Another momentous occasion, feels like 5 mins since day 100 if I’m honest…. so I’ve been writing this blog for 193 days now… precisely. Wow, no wonder I’m knackered.

There are days that I struggle for content and am too tired to write it but other days where it flows and the content is glaring me in the face pretty early on in the day.

I’m really tired today. Very, very calm which is such a wonderful after a week of anxiety.

I went out on my first puppy training job this morning. I was in training along with the puppy obviously. Timely that I make such a big step on day 200. The next step in my healing journey. The puppy was A-D-O-R-A-B-L-E, the cutest little thing ever. For 10 weeks old it was incredibly well behaved.

I took lots of notes, tried not to freeze to death as I forgot to take a jacket and we ended up outside for the whole session. Also note to self to stay off the coffee ☕️ prior to dog behavioural sessions that last for 3 hours……. 🥴

I’m home now, in the sunroom and for the last 2 hours I’ve had the sun beating in through the windows and I am defrosting! It is sooooo cosy. Our hallway has been tiled this morning so I can’t go into the bedroom and get comfies on so I’m lounging in my smart clothes 😊 not smart like smart but smart for me!

So today is World Mental Health day snd as a sufferer of anxiety and depression I’m not quite sure what this means…. it doesn’t change anything for me. The last few years my work have advertised it (sure it was Mental Health WEEK last year) but no one even contacted me about it when I was off sick. Someone did send me a screenshot of their screensaver on the pc saying to watch out for people struggling. He sent it to me more for the irony of the fact that I had struggled for so long… I had tried to get help from HR…. and yet eventually had to muster the strength to walk out of the office myself when I just couldn’t cope for a second longer.

Anyway that’s all water under the bridge now. No point in thinking how things could have or should have been different. Mental health awareness is a new thing for us all so while people are being “seen” to support it, we need more action to join the dots up in our mental health system. We shouldn’t have to fight for our own recovery at a time when we don’t even have the strength to look after ourselves.

Anyway, what have we learned from our COVID-19 life changes?

I think the saddest thing of all is that our lives will never be the same again. Gone are the hugs. The kisses. The handshakes. All that’s left are the emojis 🤗 😘 🤝 things that we took for granted are gone.

We watch things on tv and realise how freely we moved around without any fear of catching anything from each other.

I think it’s important to note here that I don’t personally fear catching COVID-19. As time has gone on and we’ve been lucky to be pretty distanced from it, we’ve become a bit complacent.

Looking back we would think nothing of sharing buffets with hundreds of strangers at a wedding, standing in crowds at gigs, hugging and kissing loads of strangers in pubs or at Christmas and New Year. These things were very normal. Yet now we just can’t do that.

So let’s all see what the next 200 days bring. I hope that all we still have our health, our happiness and our sanity.

Stay safe everyone 💚💚💚