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…

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?

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