thought that I might have been wrong in thinking I was in pain and believing
something was still badly wrong with my wrist, was disconcerting and worrying
and it made me question whether my mental health was poorly, and I hadn’t even
realised it! So, the x-ray result was – in a sense – just what I needed to
hear(!) and the only real downside was that it meant more surgery!
So, in
my second operation, the plate on my Radius was removed because the break on
that bone had actually healed beneath the metalwork and then the Surgeon put a long
plate and screws into the Ulna. Unfortunately, the break still failed to heal
and last year (2023) I had a third surgery on my wrist where the plate was
removed and instead, two anchors were placed in the Ulna – one to hold the
break together and the other to strengthen a tendon that was damaged and was
meant to actually be strengthening and supporting the bone.
Sadly –
like, massively sadly! – the break still hasn’t healed, and my wrist now has a
number of other things wrong with it too: I have an unstable distal radioulnar
joint with crepitus, bone loss around one piece of the metalwork, and the
intraosseous membrane isn’t intact. As a result of all of this, I’m awaiting a
fourth surgery where the Orthopaedic Surgeon is going to do a bone grafting
from my iliac crest bone (my hip) into the ulna and then likely do some band
wire fixation! When I’ve told people about the bone graft, they’ve almost all said,
“it’s so clever what they can do these days!” And I’m always like “it doesn’t
feel ‘clever’ when it’s you who it’s being done to!” And, to add to the fear of
how painful this is going to be, they don’t just do surgeries like this the
next day, I have to go on a waiting list that’s god knows how long! The Surgeon
said about six months which means it won’t be until next year! Which means
worrying and being afraid of it all that time!
In
April 2021, my four year old therapy bunny Pixie was put to sleep (I wrote a
blog post at the time which you can read here) and you might wonder what’s
scary about that… A few things, actually!
The
first huge fear I had in losing Pixie was how Emmy – the calico rescue cat I
had at the time – would react to losing her best-friend. I think that one
mitigating factor here was that Pixie was actually poorly for a little while
before being put to sleep and even spent the full weekend of April 19th
in Intensive Care with a diagnosis of Gut Stasis (a condition that’s common in
rabbits and is equally common to be fatal). So I guess it meant that she had
some recent experience of being without her, but I do wonder if – despite me
having a bad feeling about things from Pixie first becoming poorly – she could
sense my knowledge and assurance that, at that time, she would still be coming
back at some point. And she did, but when I had to take her back in just days
after she came home, the thought that I just couldn’t shake from my head was
‘I’m going to have to go back to Emmy empty-handed.’
I’m a
huge believer that so many people underestimate animals and especially rabbits.
I mean, not many people even know their lifespan (in the wild, with rabbits
being prey animals, their life span is only 1 – 2 years, but domestic rabbits
can live 10 – 12 years and I know some who have reached even older!) or how
high maintenance they can be. I think this is largely due to a lot of people tying
them to Hamsters and their relatively short lifespan and mostly easy and small
maintenance and care routines. Another estimation or misunderstanding of animals
is their intelligence and, in my opinion, one time when their understanding and
knowledge becomes most important and meaningful is in times of upset, grief,
and sadness.
