Not A Daily Log (009)

Capturing simple things like writing, coding and piano practice on here seemed like a really sensible idea. And it was. Is.

What makes it hard is when the routine falls away as the Black Dog1 takes over and everything gets almost unbearable difficult to plough through.

How do you write a log of a day filled with negative thoughts, few actions beyond tea making, and an emptiness of mind that makes any thought up to and including “What’s for dinner?” really hard to process?

If this were a YouTube channel, or maybe Buzzfeed/Bored Panda etc, they would be confidently listing the FIVE THINGS THAT MAKE BLOGGING YOUR SHITE LIFE SUCCESSFUL and telling you that you can earn millions doing it at the same time.

I’m none of those sites. I’m just a guy, sitting in front of a screen, asking it to understand me. Which it’s rubbish at, by the way. All it does is reflect back my moods and insecurities in everything I write or do. I suppose that’s it’s job, but I still find it quite rude.

Back in the very beginning days of blogging, when I started Smile Through It, I had a surprising amount to write about given my physical state. I was doing things, seeing people, working. That feels a world away from today.

At the time I was convinced that post-transplant life would be nothing but upward progress. Instead, after a decade of joy, I’m now five years into very little but misery. There are light times, light moments, high points — life is never 100% awful, even if it’s a struggle to find the light in the dark — but the majority of my days are spent the same way, which is to say largely unproductively.

That blog was about learning to see the positive in every day. It was about nurturing an openness to notice the positive beats of a day. I don’t know why that feels so impossible now.

So, how you do you write a daily blog when you’re overwhelmed with negativity? You do it like this, I suppose.


This post is a 4am stream of consciousness and as such I’ve decided not to edit it. Apologies for any egregious SPAG errors.


  1. Often attributed to Winston Churchill it is, like many things, not a phrase he used himself. I really like it, though; it’s wonderfully evocative. ↩︎

Daily Log 008

Wow. It’s been a tough couple of days. To say the literal least. I’ve literally managed zero coding and zero writing. Looking back, it’s easy to see that the first seven days of this log have been utterly misleading and how semi-miraculous they were in how much I achieved.

Instead, Tuesday night I didn’t sleep until 05.15 and then managed some broken hours up to around midday. Last night (Wednesday) I managed a fairly solid block from 1-2am-ish until around 8 or 9am this morning. That’s not enough sleep, and certainly not enough sleep when under stress. And stress is rocketing right now.

They saying buying a house is the most stressful thing you’ll ever do. Honestly, if that was true for whoever coined the phrase (or finds it to be true), they have led a very blessed life. That said, it’s definitely right up near the top of the list. When the looming threat of the deal collapsing raises its head, that’s when things get really bad.

The biggest issue for me, though, is what stress can do to my mood. Years of being clinically depressed and, more recently, diagnosed with Bipolar 2 means that I understand how I react to things pretty well. When things go wrong it can have very real, very severe consequences to my mood, sinking me into deeply depressed states. Sometimes I pull of of them quickly, other times I don’t.1

It’s scary when you don’t know how long that sort of state will last. Time slows down, appetite disappears, everything becomes pointless and it’s hard to even shift off the sofa.2 That’s fine if it lasts for a day or two, but more than that and there’s a very real chance I’m going to be in it for the long haul, which is a very, very dangerous place to be.

So that’s how the last two days have been. A bad situation with our house sale has put our house purchase in jeopardy and it dropped my mood to intimidating lows. I couldn’t even face typing out a summary last night, so hopefully this means I’ve made a little bit of progress.

Sleep helps, so fingers crossed for a better, longer, more settled night and a brighter outlook in the morning to make more progress on the things I want to be focusing on.


Side note: I did at least manage to teach myself Mad World in two days, probably helped because it was a song that reflected my mood pretty well!

  1. Or can’t – that’s the more accurate term. The thing with depression as a clinical state is that it’s not a choice, it’s an involuntary state of being. ↩︎
  2. It’s important to recognise that clinical depression presents differently in everyone. Some people become almost literally catatonic, others can appear to function “normally” most of the time, but dissolve into tears at any given moment. Everyone has their own flavour, none of which is better or worse than others. ↩︎

Daily Log 007

  • Slept: 00.30
  • Woke: 09.00
  • Screenplay pages: 9
  • Coding practice: 1 hour
  • Piano practice: 1 hour

Writing

I’m astounded at nine pages today. I knew I was on a role, and I was bashing through several short, sharp scenes, but when I finally opened my spreadsheet1 to note down my progress I genuinely couldn’t believe it. Again, though, I’ve not gone back over the last couple of days’ work, so I’ll probably write less tomorrow and focus on re-reading/re-writing.

Coding

I managed an hour this afternoon, making a little bit of progress, but the final exercise I stopped on today drove me potty. I couldn’t get a simple, six-line piece of code to work and when I carried on and watched the solution through it appeared to be exactly the same as mine. Once I adjusted a few of the semantics to match the example, it magically worked. I don’t mind getting things wrong, but it does drive me a bit nuts when I can’t work out why.

