Capturing simple things like writing, coding and piano practice on here seemed like a really sensible idea. And it was. Is.

What makes it hard is when the routine falls away as the Black Dog1 takes over and everything gets almost unbearable difficult to plough through.

How do you write a log of a day filled with negative thoughts, few actions beyond tea making, and an emptiness of mind that makes any thought up to and including “What’s for dinner?” really hard to process?

If this were a YouTube channel, or maybe Buzzfeed/Bored Panda etc, they would be confidently listing the FIVE THINGS THAT MAKE BLOGGING YOUR SHITE LIFE SUCCESSFUL and telling you that you can earn millions doing it at the same time.

I’m none of those sites. I’m just a guy, sitting in front of a screen, asking it to understand me. Which it’s rubbish at, by the way. All it does is reflect back my moods and insecurities in everything I write or do. I suppose that’s it’s job, but I still find it quite rude.

Back in the very beginning days of blogging, when I started Smile Through It, I had a surprising amount to write about given my physical state. I was doing things, seeing people, working. That feels a world away from today.

At the time I was convinced that post-transplant life would be nothing but upward progress. Instead, after a decade of joy, I’m now five years into very little but misery. There are light times, light moments, high points — life is never 100% awful, even if it’s a struggle to find the light in the dark — but the majority of my days are spent the same way, which is to say largely unproductively.

That blog was about learning to see the positive in every day. It was about nurturing an openness to notice the positive beats of a day. I don’t know why that feels so impossible now.

So, how you do you write a daily blog when you’re overwhelmed with negativity? You do it like this, I suppose.

This post is a 4am stream of consciousness and as such I’ve decided not to edit it. Apologies for any egregious SPAG errors.

  1. Often attributed to Winston Churchill it is, like many things, not a phrase he used himself. I really like it, though; it’s wonderfully evocative. ↩ī¸Ž