#another post without trigger warnings

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Oof, well friends there are probably not going to be many posts this week. But the good news is I do not have covid. 

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I’m about three weeks into this ‘week on, week off’ approach to the blog and I’m already starting to see some differences.

I’m slower, I’m not posting as much. But I’m also reading more again and starting to realise how stressed and overwhelmed I was getting before because *wow* is it less now. 

I’m going to keep with this system for a while. I think it will result in less posts long term and probably in the askbox closing quicker too. But I also hope it’ll improve the quality of answers again and give me some time to work on the masterpost I keep promising. 

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Apologies and a bit more explanation

So I know that the output on the blog has gone down a lot over the last few months and I’ve been taking a lot more time off. And it looks like there aren’t going to be any posts this week either. 

There isn’t one big thing behind all of this it’s just that this year has hit me pretty hard. Most of this is stuff my more long term followers will already know. 

I work in medical testing, in a facility that specialises in lung diseases. Over the year we’ve had a lot of last minute changes to how we work which have effectively eroded a bunch of the benefits we had (like flexible working hours, sick pay and carrying over holiday days.) We’ve lost a lot of people at work as a result. At the same time we haven’t been able to train or hire people for most of the year. So we’ve had the same workload falling on fewer and fewer people. 

Like most people this year I’ve lost a lot of my usual ways of socialising, exercising and having fun. I’ve also just been straight up sick for a lot of the year.

Plus I’m mentally ill, and I think all of us can agree that this year has been a little anxiety inducing.

I think over the last few months it’s just caught up with me and I haven’t really had the energy or emotional resilience to work on the blog as much as I’d like. 

I’m hoping that at least some of this will even out soon. There should be posts next week. Thank you all for sticking with me through this, I know some of you have been waiting a long time for answers to your questions. 

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Just a heads up: although this is a week where I’m working on the blog last week was a bit of a disaster. I’m not sure there’s going to be much over the next two weeks. 

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Have you ever considered starting a GoFundMe or fundraiser page for people who want to help pay for English copies of research?

Only very briefly. Partly because (I’m big enough to admit this) I have a lot of issues around being self reliant and it feels close to profiting from all this pain in a way that makes me uncomfortable. (I don’t think this is logical but it is something I can’t quite get past emotionally.)

 But the other issue is copyright. I don’t own the rights to the books and papers I’d like to translate. Some of the authors are still alive. They need income and funding for their research, I don’t want to take from that.

 I also don’t own the right to translate these texts on a large scale. That belongs to the publisher. And frankly the idea of having to deal with French publishing law scares the shit out of me in a way that physical harm does not.

 I won’t dismiss it completely. If the price comes back as completely outside my pay grade then it might be a choice of that or never read it. Or learn more languages just to translate it.

 I’ll be honest Anon I don’t know what the best answer is here. The simplest seems to be paying for it myself. Which I hope I can afford to do.

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Going forward into 2021

Firstly, hello to all the new followers I’ve gained, it’s lovely to see you. :)

As a lot of you know I struggled to keep up with the blog through most of last year. I was ill a lot and rushed off my feet at work (my day job is medical testing, primarily for lung diseases) and I found it difficult to get any sort of work/life balance. I ended up pushing myself a lot to get blog stuff done and my own writing took a bit of a back seat. I tend to feel really guilty when there isn’t a post every day for the blog and that has led me to ignore my own limits quite a bit. 

I am also really bad at following my own advice and taking breaks. 

One of the things I want to do this year is take more time to work on my own projects. So I’m planning to try out a ‘week on/week off’ approach to the blog.

What this will mean is I’ll essentially work on blog stuff for a week, queue it all up and then take the next week for my own projects. 

I don’t know if it’ll work. I may try it for a month and then give up. But I hope it will give me time to unwind from last year and strike a better, healthier work/life balance. I also hope it will mean I feel less pressured to work on the blog when I’m ill or not in a mental state to do so. 

We’ll see how it goes. 

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I need a week off

I’ve had a terrible couple of weeks and I really need a break. 

I’ll be back on the 10th. 

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Askbox is clear!

Aaaand that’s the last of them. This message will be posting during a week when I’m ‘off’ the blog. So the askbox will be reopening when I’m back on Monday the 8th of March. 

Hopefully I’ll be able to get the will together to update the masterpost page and make some new masterposts as well. 

See you all on the 8th :)

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