Small, quiet happiness.

I live my life like the British weather. Unpredictable, sometimes cold in warm seasons, always the potential for rain or random, angry gales. My dad has always told me that emotions are like the weather, when it's cloudy you know it will always pass. He's exactly right, for me anyway, as I can spend whole days feeling really, really up and then all of a sudden feel really quite down.

Yesterday I was in the car with my parents driving through the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire countryside and the sunshine was so golden settling over snow covered fields and I felt perfectly contented. It was the brilliant feeling of just being able to breathe and see and be. And I felt like that for hours, hours of contentedness.

Later on my mood lowered itself and I was unable to maintain such high levels of happiness. I was annoyed at first. How come such random anger and upset can come and cloud over my contentedness as if I had no control over it.

I do have control really. I can't control the weather but on a good day, and thankfully most days are good days, I can override sad thoughts and bitter feelings. It's just really quite irritating, quite frustrating when a perfect all encompassing level of happiness can't be maintained for longer. But it's okay, I guess, to value things more when they can't last forever.

Because those moments of small, quite happiness can produce such brilliant joy.

Brilliant Procrastination.

I think I am a lazy person. Or a brilliant procrastinator. Or perhaps brilliant is too great a word. My procrastination in an ideal world would involve creativity. I would be making little origami Christmas tree decorations or making mince pies or even just reading a book. I struggle to do any of those things.

I am procrastinating doing a lot of things. My dissertation is one of them. I've reached the end of my second draft and it's really, really hard to care about finishing it. So I find excuses. I'm ill, or I'm not in the mindset, or this coffee shop hasn't got the right atmosphere. I'd rather be doing other things like making little Origami tree decorations or reading a book. So I sit on my phone and scroll through Facebook instead. Naturally.

I've realised that scrolling through Instagram has become a bit detrimental. I keep comparing my life to other people's every single time I'm on the app. I come away feeling a little bit worse about myself each time. It seems that everyone else is either less lazy or a much better procrastinator. This isn't a post to whine about social media it's just, you know, if every time you use it it's giving you a mini complex you should probably take a break.

I've gone off course. The other thing I keep procrastinating is writing. I've done it for years. I've even talked about it on this blog for years. I could tell you for hours how much I adore writing, all the different things I'd like to try writing, all the ideas, all the dreams. And then at the end of that conversation I'd feel a little bit empty because I'd remember that I haven't done a lot of those things because I keep putting them off. Oh, I'm too busy. I'm not in the right space. I can't.

There are a lot of things I love and a lot of excuses I keep finding to not do them. I couldn't for the life of me tell you why. Perhaps I'm very lazy. Or just very scared of, you know, getting it all wrong.

Keep going.

It is tough to always be telling yourself to keep going. It gets worse when you're not well. It's quite hard when the sun hasn't shone for a while and the winter days get shorter and shorter.

"Keep going" I have to say to myself, a lot. Keep going when you're rejected from roles and positions you really wanted. Keep going when you're rejected from the ones you weren't even that bothered about. Keep going.

And it's tiring. Always motivating yourself, always picking yourself up. Always allowing self-acceptance, always forgiving yourself.

It's harder when you're standing by yourself which in many ways I'm not but in some ways I am. I am lucky with my friendships and my family. But it's difficult when relationships change or disappear and there you are again telling yourself to just keep going.

It's not all the time, you know, there are just periods of my life where I have to "keep going" a bit more than others. And honestly I'm glad for those periods, because they're lessons, aren't they? You don't always get what you want, things change, people come to and fro.

I just wanted to say that sometimes, not all the time, it's tough to tell yourself to keep going. Keep going.