What makes it hard is when the routine falls away as the Black Dog¹ takes over and everything gets almost unbearable difficult to plough through.

How do you write a log of a day filled with negative thoughts, few actions beyond tea making, and an emptiness of mind that makes any thought up to and including “What’s for dinner?” really hard to process?

If this were a YouTube channel, or maybe Buzzfeed/Bored Panda etc, they would be confidently listing the FIVE THINGS THAT MAKE BLOGGING YOUR SHITE LIFE SUCCESSFUL and telling you that you can earn millions doing it at the same time.

I’m none of those sites. I’m just a guy, sitting in front of a screen, asking it to understand me. Which it’s rubbish at, by the way. All it does is reflect back my moods and insecurities in everything I write or do. I suppose that’s it’s job, but I still find it quite rude.

Back in the very beginning days of blogging, when I started Smile Through It, I had a surprising amount to write about given my physical state. I was doing things, seeing people, working. That feels a world away from today.

At the time I was convinced that post-transplant life would be nothing but upward progress. Instead, after a decade of joy, I’m now five years into very little but misery. There are light times, light moments, high points — life is never 100% awful, even if it’s a struggle to find the light in the dark — but the majority of my days are spent the same way, which is to say largely unproductively.

That blog was about learning to see the positive in every day. It was about nurturing an openness to notice the positive beats of a day. I don’t know why that feels so impossible now.

So, how you do you write a daily blog when you’re overwhelmed with negativity? You do it like this, I suppose.

This post is a 4am stream of consciousness and as such I’ve decided not to edit it. Apologies for any egregious SPAG errors.

1. Often attributed to Winston Churchill it is, like many things, not a phrase he used himself. I really like it, though; it’s wonderfully evocative. ︎

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Instead, Tuesday night I didn’t sleep until 05.15 and then managed some broken hours up to around midday. Last night (Wednesday) I managed a fairly solid block from 1-2am-ish until around 8 or 9am this morning. That’s not enough sleep, and certainly not enough sleep when under stress. And stress is rocketing right now.

They saying buying a house is the most stressful thing you’ll ever do. Honestly, if that was true for whoever coined the phrase (or finds it to be true), they have led a very blessed life. That said, it’s definitely right up near the top of the list. When the looming threat of the deal collapsing raises its head, that’s when things get really bad.

The biggest issue for me, though, is what stress can do to my mood. Years of being clinically depressed and, more recently, diagnosed with Bipolar 2 means that I understand how I react to things pretty well. When things go wrong it can have very real, very severe consequences to my mood, sinking me into deeply depressed states. Sometimes I pull of of them quickly, other times I don’t.¹

It’s scary when you don’t know how long that sort of state will last. Time slows down, appetite disappears, everything becomes pointless and it’s hard to even shift off the sofa.² That’s fine if it lasts for a day or two, but more than that and there’s a very real chance I’m going to be in it for the long haul, which is a very, very dangerous place to be.

So that’s how the last two days have been. A bad situation with our house sale has put our house purchase in jeopardy and it dropped my mood to intimidating lows. I couldn’t even face typing out a summary last night, so hopefully this means I’ve made a little bit of progress.

Sleep helps, so fingers crossed for a better, longer, more settled night and a brighter outlook in the morning to make more progress on the things I want to be focusing on.

Side note: I did at least manage to teach myself Mad World in two days, probably helped because it was a song that reflected my mood pretty well!

1. Or can’t – that’s the more accurate term. The thing with depression as a clinical state is that it’s not a choice, it’s an involuntary state of being. ︎
2. It’s important to recognise that clinical depression presents differently in everyone. Some people become almost literally catatonic, others can appear to function “normally” most of the time, but dissolve into tears at any given moment. Everyone has their own flavour, none of which is better or worse than others. ︎

The post Daily Log 008 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

Writing

I’m astounded at nine pages today. I knew I was on a role, and I was bashing through several short, sharp scenes, but when I finally opened my spreadsheet¹ to note down my progress I genuinely couldn’t believe it. Again, though, I’ve not gone back over the last couple of days’ work, so I’ll probably write less tomorrow and focus on re-reading/re-writing.

Coding

I managed an hour this afternoon, making a little bit of progress, but the final exercise I stopped on today drove me potty. I couldn’t get a simple, six-line piece of code to work and when I carried on and watched the solution through it appeared to be exactly the same as mine. Once I adjusted a few of the semantics to match the example, it magically worked. I don’t mind getting things wrong, but it does drive me a bit nuts when I can’t work out why.

Music

I watched a couple of awesome YouTube videos from Pianote today, tutorials on Great Balls of Fire (waaaaaaay too advanced for me, but I enjoyed listening to some of the principles and I may try them out) and Mad World. The latter is one of my all time favourite songs that I’m going to try to learn properly now using a little bit of this tutorial and the sheet music on Musescore.

1. Yes, I’m a nerd. But it helps me visualise progress and entering a value every day that I write helps me see where the gaps in my productivity were etc. ︎

The post Daily Log 007 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

Today was one of the hard days. Granted, I’m not sure I know when the last easy day was, but it doesn’t matter what your baseline is, some days suck a lot more than others. Same for everyone, everywhere, whether you’re living your best life or fighting your hardest fight.

A huge part of what makes the hard days hard for me is quality of sleep. It’s perfectly common for me to have nights like this where I fail to get into a deep sleep and wake up feeling like I’ve not slept a wink or a blink. When those nights combine with/follow on from nights like Saturday where the quantity of sleep is significantly reduced, well, that’s a recipe for days like today.

Writing

I genuinely can’t believe I actually still managed to write six pages today. I don’t know how I did it, I must have been in some kind of hypnotic state to be able to actually get my imagination working and my fingers hitting the right keys, but looking back on a day like today knowing I managed to do more than nothing is bordering on the miraculous.

