Confessions,

When I first started thinking about this blog post, the scene from Moulin Rouge (didn't try to spell it as Mulan, didn't) where Ziegler (I had to Google that I was getting the character right and have realised I should always back myself, because I was right!) is trying to cover for (it's not Renee Zelweigger) Nicole Kidman's character for being ill, and yells, "SHE'S CONFESSING!", popped into my head and made me both inwardly groan and also made me laugh, because the connections my mind makes with words entertains me but at the same time, why am I so weird?

Sometimes this little blog feels like my confessional and I'm not sure that that's always a good thing, but there we go. 

The thing I'm going to confess right now though is that, due to struggling a lot with being able to plan when to get things done and find the energy and motivation to do so, so I've been trying my best to write when I have the inclination, motivation and most importantly the time, and then I schedule them to be posted later. It's a bit lazy, but hey, that's life. It's a coping mechanism and I need it. 

The more we move into a social media age, the more there is an expectation of access, and a want for things like a schedule for when we do things, and it's one of the things I really struggle with. When I was a Twitter sprint lead, things would come up and I would be completely time blind and then realise that my shift was supposed to be a few hours ago or was supposed to start thirty minutes ago and obviously at that stage there was nothing I could do about it, so whilst I would love to be able to do more things in the NaNo community which are kind of 'live', I also find it a really difficult commitment because I don't want to let people down and I know I screw up sometimes. Even before my diagnosis I was pretty intensely aware of my faults, or the impact that 'whatever' as I thought of it as then had on me.

As I was thinking my way through this post, and it was another that was sort of shouted at the voice notes on my phone by way of a first draft, I realised that it's not uncommon to schedule things like content, but it blogs, videos and such like, and actually, it's a really useful way of being able to utilise the down time we all need and the switch off we all need. I know that social media is highly likely to be having some form of impact on my mental health at the moment and whilst it's not the only reason I am having panic attacks, it definitely isn't helping. I also know that this blog gets a lot more readership throughout NaNoWriMo, for obvious reasons, and that social media is one of the ways I promote it. Whilst this is never going to be something I do for my actual job, or anything like that, I think it would be really misguided to completely go offline like I may wish to do during the month that I write the most about, so this whole scheduling thing has another benefit of actually giving me some breathing space if I need or want it. (Though that does take a level of forward planning I'm not sure I'm quite up to given the amount of other things I need to do during November and plan for before NaNo starts... )