Looking Back – A Personal View of the Year

I thought I’d put together a few thoughts at the end of ‘My First Year’ of this blog and the ideas that have encompassed the last year for me.Today’s post is a more personal one about the technicalities of the blog – tomorrow I hope to write more about the more general themes that have been covered and after that, a little look forward!

Although my first post on this blog was published on the 23rd November 2007, I didn’t really start ‘properly’ (that is, regularly) until 13th April 2008.

I had in my head that writing a blog would be a positive thing. I think, regardless of the profession and my training, I am a fairly reflective person. I think about things a lot.

Having just finished most of the substantial work on my course to become an Approved Social Worker – and returning to deadline specific academic writing after a few years away, I decided to try detailing my thoughts as I went. Instead of the writing being handed in at the end of the day, I published it here.

My first ‘tagged’ post appeared on the 17th April. Generally, I was writing for myself at that point. Most days I had zero readers – in fact, in the whole of April 2007, I had two ‘hits’ , but that was how I had expected it to be. I didn’t really go looking for other blogs much, I certainly hadn’t linked to them. I didn’t want to go ‘public’.

I was writing pretty much about the end of my course and worries about handing in so most of the focus revolved around deadlines and concerns about not making them and the quality of the content I was submitting.

My first comment came in on the 22nd April. I was thrilled, to be honest. I think it was someone who had found me randomly on WordPress.com. I certainly had done nothing to go out and ‘get myself known’.

That came about a week or so later. I wanted to make sure that I’d be able to at least make an attempt to post fairly regularly until I ‘made myself known’.

Of course, this is an anonymous blog. I did actually start with a different ‘name’ – two words of which C and B were the first letters. I thought it sounded rubbish so I shorted it. I think if I were to start over, the one thing I’d change is that I’d invent a proper name rather than using two random initials. I still might change that at some point because I think it sounds a bit rubbish!

At that point, I was mixing my writing between Mental Health and Social Work – and it’s where I settled. I have veered towards more personal posts that I expected but for two reasons I am not overly concerned

Firstly that in general, I enjoy my work and I work in a good office environment. I have some gripes but a lot of them are not specific to my workplace. If I were ‘discovered’ there’s nothing that I have written that would place me in difficulty. I have a gut feeling that managers wouldn’t like me writing regularly but I don’t think there is anything that I wouldn’t be happy to have written under my own name. I just want to preserve that option. Things may not always be so rosy.

Secondly, I have absolutely left enough clues that if anyone I knew or worked with was actually reading this, they would be in no doubt about my identity. Things like the office reshuffle and some of the things I have referred to about the area I work in (I have specified London but if you know the areas involved, I think you would know what I have been referring to – or be able to narrow it down!) make me think that I have made myself identifiable enough to people involved.

One of the reasons I hadn’t started writing earlier than I did was that in some ways, I felt awkward enough at times, intruding on the private moments of someone’s life. I tend to work with people who are at crisis points by some means or another. I felt something may betray that trust if I were to share those moments and comments more globally.

My consideration was partly settled by the thought that I could completely anonymise. I am extremely careful with anonymising. I change details, genders, family composition and diagnoses at times. I think for me, the worst thing would be for someone who I felt had instilled me with that trust would think that I would write about them. Often the reality is far more absurb than the  account presented. Such is life.

The situations though, are honest. The first time I mentioned an individual I worked with was in my post of the 28th May.

Secondly I hope it comes across and certainly it’s something that I consistently feel that I have an enormous amount of respect for the people I work with. I think most professionals do to be honest. There might be an occasional offhand comment in the office but it makes my skin crawl when the person sitting next to me is dismissive of people she sees. I genuinely find it incredibly offensive.

Initially I tried to create a structure to posts in my head. So some days I would write Social Work specific posts, some days I would write Mental Health specific posts and I would mix them up with more ‘personal experience’ posts. Now, I do this much less and focus on writing what I find interesting or events as they have happened. Perhaps the structure would make for an easier read but events don’t always occur in neat boxes.

The social work posts tended to get more ‘hits’ at this time. I was also searching for other blogs and putting together links that I found useful and helpful.

I was (and still am) thrilled to get above 10 readers for a day. Now I think my average veers around ten times that – but one of the main reasons is that I’m getting a lot of traffic from searches and the more I write and have written, the more there is to be searched through!

I toyed with doing a round-up post but I had a little accident in the autumn (involving running across one of the busier roads in the Central London area and tripping up before I made it across). While the medical implications were not serious (sprained muscle, swollen ligaments, twisted ankle), it did seem to hurt more than running, tripping and falling hurt before I was 12! That set me back a bit and needing to slow down the rate a bit with the aim of putting less pressure on myself at a time I was feeling quite low, made me abandon any kind of necessity to post regularly.  I stopped the round ups because they were quite a lot of work to put together. It may well be something I return to..

Strangely enough, even though there have been few ‘working days’ I have missed since then, taking the pressure off myself with the ‘need’ to write has felt marginally liberating.

My most popular post, unsurprisingly, is the About Me page. I added a ‘Comment Policy’ section to it after I got a string of offensive, libelous and frankly just inappropriate comments and emails. That was when I put in the stronger comment moderation. A group of people seemed to want to attack Social Workers in general and had publicised the address of the blog on one of their forums as an attempt to ‘get back’. Well, it’s been a little quiet in that direction but every now and then I get some more so that’s the way it stays.

As I work full time I don’t always have the chance to moderate comments ‘in real time’ but I have a wonderful smart phone (ok, it isn’t that wonderful and it is a bit on the clunky side)  that often does the job for me when I’m out and about!

The Southern Cross posts have been the next most popular. I get a lot of search terms relating to them.

Other popular search terms seem to come up with the ‘No roads in London’ post. I can almost tell when there’s a quiz with that question as I get spikes of searches for ‘City with No Roads’ and the like.

I have also had a lot of searches for ‘alone at Christmas’ and similar terms.

As for what I have achieved – I have proved to myself more than anything that I can write on a regular basis, that I have found a far more positive ‘outlet’ when frustrated and most importantly, I feel I have made some important connections with other people in other settings, other circumstances and other countries that have both motivated and inspired me.

So where am I going?

I’ll leave that for another day.  Tomorrow I hope to look more at some of the more general themes that have presented themselves this year.

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by and contributed, or read or agreed or disagreed. I really do appreciate it and it is what has really motivated me to keep going.

Happy New Year!