Welcome to my blog part 2
Me after running my first 10 k of the summer!
I’m back, everybody! I hope you missed me. I have spent the last three months agonising about the fact that I should be blogging consistently, reminding myself that I promised I would write at least once a week, and criticising myself for not being able to come up with anything to write about. I was putting pressure on myself to maintain a good image for any future employers by only talking about things that they might want to read about.
“I should blog about the news,” I thought to myself.
“No, scratch that. I should blog about my opinions on social justice issues.”
“Or wait, what if I blog about my travels, even though they are currently non-existent?”
I went back and forth, up and down, over and around so many times that it’s taken me three months to come up with anything to write about. My desire to make a good impression on a hypothetical prospective boss, to dazzle him with my witty, inspiring prose, has completely gotten in the way of me being able to write anything at all outside of work.
And call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure that writers are supposed to write.
I have also spent the last three months wallowing deep inside a pit of anxiety, depression, and general existential angst. I’ve come a long way over the last three months, but there are still good days and bad days.
Days where I feel like I can take on the world, and days where I hate myself so much that I wish nobody loved me so I could stop existing. Those days are the hardest ones.
Between these two things, my desire to please, and my ever-present mental disorders, I have been rendered mute. I felt like I couldn’t write anything, because the only thing that I wanted to write about was what was going on inside my head. And if I wrote about what was going on inside my head, then the entire world would know that I wasn’t as stable as I seemed from the outside, and then nobody would ever hire me in the future.
Can we say stigma?
After worrying about this for months, I realized that there was only one thing I could possibly do: be honest. I want to write about myself in the hopes of helping other people feel like they aren’t alone. Mood disorders are present in almost 25% of the general population, and by silencing myself, I am helping to perpetuate the stigma further.
If a potential employer has a problem with me talking openly about my struggles with mental illness, then they are most likely a company that I wouldn’t want to work for.
All of this is to say that I think I have finally come up with a theme for my blog. I hope to write about things that I care about in the hopes that you will care about them too. This could be something as far reaching as this awesome cartoonified David Bowie interview to a stream of consciousness rant from me in the middle of a panic attack.
Because I hope that my blog will help others to realize that although I may be crazy, I am crazy like everyone else. I am crazy with a diverse set of interests, hobbies, hopes and dreams. And to try to be someone I’m not in the hopes that I will be someone worth hiring when I graduate is just plain dumb.