KEEP IT REAL

 4^th February, 2022

I started to write this blog in March 2014. I needed to lose weight. There have been many times in the past I have needed to lose weight, but this time I thought I would track my journey. I think my daughter might have suggested a bolg when we chatted about me writing a diary. Blogs were the in thing at the time and my daughter knew someone who was doing quite well with hers financially. After a lot of thought I started one, not because I wanted to make any money, but because it seemed a good way to get my message and my feelings out to a wider audience, as opposed to keeping it all to myself in a diary.

I did stop writing in 2015 when life got in the way, as so often happens, and I started to slip back into my old habits of using food as a crutch. A solution to problems I had as it was easier to eat than to face the situation I was in. For four years I was back to the overweight and unhappy person I was used to being.

In 2019 things had to change, and in 2020 I started to write again after being encouraged by my family, and also local writer Katie Portman, to put my feelings and passions into words. It has not always been an easy task for me, but over the last 2 and a half years or so I have lost the weight (100 pounds ish) and now I am here wondering what to do next.

Now, there is a reason I wanted to recap the origins of blog and the reasons I personally write. Some people enjoy writing fiction, whether based on true fact, or totally made up. That is what they do, and get enjoyment and a feeling of fulfilment from it. It has been suggested to me to take my writings about myself and do the same. That they might be better like that. Not so personal as a blog can be and things may be better kept anonymous. That's their opinion and they are probably correct, but at the moment that does not sit easy with me. My blog was started about me. My opportunity to write about me. Selfish or not, it was my chance to say what I felt about the things that bothered me. There is value in blog writing if only for self expression. Blogging should be considered as a form of writing.

For a long time in my life I didn't matter, what I felt was irrelevant and then things – life – changed for the better. I do not really know who reads my blog. At I write this, I have had nearly 42700 page views on the 135 posts I have written so far, and the vast majority are from people I do not, and never will, know. This has always been fine with me. I write because I really love to write. What I write is an honest and personal account about me. I am very proud of how far I have come and I am not ashamed of anything I have had to cope with in my life.

If anyone reading my work gets strength from this, then that is absolutely fantastic. My weight loss journey has almost ended but as one journey ends, another one begins. A journey of maintaining my weight loss in the long term, and learning to deal with life's ups and downs in a different way. The great big journey of life goes only one way. We can't go back and start again, but what we can do is enjoy all the good things that come our way.

In fact, go looking for those good things while pushing the bad things back into the shadows where they belong. Learn how to deal with those problems and never let them grow any bigger than they should.

I know that my blog's content will change. It started with weight loss and will continue with “What Jackie Did Next”, but it will always remain a personal, honest and real life account of who I am and what makes me tick.

I always said in those dark days that I could not see an escape from, that one day I wanted to look back on my life satisfied and with no regrets, and I continue to work on that.

 My journey continues...

All for now, until next time,

Love, Jackie

xx