Makeover

Hi! Looking a bit different here. I took a cue from Kirsty and went for a new look. You might need to adjust your zoom settings a little, because the blog header’s a bit big, but if you do that hopefully you get the impression intended.* The look of this blog has always been a bit dark and martial  (unsurprisingly so given the content and my own personal aesthetic preferences), and I thought it might be time to pretty it up a bit. As I am completely incapable of doing that on my own, I turned to the internet for help with a (small) fistful of dollars.

In real life, I’m going through a corresponding period where I just hate the way I look and wish it was as easy and as quick to fix with a blog template and a little bit of money. I know this is pretty common, especially for women, and I do all the typical things like avoiding mirrors and not buying clothes unless I absolutely have to. I spent some time with someone recently which ended up making me feel even worse on that front, and it’s not like I’ve ever had much confidence when it comes to my appearance. It’s just that any anxiety or discomfort I might feel about how I look has been drowned out by the misery in my head, and it’s been that way for a long time.** It’s absolutely one of the reasons I don’t post personal pictures on the blog.

I also know that aesthetics matter, and maybe if I pay a little more attention to the outside I might feel a little better on the inside. Obvious, huh? I thought it might be worth doing the same with the blog, trying to spruce the place up a bit might help alleviate the dark stuff I write about. So I’m going to try and post a few more pictures, and try writing about some more everyday things, in order to make this is a slightly better place to visit as a reader. I’m profoundly grateful that I have a small, committed group of you who read and comment, especially given the difficult themes and content up for grabs here.  I’d like to try and make it a more pleasant experience for you.

But how to do it? It turns out that just about every blog template you can buy without expensive custom work is all pretties and pastel colours and cutesy fonts. They’re all so feminine and imply that the blog to hand is filled with food pictures and teddy bears. The templates I could find are for bright and shiny blogs, filled with posts about how hard things were, and now it’s OK, I figured it out. How difficult but fulfilling parenthood can be. Or how to make a yoga mat out of cucumber peelings and a picture frame out of your baby’s first teeth. Those blogs are lovely and all, but that isn’t what I write about and probably never will be. I hope that I will eventually be able to write about some things with a measure of retrospection and experience, but it will never be an advice blog.*** ‘Here’s how you get through this’ and ‘here’s how I did it’ is not my style. I’m just groping about in the dark in real life, much like how I fumble writing this blog.

I started this blog because I wanted to write about things I couldn’t really find elsewhere, especially amongst Australian bloggers. I want to become a better writer and flesh out ideas for my work while I obsess over some of problems which have defined my life. But I also don’t want it to devolve into something so dark that you all only read it out of obligation.

I want to punch a hole in the wall for some light and air. I’ll be here, in my corner, trying to breathe and start over. Hope you all like the refurb.

*Thanks, Mel! There are some small changes, physically – you can now subscribe to the blog for e-mail updates, I’ve updated my bio slightly, and my blog roll is now current. There are some other bits and pieces I’m trying to figure out too, so with a bit of luck it should be easier to navigate around here and get in touch, should you need to. And no more word verification! I apologise for that, I didn’t even realise it was part of the deal.

**This is not, in any way, to discount the mental illness or distress caused by eating disorders or something close to them. I know exactly how devastating they can be (a very close friend nearly died from one), and that they are not simply a physical disease. It’s one of the reasons they are so tricky to treat - they are both physical and mental illnesses. My friend who went through it wrote a memoir about it that I highly recommend.

*** The only advice I can dispense with good conscience is about what music to buy.