Where I’ve been

Hello… remember me? Please say yes…

So, yeah, this is awkward. I know I disappeared for a long time and without any warning, and I’m really sorry for that, but the last few months have been pretty tough. If you’re interested enough to want to know all the things that have happened to me since last November, please keep reading. On the other hand, if you’re just here for some hot wetlook action, feel free to skip to my next post which will follow this one almost immediately.

This is, I don’t know, maybe my fourth attempt at writing a post like this, and this is already the furthest I’ve got without having a crisis of confidence and deleting the whole thing, so I guess that’s a good sign.

*deep breath*

So the main reason why I’ve not posted in so long is that, around the end of last year, I realised I didn’t like my brain. I’ve suffered from anxiety and bouts of depression for as long as I can remember, right back to childhood, when I first realised that things like avoiding social situations and being terrified of talking on the phone weren’t “normal”. Luckily for most of my adult life I’ve been able to do use the internet to do “grown up” things like banking, buying large household appliances and socialising without having to actually speak to anyone – you know, the sort of things most people wouldn’t think twice about doing over the phone or face to face with a stranger. It’s been an enormous help but I still get overwhelmed sometimes; that’s one of the reasons I put off going public on UMD about my wetlook fetish. Of course, eventually I bit the bullet and “came out”, and within hours I was inundated with messages. I tried my best to reply to them all, I really did, but I found I was becoming more and more anxious about the sheer number of people wanting to talk to me, and the thought that if I didn’t reply to every message I was letting people down, and eventually my hopelessly fragile brain just collapsed under the weight of that (self-inflicted) pressure and I had to take a break from UMD for my own sanity. This helped a bit, but then I started to worry that by disappearing and suddenly ending all these conversations, I’d probably pissed off a few people who I’d come to regard as friends, so really it’s a vicious circle of unnecessary guilt. If you’re one of my old UMD friends and you’re still interested enough in me to be reading this, I’m truly sorry for disappearing and I’ll try to get back in touch, I just can’t be on UMD ploughing through all those messages all the time. I hope you understand.

But hey, it’s not all about my brain being unable to cope with other people, lots of other unpleasant and trying things have been happening too! In early December I was visiting family in Scotland and agreed to take my niece Eilidh [note]Actually my cousin’s daughter, which makes her my first cousin once removed, but who can be bothered saying all that?[/note] to her Brownies camp early on a Saturday morning. All things considered, this has not gone down in history as one of my better ideas.

It was in the middle of a particularly cold snap and there was some ice on the roads, so I was driving even more carefully than usual, but about a mile from our destination the car skidded on a patch of black ice and we pirouetted through a fence into a field, where an inquisitive cow came to see if we were okay. Luckily we were fine, at least physically, but it was immensely traumatic for both of us, especially Eilidh as it was her side of the car that hit the fence, so her airbag went off, which was actually scarier than the impact itself. As luck would have it, the first people on the scene were one of Eilidh’s friends and her mum, on their way to camp too, so they took Eilidh the rest of the way while I was left to deal with the insurance company and the recovery truck. The car didn’t seem too badly damaged, but because the airbag had deployed they wrote the whole thing off, so I had the stress of having to get a new car on top of the trauma of the accident and the guilty feelings about how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been driving so carefully. If we’d been going a bit faster… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

So the insurance saga dragged on right through Christmas until early January, and a few days after the accident I came down with a cold, which turned into a chest infection, so Christmas was basically as big a write-off as the car. And I realise this is now becoming an absurd catalogue of self-pity so I’ll spare you the details of how I got made redundant in February, just after I’d taken out a loan for a replacement car, and fast forward through to the more positive things that have happened.

Ha ha, well, it’s not quite that bad! Some positive things have happened. For one, losing my job has given me an excuse to move back to Scotland; I felt like a needed a change of scenery and a fresh start, so now I’m sharing a flat with one of my old uni friends. It means I can see my family more often, which is a bigger help with my mental health than I had anticipated. And the scenery’s nicer! I’m no longer living on my own, but as I’m only paying half the rent I can afford to work freelance for a bit and see what happens, which has given me time to enjoy the amazing summer we’ve had this year. My brain is still a bit fragile, but overall I’m feeling much better than I was at the start of the year, and I’ve even got my wetlook mojo back… but that, my friends, is another story. 😉

If you’re still reading, thanks, it means a lot, and you’re now at the end of probably the driest post I’ll ever write. As a reward, you can now go and read the story of how I got “accidentally” caught in a downpour recently. But if you could see your way to maybe clicking on one or two of the ads strewn around my blog, or following the “Buy me a coffee” link, it would help a struggling freelancer out no end.[note]If you’re seeing the same ad I’m seeing, one which promises you’ve won a fantastic Apple product, maybe don’t click on that one. Looks very dodgy to me. And if you do, don’t blame me when your “fantastic Apple product” turns out to be a Mr Kipling’s individual apple pie.[/note] Thanks guys!

Hannah xx