I'm Not Actually As Disorganised As I Look,

 It would be very easy to walk into my house, you know, if you were invited, and think, jees, you have no organisational structure to your life at all, and honestly, you would be forgiven, at least to some degree, for thinking that. I am a bit scatterbrained. I forget things a lot, I get confused a lot and inevitably I walk out of the house with the feeling that I'm going without something literally every time I go anywhere, and sometimes, it's a whole list. Most of the time, that is okay, because for most things you can replace them pretty easily where you're going. I regularly get to camps early because I know I will need to drive off and find something that I have realised I have forgotten. I'm also good at remembering things other people will have forgotten and other people do that for me and generally, we all muddle along pretty well. There will always be a time when you forget mugs, well, there was that time I forgot mugs anyway, there will always be someone who forgets a chair. There will always be multiple people who forget chairs.

Organisation is something I try to achieve but unfortunately there is no one linear way to do things, so inevitably things go missing not because they're stored illogically or in the 'wrong place' but because I can't remember what I thought the right place was when I actually stored it. You know the old joke of keeping something so safe even I don't know where it is, that's me, a hundred percent. I was recently looking for the other book by Dr Richard Shepherd 'Unnatural Causes' whilst reading 'The Seven Ages of Death' - ridiculously I started reading this because I had to wait for Christmas to get the next Bridgerton book, and this was the next "logical" choice - and I was somewhat obsessed with the idea that it was on one of the bookshelves, effectively filed with other books which were the sort that aren't best sellers, but almost like current W H Smith most recommended or something, which would have put it in the same place as 'The Hate You Give' and Hibo Wardere's 'Cut'. I kept looking in the same place, partly because when I last thought I had lost a book, that was where it turned up. Annoyingly, I could see the previous missing title - my beloved 'Before I Go To Sleep' by S J Watson, but I could not find 'Unnatural Causes'. I'm pretty impressed though because I knew I had it. Like, I KNEW. There have been multiple occasions over my life where I have ended up with two copies of the same book because I forgot I had it already, so I impressed myself knowing I had it, even though I was irritated as fluff that I didn't know where it was.

This isn't just some lengthy thing so I can go on about all of the wonderful books that are taking up the shelves of my library guest room merge storage area, but just simply trying to explain that I was looking in a very logical place for it, not just for one reason - it was one of those books that was highly recommended at the time - but also because it was a place I had previously located something which had been missing. It turned out that the damn thing was in the equally logical position of being the opposite side of the room in a stack which sits atop the books which are properly shelved - I refuse to believe I have too many books, I just don't have a proper way to store them - with the likes of Adam Kay's 'This Is Going to Hurt'. Why? Because I sorted the books on that side of the room by genre, or at least started to, and so there is a whole section on crime fiction, there is a whole bit on serial killers, there's all the war time stories like 'Bread, Jam and a Borrowed Pram', everything animal related, Jojo Moyes has her own section, there's the LGBTQIA+ fiction stack and there is the pile of medical books. There's a few different nurses' stories, there's a prison doctor's story, and there is one of the most recent books that ripped my heart out, 'When Breath Becomes Air'. 

Somehow, despite the fact that there was some emotional turmoil deciding where 'When Breath Becomes Air' should live because I was torn between putting it with 'The Fault In Our Stars' to have a little epic books that made me cry hysterically section, having it with the other medical books where it ended or putting it on one of these gorgeous house shaped shelves that are above the guest bed, because that's where some of my very favourite books are. A few NaNo novels live up there - yes, including the proof copy of mine - 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' is up there, there's a few Jodi Picoult's and the only reason Jojo Moyes didn't end up there is because she's written too many books for me to put them all up there and I can't bare to separate them. 

Okay, that did turn into a bit of a tangent. 

The point is, even when I am very deliberate and very specific with trying to be organised, it doesn't always work, particularly when it comes to issues with object permanence; if I can't see it, it doesn't exist, but it becomes an, if I can't see it, I can't find it, because who knows what system I filed it by. So many things come into this and it's also one of those 'if I put it down it is lost' situations which is why I need to figure out what I'm doing with something when I'm looking at it, or I need to do a task when I pick it up, because if I put it down, God only knows when I will find it again to sort it, and some things just don't work like that, do they? 