I also
believe that you know your pet better than anyone – not only because you live
with them 24/7, but also because of the bond you build with them. I mean, I see
my two bunnies and cat as my babies, and I think of myself as their Mum! The
other night, I woke up crying from a dream in which I had took Ruby (my cat) abroad
for some reason and found myself regretting it so in the dream I kept saying “I’m
such a bad Mum!” and then woke up actually saying it with tears streaming all down
my face! Having this attitude with all my pets, not just the ones I have now,
means that when I’ve lost one, it’s felt like a massive, personal failure and after
losing Pixie, having to go home to Emmy without her best friend just
exacerbated that feeling. Because I couldn’t have saved her. But after all I’ve
said about how intelligent animals are, would my cat be able to understand and
appreciate that I tried my best to save the bunny? Would she realise that I did
all that I could; taking her backwards and forwards to the Vets and paying the
bills and then having to make that horrific decision that all pet owners
absolutely dread but know will very likely come at some point? And in a way,
the fact she wouldn’t realise this just made the situation even worse! And it’s
like that when you’re trying to take a pet to the Vets and they fight you like
crazy not to go and you can’t explain to them that you’re doing it to help
them! Which leads me onto losing Emmy…
Emmy,
in her last days, was in so much pain that it made her so angry that I ended up
needing Animal Control to get her in the carrier. On that last day when we had
to take her in to be put to sleep, the Officer actually had to call for back-up
and she had to be put in a huge crate. Then, at the Vets, I had to stand
outside whilst the Vet sedated her so that I couldn’t hear her cries…
When
Pixie was put to sleep, it was actually during the coronavirus lockdown in the
UK and it meant that the Vets took your pet in whilst you stood in their
carpark. And they made no accommodations when your pet was being put to sleep.
So, they’d taken her in and came back out saying “we need to put her to sleep;
it’s the best thing for her” and I was like “ok, I’ll come in and say bye.” And
they said I couldn’t so they had to bring her back out to the carpark so that I
could give her one last hug and tell her that I loved her and would miss her
and that she’d be with Dolly now. And all these other people were there with
their pets too, so everyone was staring at me and someone offered me tissues
which was obviously lovely, but it made me cry even more!
So, I
say that because there was also a bad situation around Emmy’s death too in that
when I’d tried to take her to the Vets about a week before she was put to
sleep, she scratched and bit me and it ended up getting infected and literally
within hours I was in Minor Injuries with a rash and being given antibiotics.
When I couldn’t keep them down, I was admitted to hospital to be given IV
antibiotics and went into sepsis, my blood pressure plummeted, and I remembered
this white light and this overhead announcement saying, “cardiac arrest” and
then my bed number and I said, “am I dying?” and someone said “no, it’s in case
you do!” Then that was it, I woke up in ICU! And so, when we knew I was being
discharged from hospital, they ended up keeping Emmy alive one extra day so
that I could spend one last day with her. So, it was kind of extra tragic.
Before
I lost Emmy, but after Pixie had died, I had to make that heart-wrenching
decision of whether to get another bunny and when Emmy seemed to bond to me in
ways I had never known her to, I decided to stay as a family of two for a
couple of months (from April until around August) before I decided to start
looking for another bunny on the website I’d used to find my first cat; Dolly. It
felt like as time went by without a rabbit in the house, it was becoming
emptier and emptier – despite my improved relationship with Emmy (I actually
wrote about this in the blog post when I got Luna, you can read it here).
And finally – after a few duds! – I found my Luna! Her little moustache
markings made me laugh and smile and she felt all sparkly and new – just what
the house needed since Pixie had passed away.
I’d had
Emmy and Luna for just over one year when Emmy became poorly. It started with
her having a sore on her face and I immediately called the Vet who dismissed it
over the phone! When it got worse, I called them again and they eventually
agreed to give me some cream for her but when it spread and was almost touching
her eye, I decided to take her to a different Vet because I had such a bad
feeling and the original Vets just weren’t seeing that. The new Vets
immediately prescribed antibiotics and another cream and said that it was good
I had brought her in because she had been close to losing her eye! It healed for
a little while then came back and the Vet said they would need to do a biopsy (I
talked more about it in a blog post: DEAR
EMMY, PLEASE STAY ALIVE | I'm NOT Disordered (imnotdisordered.co.uk)). Unfortunately,
her health worsened when she stopped eating and drinking, was being sick, and
had diarrhoea. Eventually, she was diagnosed with Feline Leukaemia and in
October 2022, she was put to sleep (I wrote a blog post with a poem in it when
she died, you can read it here)
and once again, I was in the position of going home empty-handed to her best
friend because regardless of how short their time was together, Emmy and Luna
had bonded so well! I remember on the first night I got Luna and the two of
them were washing in unison on the bed with me!
