Two pieces of exciting news for you today, which I have cryptically trailed in the blog heading.

Firstly, the maps arrived in the post. So I’ll be getting my head stuck into those as soon as I can. I have a vision of a wall covered in maps, peppered with pins each linked to another with colour-coded string. Think Matthew McConaughey’s storage unit in True Detective, but with a bit less crazy.

Also, as you know by now if you are reading this, I launched the website.

It’s not exactly how I want it. I will keep building it as we go. But it is, as my counsellor would say, good enough.

Feedback welcome, but please go easy on me. I’ve never built a website before and I’m a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned (Pumbaa the Warthog, 1994).

Where’s my head at?

Amidst all the excitement of the maps arriving and the website heading out into the big, bad world, I’m afraid I must set this in the context of the absolute state of my mind today.

Lockdown, and everything that comes with it, does funny things to people. For me, it has undoubtedly lowered my defences designed to stop negative thoughts morphing into pervasive and destructive emotions. So, it doesn’t take much to send me into a tailspin and it is even harder to bring myself out of it.

I am going through one of those periods today. It never lasts more than a few days and it always passes. I am holding on to this as something that has always been true, so why should it be any different this time?

The most common shitty and pointless emotions that cross my path during these “dips” are my old friends self-loathing, hopelessness and irrational anger. The first two pass with time so I just let them be. But I tend to suppress and smother the anger bit, which is not helpful or healthy.

My eldest daughter (age 10) is the same – although she is still at the stage of completely losing her shit with folk when things happen that she feels “should not” (or vice-versa). I feel the same, but I’ve got really good at swallowing it down, rather than blasting it into the face of the person doing the thing they should / should not be.

I’m sure this is a theme that will be explored further in future missives. We all have mental health, good and bad, and I don’t intend to pretend that I am any different through the course of this blog. I will talk about my mental health and maybe that will help me. Maybe it will help you too. Wouldn’t that be something?