In A World Full of the Word Yes, I'm Here to Scream,

 I cannot emphasise enough how entranced with Fall Out Boy I am at the moment, and I love the song that they performed with Elton John, so much I quoted it for a blog title. And honestly, it's applicable both in its current form and with the next word. (No.) 

On my list of bad habits there are two significant entries. I get super into things, like baking, chocolate making, climbing and all sorts of other things, and I am obsessed for an indeterminate period of time, and then I kind of stop having time for it. It's not that I go off it as such, but just that it stops being the centre of my life. It's not always because I've found something else to do, but almost like the motivation has left me. I've also got a bad habit of buying everything I think I will ever need for sad hobby very early on and being a bit all the gear and not much idea. 

Tonight, after logging off of work I decided that I was finally going to get around to starting making something I've been thinking about for literally years. It's going to be a bit of a long process, but right now, I don't care, I just wanted to start. A few years ago I saw an awesome chocolate mold that was shaped like Christmas trees and I thought I could make something which is effectively a riff on a walnut whip, without the walnuts and with some special Christmas-y ingredients. It took me a while to find the mold again on eBay when I eventually decided to do them and this last year, I forgot that I had the mold until too late in the day to make them for Christmas 2023. If I don't at least have a go at making them, not using the word crack because I don't want to curse them when they come out of the fridge, I don't know if I'll do it this year. 

I wanted to make them with tempered chocolate, but tempering chocolate is a process which requires more patience than I actually have, so I gave up in the middle. I wasn't convinced the thermometer was working right, I wasn't convinced I had guessed the amounts of chocolate right (God only knows where I have put my scales) and I wasn't convinced that I could keep a bowl of tempered chocolate at the right temperature once it was done for long enough for me to fill the bottom of the molds and then brush enough chocolate for a shell up the sides. Honestly, I think it might need to be done in layers next time, because there is going to be quite a tough piece of chocolate at what will form the top of the whip from where it all dribbled down inside. (Though this won't necessarily be a bad thing, because I was thinking about blow torching the top ever so gently and quickly so I could stick a star in the top, though now I think that that might be a little too delicate, so I might just melt some white chocolate in a piping bag and pipe a messy star not the top. I'm also debating icing sugar snow over the top as well, but that's going to have to wait for me to see how they look when they come out. I've also considered putting tiny coloured hundreds and thousands into the melted chocolate before putting it into the mold but I'm not sure it will work out properly.)

I've also considered where I can make them as tea cakes and also considered whether I can make green chocolate, but the easiest chocolate to colour is white chocolate, and white chocolate is probably going to be way too sweet for the other ingredients I want to put into the middle of them.

Anyway, tangent, I would normally be considering something like getting a chocolate tempering machine, but for one thing, I'm well aware of the fact I will likely get bored pretty quickly, but also, they're really expensive and I'm not sure that tempering chocolate is ultimately worth it. Yes, it makes it shiny, yes, it makes it stronger, but it's so much effort...

But I'm proud of myself for not doing my ultra impulsive thing of just going for getting something that will just take up space in my house. Even if doing the tempering without a machine makes me want to scream. I think I just need more practice. (And more chocolate). 

I Got My Wings,

 Full disclosure, it is not Friday the 5th when I'm writing this. I'm writing it at twenty to two in the morning because one of the dogs is stressed from the fireworks and it's taking a lot to try and get him to go to bed and get some sleep. I used to love fireworks, but as I have said countless times, I don't love the impact they have on my animals.

