This probably gets too personal at points so apologies for that, but I've decided to keep it rather than trim it out as I usually do, so if you aren't ready for a discussion of my, frankly not brilliant, mental health, maybe do skip it.
Anyway.
If you haven't noticed by now, I'm pretty bad at maintaining this blog. When I started just over a year ago I had a pretty decent output for maybe the first two months and then dropped off pretty significantly. Part of this was just life, we all have one, (unless we die, but then you wouldn't be reading this notwithstanding act of God) and mine just got busy.
But to be honest, I also started overthinking about writing a lot; to tell you the quite blunt truth, I started writing this blog because in my more dramatic moments I was convinced (at 17, I should note) that I hadn't contributed much meaningful to the world outside of a few pictures of myself I literally wanted destroyed in a fire, so I decided to write this with the hope I could at least leave something I had a little pride(?) in by putting my political opinions out there, however bad they probably were.
I half expected these to either be completely ignored or picked apart by people more knowledgeable than me, so I always prefaced my opinions with an overuse of qualifiers like "perhaps" and ended up citing everything pretty rigorously so that I wasn't seen as completely silly, to the point where I feel very weird not having added any links in these past few paragraphs.
As it turned out, however, my work ended up resonating with people, I was featured on Liberal England, which excited me immensely, and I ended up being approached by Liberator Magazine to write a few articles as well as having my tiny account followed on Bluesky by people who have followings of their own in the thousands and thus to my mind obviously didn't have any business taking an interest in little old me! I have to say this did give me a bit of imposter syndrome, especially as so many people were genuinely shocked at my age in comparison to what they saw as the (perceived) maturity of my analysis.
This is to say I suddenly felt very intimidated and that led to me burning out quite rapidly out of fear I couldn't keep up to the expectations set in my first few blogs. As it stands I am now sitting on about twenty drafts of varying completion because I haven't been able to create an argument I felt was tight enough. You may notice my series on Harold Wilson stops after it's first entry and that's because after spending four months putting together the first one I realised I just didn't have the will to finish three more.
I have also evaded writing and speaking out on topics I am genuinely interested in but fear would possibly alienate people - well, more specifically men. - I have no concrete stats on this but from what I've gathered my audience is pretty male, and while I would like to write more on feminism, body image and eating disorders and how it all intersects in a society built mostly for the views of the men in it, and though these elements are often in my drafts, I have basically always cut them for fear of the reaction, particularly as they are mostly written from my own experience.
I can't help but feel aware it could potentially be quite uncomfortable reading for my audience - particularly as I don't really have a way to not express it scathingly - and so have refrained from doing it. I also have a few unfinished projects on Leveller women and Maria Edgeworth, both of which have startlingly little written about their contributions to Liberalism, philosophy and economics more generally.
Perhaps this is just a reflection that my biggest problem has always been that I have always sacrificed my own joy to avoid the discomfort (or worse reactions) of others. Despite the common view of me as a pretty obstinate, headstrong girl, I am far more tactful than people realise with what I do and don't say. On that note, I will also add that recent political developments have done me a lot of personal strife for reasons I don't particularly wish to discuss here, and that has made me less willing to write these. Or do anything really. But, that's all I really want to say on that matter at the moment.
All this is a tacit (now not so) admission that I'd like to know more about what people want from this blog, and would be interested in hearing opinions. I will probably also be doing a bit of restructuring to it this month so that I can write a bit more regularly.
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