Any day can be Blue Monday

Today, the third Monday of January, is commonly referred to as Blue Monday. It’s considered to be the most depressing day of the year. By this time people are feeling down because they have broken all their New Year’s resolutions and there’s still another week until pay day.

Day’s like this that receive a lot of coverage in the press can be both damaging and helpful to mental health awareness. They can harm mental health awareness by giving the impression that depression or other illnesses only happen on particular days, but they can be helpful by bringing conversations up with people. They can be helpful to highlight that every day can be a Blue Monday, it is not confined to a single Monday in January. Instead it can strike on any day, at any time. My Blue Monday’s have been on a Friday in December, a Monday in August, and a Tuesday in January. Each on years or months apart. What’s important to know is that they are all survivable.

If you are struggling with your own Blue Monday you’re not alone. People are there to help you, be they family, friends, or healthcare professionals. They all care about you. Don’t suffer in silence.

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Sometimes it just clicks but I was fortunate with my first guess.

Reviewing some of my subscriptions that are up for renewal soon. Decided to have a look at the built in calendar app on macOS. Didn’t realise it had support for conference calls built in now, might be able to drop Fantastical now.

At the end of a long week an hour on the sofa reading The Return of the King was exactly what I needed. 📚

I got a yellow HomePod mini for Christmas, it arrived yesterday, and I’m finding it really hard to resist making shortcuts to use with it when I should be working.

Keep it simple…

Part of my approach to the new year involved rediscovering one of my habits. I’ve been trying to write a blog post more often. I initially intended to use my Micro.blog and to post all my content there, but given the chance to reflect I realised I wanted my longer posts to live here. I’m not committing to a set number of posts per week, but I am committing to posting here more often.

All week I’ve been thinking about what to write about. Everytime I opened my iPad and sat down to write something I couldn’t think of anything to write. It started to become a problem. I wanted to write a post, but I didn’t know what to write. I wanted to write a post but I began to feel like I didn’t have anything to say. I wanted to write but I began to believe I didn’t have anything to say or write.

This is evening as I sat here recovering from my counselling session I was bumbling around on the internet. Something made me google a photographer whose blog I used to follow years ago. I even have one of his photos. To my delight I found his website and realised he was still blogging regularly. As I scrolled through his posts I came across one titled Stop hiding behind complexity. The first line struck me:

Whether we like to admit it or not, we sometimes enjoy making the simplest task more difficult because it's easier to blame the many loops it would have taken to finish it if we don't succeed.

I realised perhaps this is what I’m doing with my blog. I want to write a post but I think that I need to write something significant. Instead of sitting down to write something, be it about something I’ve read or done this week, I’m making the simple task complicated. The likelihood is that it’s easier to not post something and hide behind the thought that I have nothing to say than it is to open Obsidian and write until I’ve put something together worth posting. If I want to write for my blog more often, it should be as simple as writing a post and publishing it. No second guessing myself and no worrying about whether I have something to say. Just writing.

I really dislike the way businesses refer to people as resources. Four meetings today and everyone has said we need more resources to do something. They are people. You need more people to do it.

Discovered that iA Writer has the ability to publish to Micro.blog. Time to give it another go I think, it’s always been a nice writing experience and it also works with Hook according to the Hook documentation.

Thanks to Hook I’m finding myself looking at notes apps that play nicely with it. Obsidian is halfway there but Craft seems to be the most compatible.