Perspective

Looking at the ‘decorations’ on this virtual garden, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the clock stopped and that it’s still Halloween 2012. The clock stopped for a dear friend of mine who decided to end his life in the opening days of November and my motivation for blogging went away with it. I tried to keep the blogging flame burning for a while, having Sunday ‘blogging dates’ with the lovely Sirvinya (we promised each other to blog every Sunday) but it never felt the same: the desire to blog didn’t come from within and writing didn’t feel as spontaneous and natural as it was before. At the end of January 2013, it was finally time to admit defeat and to take a break from blogging. I was still very much interested in the world of beauty blogs, devouring beauty articles like an addict and checking my beloved Google reader multiple times a day, to see if any of my 426 blog subscriptions had new content for me but I just couldn't blog anymore.

When the news that Google Reader was going to be discontinued first broke out, the hopeless creature of habit that I am got in a state of panic and I thought the world was going to end. Little than I knew then that things would get worse, much much worse. Weeks later, the fateful financial climate of my workplace meant that I had to fight to keep my job, and that were only going to be 4 jobs for 6 people. I had the chance then to sign on some kind of redundancy plan, to prepare for the worst but I chose to remain positive and to believe in my potential and in my skills.

Days before the Easter break, the worst came to worst and I had to depart for an arranged week end in York while all I wanted to do was to crawl into a ball, eat myself into oblivion and mourn the loss of my job. I don’t know what was the worst actually: the awful interview I was subjected to, the atrocious way I was broken the news on the phone (Bad news, I am afraid, you have scored the lowest, this means you have lost your job) or the fact that I had just lost the only job I had ever had in my whole life. I can’t even begin to tell you how destroyed and broken I was. Other than losing a great chunk of my hair at uni, and losing my dad (he also chose to put an end to his life) this is definitely the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with. Among other things, it made a huge door called ‘perspective’ violently slam against my face and made realise how silly I was to worry about small things like the discontinuation of Google Reader.

Google Reader is still a big thing to me and come tomorrow I will be a bit lost, but nowhere near as broken as recent events left me. Incidentally things haven’t been all bad. In a struck of fortune, I was lucky to meet a lovely man at the beginning of February and we have been seeing each other since.

I would love to go to back to blogging again. Not only there’s only so much the poor man in my broken life can hear about exfoliation, lashes and toners without alcohol but I really feel that there is a gap in my life. More and more lately, I have felt the urge to write and share things, express and share my experiences with certain products, to the point that it has been itching me to write: I am in the bath, and things come to my head. I am dying to put them onto (virtual) paper but I have felt shy about coming back, about having lost whatever little touch at blogging I had before. This overdue update is my attempt at coming back. I thought today (Boy, do I annoyingly like to leave things at the last minute or what) might be a good time, since ‘the end of the world’ is happening tomorrow and Google reader is dying and all :P

I can’t promise you that this very neglected garden of mine will be updated every other day like I set it out to be at the very beginning, but I would love to come back, write a little every now and then and if there would still be a little handful of you left still wishing to read my ramblings, life would be even sweeter.


There has been a lot of confusion between Google Friend Connect and Google Reader. Google Friend Connect (GFC for short) is not going anywhere yet, and it will still populate your Google ‘Dashboard’. If reading blogs through the RSS technology is your favourite way to keep up to date with your blogs subscriptions, you will have no doubt backed up your information and probably emigrated to a new RSS reader. I only backed up my data with Google Takeout yesterday (yep, queen of last minute, me) and have yet to find the RSS reader of my dreams. If RSS is all gobbledy gook for you, you can be notified about my posts through the usual channels and I will leave all the links for you at the end of this post.

I have lost my job and have yet to find a new one. I have put on 2 stones of weight in since January and I have yet to be in the right frame of mind to lose the flab. Life has more downs than ups at the moment but the world has not ended. Life has just been very tough and hopefully blogging will help to add some necessary distraction to it. See you in the next post x

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