Music

I watched a couple of awesome YouTube videos from Pianote today, tutorials on Great Balls of Fire (waaaaaaay too advanced for me, but I enjoyed listening to some of the principles and I may try them out) and Mad World. The latter is one of my all time favourite songs that I’m going to try to learn properly now using a little bit of this tutorial and the sheet music on Musescore.

  1. Yes, I’m a nerd. But it helps me visualise progress and entering a value every day that I write helps me see where the gaps in my productivity were etc. ↩︎

Daily Log 006

  • Slept: 23.30
  • Woke: 09.00
  • Screenplay pages: 6
  • Coding practice: 0
  • Piano practice: 0

Today was one of the hard days. Granted, I’m not sure I know when the last easy day was, but it doesn’t matter what your baseline is, some days suck a lot more than others. Same for everyone, everywhere, whether you’re living your best life or fighting your hardest fight.

A huge part of what makes the hard days hard for me is quality of sleep. It’s perfectly common for me to have nights like this where I fail to get into a deep sleep and wake up feeling like I’ve not slept a wink or a blink. When those nights combine with/follow on from nights like Saturday where the quantity of sleep is significantly reduced, well, that’s a recipe for days like today.

Writing

I genuinely can’t believe I actually still managed to write six pages today. I don’t know how I did it, I must have been in some kind of hypnotic state to be able to actually get my imagination working and my fingers hitting the right keys, but looking back on a day like today knowing I managed to do more than nothing is bordering on the miraculous.

Of course, I haven’t read it back yet, so with fresh eyes on a new day it may be utter drivel, but I’m proud of the fact that I managed to do the one thing I really want to prioritise at the moment.

Without much in the way of extrinsic motivation at the moment, I made a promise to myself to do everything I could to finish a screenplay by the end of the year (ideally the end of this month) and I want to keep that promise to myself.

Absent external deadlines, I’ve always had a tendency to let things drift and I’ve been working on this project for long enough1 that I just need to get a first draft done. That requires a level of self-motivation that’s hard for me when I’m struggling as much as I am just now.

Other stuff

We had a surveyor over today to talk through the survey on our new house2 and to check over ours. The Help to Buy scheme we used to buy our current place needs us to provide a surveyor’s valuation to make sure they’re not getting short-changed on the deal when we repay them the loan.

That took a lot of effort not just getting the place clean and tidy enough for someone to visit, but also in pretending not to be as broken as I am today. I think I pulled it off, but boy am I feeling it.

Everything else today – coding, piano etc – has gone right out the window because some days things just aren’t doable and it’s no use pretending they are. I learned a long time ago that pushing yourself to do more than you know yourself to be physically and mentally capable of only leads to a worse day tomorrow. Sometimes that’s unavoidable – or worth the trade-off – but today was not one of those days.

  1. It’s a drama based on real events from the mid-20th century, so it’s taken a lot of research. The trouble with research is that it’s always hard to tell when enough is enough. At some point it’s time to put it down and start writing. ↩︎
  2. Potential new house, I should say. Because the way like has treated us over the last four years I’m not counting my chickens until they’re on the dinner table. ↩︎

Daily Log 005

  • Slept: 01.00-02.00; 05.00
  • Woke: 10.15
  • Screenplay pages: 4.5
  • Coding practice: 0
  • Piano practice: 1 hour
  • Movie: Now You See Me 2

I’m not 100% sure whether Now You See Me 2 counts as being a today thing or a yesterday thing, but if you want to go by the strict rule of the clock it counts as today because I watched it from 02.00 to 04.00 (roughly). That does mean, though, that I basically double-billed the two NYSM movies since I watched the first at 22.00 last night.

This two-part night does speak much more to my usual patterns as opposed to the first few days of this log, which kind of showed “normal sleep” in one block from nighttime (midnight-ish) to morning (09.30ish). The truth is, very few of my nights go like that. Which partly explains why my entire existence is a haze of slow-working brain and no-working body.

Writing

Considering I haven’t had a regular 9-5 for more than a year at this point, I’m surprised I still even know when a weekend is, let alone think about or treat it any differently to every other day.

But I usually do, so it felt pretty good to knock off almost five pages of the script today, even if my self-critical brain still thinks I didn’t do enough.

It’s not so much that I don’t feel I wrote enough (almost five pages is good for me), it’s more that I didn’t revise enough. Before I start writing new pages each day I like to go back over what I wrote the day before to get back into the flow my tweaking and tightening things up.

Music

I spend some time flicking through the MuseScore app1 – and settled on having a crack at Seasons of Love. It’s been a favourite of mine for years and generally always gets me tearing up, but I’m hoping I can see through watery eyes as I learn to play it. Or that the concentration takes any and all emotion away…

Sport

An almost perfect evening of sport tonight.

First Arsenal Women thumped Leicester 6-2 after being 2-0 down at halftime. Then the Texans walked away with an impressive – if highly stressful! – win against the Bengals.

The only thing that could have made it better would have been if the two matches didn’t overlap and force me to double-screen. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried watching a football match closely and trying to follow an intense and exciting NFL game at the same time but I can tell you from tonight’s experience that it’s not easy.

  1. A great sheet music site (among many) that has a load of official scores from music publishers. ↩︎