Anyway, onto what I was actually going to be writing about. It turns out I might actually be full of shit. Why am I full of shit? Well, because I said I'm not really a resolution person and I said I wasn't going to try and do any of these things of do X every day of January, but instead, I'm doing something... worse? Better? I guess that depends on your perspective. I'm going to be trying to write every day. I'm part of a writing website called 4 The Words, I've written about it a lot before and it's something that I get very passionate and overexcited about and have zero awareness of when other people's eyes glaze over about it (thank you ADHD) and I have a streak which has been live for a consecutive one thousand, four hundred and sixty days, which is four whole years. Technically, I joined at the end of November 2019, but I didn't keep my streak fully after the end of NaNoWriMo, so my consistent one has been since 7th January 2020, but it's calculated by number of days not calendar years. It was a very different time.

One thing about streaks is that if you log in on the day, you can 'fix' a streak even if you don't write, because at least you thought about writing, and there is the facility to 'book time off' with planning ahead of you can 'buy back' days onto your streak, but only for a very limited period. There's a theory that I thought was called nudge theory, but I believe that's actually something different, which states that doing something small towards your goal each day is the best way to achieve it, so actually even logging onto the website and clicking a button to say I can't write today, whether it's because I'm busy or I'm ill or because I just feel like an empty vessel, it's okay. To some degree, the system allows me to take that further, but something I'm aiming to do this year is to actually log in every day and write the small amount of words (four hundred and forty four) that I need per day to pass par for the site. By the way, I'm spelling the numbers out for two reasons. Yes, long hand the words are worth more than a number written as 444, but also because I have realised recently that even though I'm good at maths I do struggle reading numbers sometimes, mainly between 3s and 8s, but the words generally behave a bit better for me.

There are going to be days where that is not physically possible, so I'm planning to email myself my words on those days so I can make sure I am writing every day, even if it's only a small amount, and even if it's only essentially me dictating my own internal monologue to myself. I don't want to lose my love of writing again because I'm trying to force myself into it, but I cannot lose this part of myself because I categorically do not know who I am without it, and part of the reason I felt as bad as I did during November was because it felt as though this part of my personality was crumbling, based on the complete and total misconception that my identity as a writer started with NaNoWriMo and couldn't function outside of it. 

Today I, well, my avatar of a slightly different name (character restrictions on usernames so it's CharlieWrite, having been charlwrite for a number of years due to even tighter character restrictions) will get a set of gold wings as soon as I hit my four hundred and forty four words, and you better believe I will be putting them on that tiny, dweeby looking facsimile of me, because I am proud of the achievement. Even if it means I was full of shit when I said no resolutions, and no joining in on do something every day things, this is something I really want to do, and I sat with it for a while to see that it was that, rather than something like parkrun that I carried on with because I wanted to want to do it, which is not the same. And if it does make me full of shit, well, a lot of people are so I guess I can make my peace with that. Hopefully in four years time I will be sat here ready to get my 8 year wings that are the coolest pair (in my less than humble opinion) and this year will be one which I look back on as a time of peace and focus, though I realise that might be asking a lot of a brain that like shiny new things and behaves erratically. We'll just have to see.

I Don't Hate Vegans, But,

 part of the "vegan messaging" I've seen recently is really annoying me. 

Something I have realised since moving out of London is that vegetarian options elsewhere are more limited and that's really frustrating a lot of the time. Generally the landscape of vegetarian food has been making some really interesting changes, partly because bigger organisations are trying new things and some of them are great, but smaller companies are not really surviving or being stocked in large places because when costs are being squeezed, the cost of faux meat is pretty high and it is the sort of thing that actually, dietarily, it's not integral, but it's a nice to have. If you know vegetarian cooking, you can make good food without it, and if you don't Margherita pizza and chips is way cheaper anyway.

Particularly around Christmas I struggle because the typical vegetarian options tend to be things like mock-beef wellington or some form of pie and I have a real aversion to pastry, and it can make me feel quite sick. A lot of places are doing better vegetarian options than when I moved to London, but the problem that I have currently is this idea that comes from vegans where it's being suggested that restaurants and eateries of all varieties make all of their vegetarian options as vegan options, because all vegetarians can eat vegan, but vegans can't eat everything vegetarian. Whilst I understand it, I completely disagree and that's for a number of reasons.