In the
immediate aftermath of losing Emmy, Luna was quite distressed; she would go
everywhere that Emmy used to sleep and would sit by the cupboard where the cat
food used to be. Then she started pushing this long, crinkle tunnel around in
the sitting room and I thought it was really cute and funny and took a ton of
videos which loads of people laughed at too. Then I did some research and found
out she was actually really distressed and missing Emmy when she was doing it
and that she wanted someone to play with. She needed a companion. The Vet said
it would likely be easier to introduce her to another rabbit than a new cat, so
in January 2023, I got my little brown mini Lionhead; Gracie (I introduced her in
a blog post, here).
The two of them hit it off straight away! I remember introducing them to each
other in the sitting room and them sniffing each other and then immediately they
started following each other around – where one would go, the other would
follow. It was so lovely and reassuring to watch because it really gave me
confidence that I’d made the right decision.
Luna’s
happiness with Gracie meant though, that they were always cuddled up together
sleeping or washing each other in a different room and I was by myself! And it
wasn’t like I could pick them up all the time for cuddles – they’re actually
quite bad with handling anyway! – so within months I made the decision to get a
kitten (I blogged about my decision-making process here).
Getting Ruby felt so special because she was going to make it be the greatest number
of pets I’ve ever looked after at once, so having that ability felt like a huge
achievement and testimony to my mental health recovery! To really make the most
of adding her to the family, I created a collaboration series with Cats
Protection and really indulged in taking videos and photos of her.
Now I
have my three adorable babes that make my home feel complete. That make my
heart feel complete.
My
first largest reader milestone which I reached in the last five years was
actually one million readers in 2021 and I obviously wrote a very lengthy post
for it (which you can read here)
where I talked about the different stages of my blogging career where I wish
someone had been there to give me advice on and share their own experience of
them too. When I first started blogging in 2013, there were really only three
well-known mental health blogs – one was written by a Police Officer with a
particular interest and experience with mental health law, one was by a
Psychiatric Nurse, and the other was by a former psychiatric hospital inpatient.
I couldn’t find one written by a current, sectioned, psychiatric hospital
inpatient – as I was at that time. Now, I’ll also be so grateful for this
because it meant that I immediately and without trying, found a niche for I’m
NOT Disordered and that is obviously a hugely important quality for a blog to
have in order to determine its popularity and success.
A
downside to not being able to find any other bloggers in my position though,
was that I felt quite alone in those early years of I’m NOT Disordered’s
journey. I felt like I had no one to turn to for advice and I think that’s one
reason why I ended up following the journey of Victoria Magrath and her blog;
inthefrow, and Zoe Sugg with her YouTube channel and brand; Zoella. Victoria –
my largest female blogging inspiration – mostly talks about fashion, beauty,
and travelling so we were on very different paths in terms of experiences and
opportunities in our blogging career, but I actually still managed to find a
lot of inspiration and guidance in her (as a person) and her content.
In
having such little, relevant guidance and influence, it meant that I’d say I’ve
definitely had to learn a lot of blog-related things the hard way, but this has
actually now become a trait of mine in life in general – I have to find things
out or learn a lesson in the worst way. I’m definitely one of those ‘always
look on the bright side’ type of people so I look at this difficult experience
with the mindset that at least I’ve learnt something and that perhaps doing it in
the most challenging way has made me even stronger. However, I also have the
thought that I wouldn’t want others to learn in this way, so I do all that I
can to prevent others going through that same hardship by creating blog posts
full of tips and advice.
Something
I learnt the hard way were to do with my readership and there were actually two
things:
1.
How
to cope with having a large audience
2.
The
importance of not having high expectations on the popularity of content
Firstly,
when I created, I’m NOT Disordered it was with the pure and genuine motivations
of having something therapeutic to do in the evenings, nights, and at weekends,
and providing my friends and family with more knowledge and a better understanding
of my experiences and of mental health in general. With those intentions in
mind, I only shared the links to my blog posts on my private Facebook account
where I literally only have family and genuine friends (and I still have that
because I like that I have a space on the internet that is more private and personal).
