The loneliness of the long distance blogger

by Rick Johansen

There’s a world of difference between being fed-up and being clinically depressed, a difference I didn’t pick up on straight away as a clinically depressed teenage boy. With the exception of my dear old mum, no one picked up on the possibility that the 13 year old me might have a mental health condition, other than being sulky, miserable and essentially feeling sorry for myself. Said dear old mum carted me off to a child psychiatrist, which I attended every Tuesday afternoon for around two years (she losing pay from work, making her even poorer and me permanently falling behind in a number of subjects). The night terrors and panic attacks gradually became manageable, the depression has never gone away. For all that, I am the lucky one.

Around 1970, mental illness had not yet been invented, so various family members merely reminded me not to feel sorry for myself and, unforgettably, my dear old grandfather would tell me to pull myself together. Oddly, for someone with a terrible short and long term and short term memory, I can close my eyes and I am there, in my grandparents’ tiny ‘living room’. “Pull yourself together,” he would say. “And stop fidgeting!” If I had been sharp enough, I’d have responded along the lines of, “Grandad. I’ve got this thing called ADHD. It hasn’t been invented yet and I won’t get a diagnosis until you’re long gone. It will explain everything.” He wasn’t in any way a bad person. In fact, he was kind and gentle. But I guess everyone has a breaking point. I was his.

I felt particularly fed up late last night when I viewed the statistics for this blog. Although I don’t know who specifically has read the blog, I know how many people have and, indeed, the part of the world they are inhabiting at that moment in time when they read, or rather click, on a post. Yesterday, I wrote what I somewhat immodestly felt was one of my better efforts and by close of play late last night the blog had received a grand total of six views. As I write, mid morning the day after, that number has increased by a staggering 33% to eight views. “I worked hard on that blog,” I said silently. “And I poured my heart and soul into it, especially as it was a real story about someone who had taken their own life.” How could the world be so ungrateful? (By the way, I didn’t and don’t feel like that at all.) Yes, I felt a bit low, a bit flat; frankly, a bit of a failure, but that is my normal mindset. There are links to my depression, but mainly this really is self-pitying nonsense, feeling sorry for myself. Grandad, if his ashes to return from the Bristol Channel and he was to spring back to life, would have been entirely justified in telling me to pull myself together. I should point out that of those eight views, a good few will be me because my clicks, often for corrections and re-reads count to the total. Maybe I am my own biggest reader? I rather think so.

The reasons why I am not a published and paid writer are mainly to do with my own failings. I do not and cannot just write about one subject, something I know most successful bloggers are able to do. If I wrote solely about, say, trains, aeroplanes, football or whatever, I might acquire a regular following. My loyal reader is not going to be interested in all the same subjects that I am. Some subjects will be an absolute turn off. I could pretend that the position of obscurity I hold in the wacky world of blogging is solely down to bad luck, the fact that I am not married to Wayne Rooney or Tyson Fury, I am not a member of the establishment where favours are handed down to the right people, I don’t have a ghostwriter or use AI (no one has ever seen artificial or even real intelligence in my writing) but the real truth is that what I write doesn’t appeal to that many people. And that’s fine.

I write because I can and because I love and need to. I write whatever comes into my head at the time, or what I have been lying in bed thinking about before hitting the keyboard. Yes, I suppose to do write to entertain my loyal reader and to make her/him think about what I have written, whether it’s bollocks or not. My shortcomings in life, my lack of scholastic and professional success, contribute to my depression, but they are not the conscious reason for it. That’s because my depression is an illness. Being fed up at getting eight hits for a blog I thought was half-decent is just being fed-up and the feeling passes, usually as soon as I start writing something else. Like this.

I don’t fool myself by thinking that writing is the one thing I am good at. I don’t feel that at all. I am well aware of the tics in my writing, the mangled grammar and the frequent typos, and that’s down, in large part, to my other shortcomings, illnesses and conditions. I have even bought and read books on grammar, making extensive notes along the way, and then carried on writing having remembered and learned next to nothing. Still. It barely matters now. To quote that stupid expression, it is what it is. (Does anyone ever say it isn’t what it isn’t?)

Writing, whether on this blog, for the Bristol Rovers matchday programme (RIP), the Bristol Rovers website, the Bristol Post, Bristol 24/7 or in my runaway unsuccessful book Corfu not a scorcher  this is actually a success story. I’ve been writing for most of my adult life and while I haven’t quite made a living out of it, I’m still at the keyboard, banging out the words every day, occasionally in the right order.

Writing makes me happy, it sometimes make me sad but it doesn’t make me depressed. In fact, it keeps me alive, keeps my remaining brain cells active and I still look forward to writing something every day. Writing today makes a clinical depressive happy. As a clinical depressive, it doesn’t get much better, even if nobody is reading.

PS Thanks for reading.

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