The first one is dietary autonomy. 

Anyone who has ever been to my house, since I bought this place, will know that I'm actually pretty open to people bringing whatever they eat into my home. I did used to be a bit more of a pain in the ass about it - mainly because the idea of anything with meat contaminating my food was enough to make me want to be sick - but these days as long as no one is trying to get me to eat anything I don't want to, I kind of don't mind, although if there was raw chicken involved I am a bit manic about cleaning. It's my choice what I eat, and for that to include eggs and cheese and honey, so I don't think it's really fair for vegans to decide that vegetarians should be eating vegan just because that works better for them. 

The second is that there are things in vegan food I just hate. 

Most vegan cheese includes coconut oil, and honestly, it's disgusting. Mostly with vegetarian food it's the exclusion of a relatively small list of ingredients, but with vegan food, the number of ingredients which can't be used is a lot, and not being able to use things like butter, or eggs to bind things, means the use of other ingredients which not everyone is used to, not everyone likes, and that make it exceptionally difficult for people with sensory issues to cope with. Even things like vegan cake have a different consistency and texture, so being forced into that being potentially your only option doesn't seem fair. 

The third this is that this argument isn't adding options to a v/ve menu at all. In most places now there are at least two to three v/ve options on the menu, but arguing that all of these should be vegan doesn't expand the number of dishes on offer, making there be three or four choice or more, it just means that there are the same number, or actually, for some there would be less, because you can't make vegan halloumi fries (or you can, but they would be expensive and most probably made of coconut oil) and there are a number of dishes which would go through the same. Whilst it would be lovely for chefs and cooking schools to value vegan cooking as highly as 'normal' cooking, and to make sure that staff are equipped to produce decent meals which are suitable for people with all dietary requirements, I think that's something which is a longer term goal than just offering the easy fix of 'make all the veggie options vegan'. We're only on day 4 of Veganuary and it's already getting on my nerves. 

Clinically Naive,

Trying to write this sodding blog has been a classic example of my not being able to organise my own thoughts, partly because I'm trying to put it together in a way that makes some form of sense to other people and also because bits and pieces keep popping in and out of my head and it's a nightmare. I also keep getting a little, I don't know what the word is but some form of uncomfortable, that I mention the ADHD diagnosis a lot, and I do, but I also know that it's something that is a big part of my life right now, it's a big part of me trying to learn about myself, so I guess I have to suck it up through the bad feelings and just get on with it.

There are some terms that people use about those around them and you just kind of get used to and they're effectively ways of describing your ADHD or autism traits before you realise that's what it is. I've been called clinically naive, I've referred to something my assessor told me isn't dyspraxia (but I forgot the name of it) as my 'clumsy dumbf**kery' and I'm sure there are plenty of other things as well. Once I thought of myself as an eternal teenager, because of a few things, but since the ADHD diagnosis I kind of had this moment where I was like ooooh, that makes more so much more sense now. 

Some of these terms are really useful, and they really help to make some sense of the, quite frankly, mess inside of my head, and I'm sure it's the same for others. Some of these terms help to kind of describe what it feels like to deal with who we are and how our heads work, or don't as the case may be, and some are just other people applying phrases that might seem well meaning, but actually point out that we're different, or try and minimise those differences and make them seem like things we are lacking. Like, my 'eternal teenager'-ness was always blamed on an inability to grow up. 

I get that I can miss social queues, I believe in people for longer than I should and I try to see the best in things, even though it is really difficult. 

One of the things I really struggle with is I take the things that people say, even in off hand comments, to heart. I get upset about it, I get hurt by it, I have had to deal with people treating me like crap for standing up for myself against these comments before, and so I just kind of absorb them, I take them in and I effectively use them as a stick to punish myself with them. I don't do it on purpose, it's something I'm trying not to do, but it happens. 

