I’m not sure I’m ever more generally depressed during the year, than I am at the start of November.

I guess I can attribute it to some specific reasons. Like the stress of extra expenses for gifts. The nostalgia of childhood trips to Florida to spend a full week with cousins I only got to see once a year, if even that. Husband having to work extra long hours and the actual holidays because his job is merciless. All the extra time that you need to somehow fit in, in an already overloaded schedule, for all the obligatory holiday festivities.

Yes those expenses are always stressful, but even when you plan ahead you still have to do the research, the shopping, the wrapping, etc.

Yes, the memories of those trips will always make me smile, but they also make me extremely sad because even if I could afford to book us all flights to go tomorrow, all my cousins are grown and scattered around with their own families and commitments. As much as I’d love to see them at any age, childhood is still over.

Yes, anytime my husband is not home on even the smallest of holidays, it makes me sad. The extra money helps money stress a little, but I would much rather have him home.

Losing my sister and nieces back when I turned 16 has never helped the situation either, but that pretty much adds a note of sadness to literally everything in my life all year round, not just now.

And while for some, the festivities is what they live for, I find it to be such a chore. I don’t care for shopping in general, it’s cute to have the tree and decorations up for a little while, but I could not enjoy putting it all up any less. And sorry not sorry, I’m just not a Christmas music person. It just amplifies my sadness.

So yes, there’s all those very specific reasons, but it also feels like there’s something else under the surface that I can never quite put my finger on. Like if none of those reasons existed for me, I would still feel depressed anyway.

Maybe I’ll never figure it out, but it would have been nice if I hadn’t had such a crippling bout with impostor syndrome last year so I could have been so much farther along at this point than currently I am.

I’m still on track to meet the deadline I’ve set for myself this year, but I would be lying if I said that pushing through the oppressively heavy depression I’m feeling right now, isn’t incredibly challenging and adding exponentially to the pressure.

Looking back, it really wasn’t but it certainly seemed so at the time and change was desperately needed regardless. Change things definitely did. Some for the better, some for the worse, far worse.

I’m a very private person so I don’t share a lot. Even before it became a stream of opinionated nonsense that I lost all interest in reading, my contributions to the Facebook feed were already few and far between. And they were far from personal.

Whenever there’s a patch rough enough to put me in a really dark place emotionally, I clam up. I don’t reach out to friends, and even family won’t hear about it unless they happen to ask. I am working on it, but I have a ways to go.

Despite being 4 years old now, this blog has never really developed into anything because of this. Well partially.

My expectations were never much, and with my “sharing issues” I knew it was never going to serve a cathartic purpose. Mostly I had hoped to document positive changes as well as what kept me sane from day to day. And maybe find a few like-minded readers who could sorta relate.

Clearly that didn’t happen. And even though this is technically yet another “I’m still alive” kind of post, this time I’ve also opted to just start over from scratch and take down all my old posts.

I’m kinda feeling like my original intentions when I created this blog, while well meaning, were kinda unrealistic and unnatural for me. I was trying to follow too many guidelines about what a “successful” blog should be.

Niche down your topics, always include a featured image, promote your posts across your social media, post at minimum X times a week/month and at X time of day.

Once upon a time, blogging was enjoyable and therapeutic for me. But trying to follow those guidelines added pressure, and kept me from writing most days (when I felt like writing at all at least) for the fear of not fitting into the niche I’d settled on.

Plus, I feel like I’m chasing too many, let alone far more important, forms of “success” in my life as it is. I don’t have time for all that formality.

No matter what anybody says, some of us just can’t narrow down our interests. There are a variety of things that keep me sane day to day, and the positive changes rarely all fit in a single category.

I float back and forth between entirely unrelated hobbies constantly, and the changes I feel like talking about could be as trivial as my hair color one day or as major as considering moving house another day.

I can’t pick just one thing to talk about, or I’d have to have 10 different niche blogs to maintain. And I don’t always feel like talking about the one thing consistently, let alone taking/finding the perfect featured image to set the mood for every post so that google might notice and index me.

Bleh what a drag, sometimes I just want to ramble and get it out of my system.

So, I’m not going to pick anymore. And I’m done worrying about writing for an audience that I may eventually have in some far off distant future, if at all. I’m going to write for me from now on, screw the rules.

If you found this post and made it through to the end. First of all, consider me impressed, I literally babbled about nothing. Second of all, thank you.