This is my one hundredth post on this blog! To celebrate, I’m going to tell you a bit about why I write here.
This isn’t my first blog; I used to have one with Livejournal but I wrote on it about once a month or even less than that. I started this blog in June last year and I wrote perhaps every week or two but I still didn’t have that much to talk about. Two things changed that. One factor was my health, and the other was politics.
Last summer I had surgery which kept me in bed for several weeks. (Warning, grossness behind that link!) Just as I was recovering from that, I had to have surgery again because the problem came back. Then I had flu, and was in bed again. Then I had more flu… I ended up in a full relapse of my ME and a whole new lot of pain which might be diabetes complications or fibromyalgia. Being in bed all day gave me lots of time to think and write, unfortunately various symptoms often conspire to prevent me writing. Brain fog means I often can’t think for long enough to construct a whole paragraph. (Although I can still manage a 140 character tweet!) I am quite often unable to sit up in bed, so can’t type on a keyboard. I can still use my phone though, and have written several blog posts using the wordpress app, typing on my touchscreen phone with just one thumb! I often use twitter this way too.
Politics gave me something to actually write about. You have probably noticed that I get angry about politics quite easily. I describe myself as an “angry lefty” and the current government has done plenty to get me worked up. I have written about the government, their policies on cuts, their attachment to big business rather than the people, the police and their abuses of power and the chilling effect that they have on protests. I have written about freedom of speech, privacy, and the right to protest.
I have often written about my illness. When I write about being ill I usually think that I am just moaning too much and tend to be quite apologetic about it to my readers, but they tell me that they love me writing about illness and to write more. Writing about ME and the impact it has on me has shown quite a few people the realities of living with this kind of illness. Some of what I have written has turned out to be accidental poetry, or so I am told. I have even written a couple of book reviews, although one of them was intensely political. Well it fitted the theme.
So I have had plenty of time to write, and between the government, the police, and my illness, I have plenty to write about. But what really kicked this all off is the protests against the tuition fee rises. During that #dayx protest, I was watching live TV news. (On three different channels at once!) I saw the vandalism of the infamous police van, and all the events leading up to it. I was outraged that the news reports about it were all wrong, and so I wrote about it on my blog. I updated that article through that day as I received more information. But the real surprise is that my blog post got twelve thousand hits! That is what really motivated me to start writing more. I realised that words written here can have real power and make a real difference, good or bad. Since then I have written a blog post almost every day. On most days this blog gets about 100 page views. About once a month I manage to write something that really resonates and will get as many as 1,000 views. I started out by ranting quite a lot, but I have been making an effort to include more facts, more evidence, and less anger. It’s still all my opinions, but I hope that I make that clear and direct people to the evidence to decide for themselves. It’s a long slow learning process, but I think I’m winning.
This blog has been great therapy for me personally. Finding subjects to write about and researching them has given me something to do with no time pressure. Knowing that people actually read it gives me some sense of purpose while I am stuck in bed. My combined efforts on this blog, facebook and twitter have, I think had an impact on the anti-cuts movement despite me being unable to go out and join them. It has led to me writing articles for Liberal Conspiracy, (1,2) Beyond Clicktivism,(1,2,) One Month Before Heartbreak(1,2,3,4) and The Broken Of Britain. (I have an article to be published there next week and a regular slot after that.)
And so, here we are at 100 blog posts. 23,378 page views. 18,851 visits. 14,231 unique visitors. The most popular post ever was about a police van. Here’s to another 100 blog posts!
This blog in other places
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My writing in other places
- When the police march against job losses – we should join in solidarity
- Top policeman has audacity to compare protesting with theft
- Is Twitter Just for Trivia?
- Online Campaigning Counts
- Invisible Illness, Invisible Benefits
- My dad, working through the pain
- Pleasure and Pain
- Head In The Sand
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