I think the reason that I wanted to share this - that might be overstating it because I can't say it's the most comfortable thing in the world - is because whilst people think that saying things about ADHD being a band wagon, everyone having it, or it just being lazy girl syndrome for those of us who are just being diagnosed, it's harmful. It's really harmful and sometimes you can hurt people even when you mean well. And hey, that's okay, but if that person tells you that you hurt them, maybe just try to understand them rather than jumping on why it's not your fault that they're hurt. 

Antisocial Media,

 Truth time: I don't remember if I wrote about why I turned my Instagram private, so I'm going to do that here and if I'm repeating myself, well shit, it happens and I'm sure we can all get over it. 

As a volunteer with [I'm not actually going to put the name of the organisation because they would not thank me for swearing] I work with youngsters and the age range we as an organisation work with is vast. I haven't worked across the full span of the age range, but I'm only short by two years and that's youngsters so small I'm not sure I wouldn't trip over them. As these lovely young people grow up, they get social media accounts and they sometimes like to find stuff out about the people they interact with - it's fine, we all do it - but there are photos on my Instagram of university nights out, utter rubbish I posted years ago and never deleted because who scrolls back that far anyway (trust me, they do) and there are photos of me at Rocky Horror Picture Show. It is a photo I'm proud of, do not get me wrong, but it's not something I would share with them, it's not an outfit I would even consider wearing around them and the God's honest truth is I forgot it was there until someone said, oh, they found your Instagram and were sharing screenshots between themselves of different photos on there. And it was like alarm bells going off in my head, and the only thing I could think to do was shut it straight onto private mode. 

In some ways, getting rid of my public profile of Instagram was actually really positive, because I didn't feel the need to post on there, and I wasn't concerned about the idea of 'if you want to be a writer you're going to have to get better at promoting your own books' and I didn't have to think about content production or all of those things that I was starting to think, hey, if you actually want to do this writing thing as more than just a venting to yourself thing, or just a written version of a Sims game, effectively, you're going to have to get better (not even better, get less shit at) using social media. I know the theory of it, but I'm not good at consistency, I don't want to spend hours on it because it's not the bit I'm good at or that I like doing and honestly, although I knew it was going to affect things like readership to the blog I had already kind of fallen out with writing and started the mental health episode that I had (though it was only bubbling under the surface at that stage). 

At present, I have a Facebook page I rarely use, I use my Twitter (and hate it), glance at my Blue Sky (not yet loving it) and that's about it. I had to learn how to embed links into stories on Facebook - post it from Instagram - so that I could get the blog out to my friends lists and hope that made some impact (and it clearly worked, though I'm sure the Google Analytics for the blog are broken given that it recorded a ludicrous number of views from Singapore over a few days this year (though having looked at it, I originally thought it was 2 days, and then it turned out it was over quite a few more days than that, so who knows?) I'm not necessarily thinking I want to try and build the readership of this blog massively, because that would be insane pressure to actually consistently write something worth reading, but I know I will have to go back to having more of a public social media presence, however uncomfortable that might feel, if I'm going to think about publishing anything this year, and I would like that to be the plan, but will have to see how I get on. 

I go through fits and starts of using stories, but I think they're going to have to be a bit more of a feature of my life so that I can actually put the links to these blogs out, and then hopefully, eventually, announce a date for the Fairies sequel and a couple of other things I have been working on, but I will be honest, it's doubtful if either of them will make an appearance this year, let alone both. 

But Do You Actually Believe in Fairies?,

 This is actually a really hard question to answer, so maybe I should start with why am I asking it of myself. 

For those of you who don't already know this my original online ID was Cynical Chick. Yes, I was once one of those Emo kids and I don't think I ever really grew out of it if we're being a hundred percent honest, but some time around the age of 16 or 17 I decided that, or realised that, not sure which, a big part of my identity was being a writer, and so I created the original CharliesWrite blog, got a new email address, changed social media handles and since then I have been CharliesWrite on pretty much everything. Don't remember the moment it came to me, but it is a big part of who I am, despite the fact my dad has regularly got my email address wrong, called me CharlieWrites and emailed someone else random things like photos of flowers I bought my mum. It's fine; it's not like it's a big part of my identity or anything... 