But, I guess those people were enjoying and benefiting from the content and so
word-of-mouth publicity kicked in and before I knew it, I was celebrating a milestone.
I so wish that I could remember how many readers it was – I’m convinced it was
the first 100 but it could have been 1,000! – but I remember being near it and
there was another inpatient who I was really close to and who helped design the
blog back then… She must have been watching the statistics go up at the same
time as me because when it hit the milestone, we both came racing out of our
rooms at the same time and stopped in the middle of the hallway and just
started screaming and jumping up and down! The alarms started blaring and the
staff came barrelling down the corridor thinking we were fighting or something!
You should have seen the disappointment on their faces!
So,
having no intention of earning an audience anywhere near as large as it is now
(there’s over 1.5 million of you!), meant that when it started expanded I had
to, on the spot, navigate my way through the thoughts and feelings that came
with that because there had been no sense of preparation for it. I think that
initially I just kind of went with it… I’ve always been grateful and celebrated
my blog’s popularity (I mean, I even hosted a party to celebrate the one
million mark; you can read the blog post about it here),
because I recognise the benefits it has. I mean, not only does it mean there’s
a greater chance that my content helps someone (because I’m not naïve – I know
not everyone who looks at I’m NOT Disordered will like it!), but it also
affords me special and unique opportunities for collaborations and one-off
experiences like event invitations. I know that might sound somewhat selfish or
superficial, but after all the hard work and time I put into creating content,
it feels like the loveliest reward and sign of achievement, as well as being
really good for my mental health recovery.
One
drawback (if you could call it that) that I’ve found in having such a big
audience now, is that I have to make a point of not thinking about how many
people might read the content I’m creating whilst I’m creating it because I
think I’d get some sort of ‘stage fright.’ One comment that’s very regularly
made about my content is that it’s honest and open, and that’s a quality that I’d
like to maintain; and I worry that if I consider everyone reading what I write,
I’ll become reluctant to share as much. Like, it’s ‘easy’ enough to write about
hallucinations and being on life support when I’m in the comfort of my own home
and just typing away on my laptop looking at my bunnies and with my cat purring
next to me… But to think that ten people in Australia might read it? How could
I possibly write in the same way and with the same honesty and openness?
Two
other feelings I have to contend with when thinking about the size of my
audience, are it seeming so surreal (which I blogged about here)
and therefore being mindful to stay grounded (which I blogged about here).
I think that my genuine gratitude and unassuming hopes and dreams to end up
with so many readers have really helped in this department because I think that
they’ve supported me in finding a balance between staying humble and allowing
myself to recognise my achievements and to feel comfortable in telling others
about it. If someone swam 100 metres and told you, would you think of them in
the way you might think of someone saying, “I’ve got over one million followers?”
There’s so much publicity and so many opinions around influencers and bloggers
and them being vain, superficial, and fake; that it’s difficult for people to
just recognise that you’re simply voicing an achievement and not ‘bragging’ or boasting.
Finally
– not having high expectations about the popularity of content: this is
something I still have to work on, but it’s also something I’ve come to accept
that I might never get right. There have been so many occasions where I’ve
spent days creating a piece of content that’s really lengthy and which I feel I’ve
poured my heart and soul into it, and so I imagine it earning a particular
amount of readers based on the typical average at that time (my daily reader
statistics have been known to go from 500 to over 4,000!). And other times, I
can put a post together in a real rush, it can be less than two pages in Word,
and I can feel like I’ve just listed an experience and facts about it, and then
it’s proven to be more popular than the other one! So, I’m learning not to be
confident and to think that I can predict the level of popularity content will
get, whilst also recognising that I do still know what my readers prefer to
read. I mean, if I was producing crappy content then I’m NOT Disordered wouldn’t
be going anywhere, would it?