Not that long after CharliesWrite became a thing, or I became CharliesWrite, or however you want to think of it really, I wrote Fairies and it was another thing that became a big part of my identity. It's kind of one of those Inside Out 'core memory' things, I guess. Now, maybe the reason it has stayed as such a big thing is because I haven't self-published anything else, but I think the fact that it was this whole other world that came out of my head was something massive, and it was the first thing I ever wrote that I felt truly comfortable letting other people read. Or as close to truly comfortable as I thought I was going to get, and have ever gotten. In some ways, CharliesWrite and Fairies are indivisible, and that's why most of my social media and online presence has me listed as being a 'fairies believer'. I've also used the term 'general cloud head' because I didn't know that I wasn't just a little helium balloon of a personality bobbing around and talking in a high pitch squeak. 

On a couple of occasions, I have been asked in earnest if I truly believe in fairies, and it's not a question that has a simple answer, because the truth is I don't know. 

Do I believe in fairies that paint rainbows and run the world? No, that was just fun to write.

Do I believe in fairies at the end of my garden? Well, I'm not someone who believes that they are definitely there, but I would be open to the possibility.

Do I believe in fairies at all? I guess what I believe in is the possibility of fairies. I think that's the best way to describe it.

In my teenage, emo era I was definitely someone who was philosophy mad and a staunch believer in science and only the things that we can evidence, but nothing is that black and white, is it? I thought evidence had to be something that could be measured, or seen down a microscope or telescope. I thought the only things that mattered were the tangible and then I did a bit of growing up and I realised that there is more to heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. He meant science, but I think it kind of applies to both. And yes, I realise that quoting Shakespeare makes me seem a bit like a pedantic pr*ck but it's important. 

I went to a Jesuit university, and there were a few lecturers that liked to teach badly. Actually, no, there was one. She had this habit of teaching the scientific arguments for things in such an awful way that then the religious (Catholic) arguments seemed to vastly overpower the scientific arguments and it was almost like trying to prove that all scientists were idiots and honestly it just made the religious arguments look even weaker to most of us. But then another lecturer explained St Thomas Aquinas to us, and it was all about how there's always something at the start of the domino trail (not how he phrased it, but some of the language is a bit archaic). If the dominos are things like evolution and the Big Bang, you trace your way back and there is this idea of In the beginning, there was nothing. And that could be the start of the Bible or any religious text, but it could also be the start of a textbook when we talk about the Big Bang, and essentially, something happened, and then the dominoes fell and here we are. Effectively, whatever that something is, that's what Aquinas called God. And honestly, I'm on board with that theory. From minute one, that made a lot of sense to me. 

That wasn't even a tangent; essentially, I believe in that, whilst not knowing what to believe in, but feeling pretty comfortable that there was something, that in our darkest moments (or our happiest) we look to something other worldly, and I don't know what that is, but there's nothing to say it isn't fairies. There's nothing to say that whatever that something is that it is an is, and not a was (as in there's nothing to say it still exists) but if leaving the wildflowers to grow for the fairies makes you happy or comfortable, if praying to something or someone is what works, or if feeling we're alone in the universe and nothing matters is your bag, then hey, you do you. Maybe that's not the belief in fairies that people would think I have, but maybe fairies were just a way to understand butterflies, because people couldn't understand something so beautiful without it being magic? I don't know. And unlike that much younger me, I'm actually very comfortable with not knowing, though that's not to say I wouldn't be curious to find out. Come on, it's me after all.

I was about to click save on this, and then realised I needed to add that Ben Folds wrote a song called Philosophy, and it's brilliant, and. the chorus is basically about how [your] philosophy is what keeps you grounded and keeps you going, and it's so true, and whilst I wouldn't say it completely doesn't matter what your philosophy is, because let's face it, there have been some pretty harmful ones, if it helps you without hurting others (and I don't mean just people getting offended because you believe in fairies and they think it's stupid), well, there's really no problem in that, is there?