Of course, I haven’t read it back yet, so with fresh eyes on a new day it may be utter drivel, but I’m proud of the fact that I managed to do the one thing I really want to prioritise at the moment.

Without much in the way of extrinsic motivation at the moment, I made a promise to myself to do everything I could to finish a screenplay by the end of the year (ideally the end of this month) and I want to keep that promise to myself.

Absent external deadlines, I’ve always had a tendency to let things drift and I’ve been working on this project for long enough¹ that I just need to get a first draft done. That requires a level of self-motivation that’s hard for me when I’m struggling as much as I am just now.

Other stuff

We had a surveyor over today to talk through the survey on our new house² and to check over ours. The Help to Buy scheme we used to buy our current place needs us to provide a surveyor’s valuation to make sure they’re not getting short-changed on the deal when we repay them the loan.

That took a lot of effort not just getting the place clean and tidy enough for someone to visit, but also in pretending not to be as broken as I am today. I think I pulled it off, but boy am I feeling it.

Everything else today – coding, piano etc – has gone right out the window because some days things just aren’t doable and it’s no use pretending they are. I learned a long time ago that pushing yourself to do more than you know yourself to be physically and mentally capable of only leads to a worse day tomorrow. Sometimes that’s unavoidable – or worth the trade-off – but today was not one of those days.

1. It’s a drama based on real events from the mid-20th century, so it’s taken a lot of research. The trouble with research is that it’s always hard to tell when enough is enough. At some point it’s time to put it down and start writing. ︎
2. Potential new house, I should say. Because the way like has treated us over the last four years I’m not counting my chickens until they’re on the dinner table. ︎

The post Daily Log 006 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

I’m not 100% sure whether Now You See Me 2 counts as being a today thing or a yesterday thing, but if you want to go by the strict rule of the clock it counts as today because I watched it from 02.00 to 04.00 (roughly). That does mean, though, that I basically double-billed the two NYSM movies since I watched the first at 22.00 last night.

This two-part night does speak much more to my usual patterns as opposed to the first few days of this log, which kind of showed “normal sleep” in one block from nighttime (midnight-ish) to morning (09.30ish). The truth is, very few of my nights go like that. Which partly explains why my entire existence is a haze of slow-working brain and no-working body.

Writing

Considering I haven’t had a regular 9-5 for more than a year at this point, I’m surprised I still even know when a weekend is, let alone think about or treat it any differently to every other day.

But I usually do, so it felt pretty good to knock off almost five pages of the script today, even if my self-critical brain still thinks I didn’t do enough.

It’s not so much that I don’t feel I wrote enough (almost five pages is good for me), it’s more that I didn’t revise enough. Before I start writing new pages each day I like to go back over what I wrote the day before to get back into the flow my tweaking and tightening things up.

Music

I spend some time flicking through the MuseScore app¹ – and settled on having a crack at Seasons of Love. It’s been a favourite of mine for years and generally always gets me tearing up, but I’m hoping I can see through watery eyes as I learn to play it. Or that the concentration takes any and all emotion away…

Sport

An almost perfect evening of sport tonight.

First Arsenal Women thumped Leicester 6-2 after being 2-0 down at halftime. Then the Texans walked away with an impressive – if highly stressful! – win against the Bengals.

The only thing that could have made it better would have been if the two matches didn’t overlap and force me to double-screen. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried watching a football match closely and trying to follow an intense and exciting NFL game at the same time but I can tell you from tonight’s experience that it’s not easy.

1. A great sheet music site (among many) that has a load of official scores from music publishers. ︎

The post Daily Log 005 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

Writing

Nothing writing today. I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t ‘inspired’ enough, was too lazy, or got too swept up in a deep dive on equivoque in magic/mentalism. You should Google it, it’s fantascinating.

The deep-dive was inspired by Tim Ferriss’ interview with Apollo Robbins, who is fascinating in his own right and has some wild stories (including the time he pickpocketed the Secret Service, and didn’t get arrested).

Regardless, I didn’t get any writing done, which feels like I’ve cheated myself a little there because I was on a role with 15 pages over the last two days. Broke my streak.

Coding

On the flip side, I got through 1.5 hours of coding (which kinda made up for not managing to fit any in yesterday because I caught up a little). I’m getting a little deeper into Python, little by little. It’s tough, though, because I have to keep going back over things a lot, which means I’m constantly pausing and rewinding video. When it’s a six-hour course, that means it’s probably going to take me at least 12 hours to complete.

Music

I’ve managed to get through Angels enough that it’s all down to practice now – I know all the notes, I just have to get them flowing, which I don’t need music for, just practice.

That means I’m ready to find the next thing to learn. So far I have two classical pieces, Someone You Loved by Lewis Capaldi, and Angels.

I just need easy things, that’s the trick of it. Easy things that sound amazing – the Capaldi song is literally four chords except for eight bars in the middle which change everso slightly.

Other stuff

On top of all that today, I managed about 90 minutes of house work: cleaning, tidying, vacuuming etc. That probably isn’t noteworthy to many people, but it’s a lot of work for me and it left me quite shattered by the end of it.

Ended up on the sofa watching a movie for the first time in a little while (maybe a week or so), which I really enjoyed. The Apollo and equivoque chat led me back around to Now You See Me, which I haven’t seen for ages and even though this must be my third time watching it I still love it.

The post Daily Log 004 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

On the face of it I slept really well (11-9), but that doesn’t (ever) tell the full story. My sleep is always interrupted, rarely high-quality and never restorative. I literally can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning and thought, “That’s better, I feel really well rested.” But that’s just life, so there doesn’t seem to be any use complaining about it anymore.

Writing

I’m really impressed that I managed another big day. Eight pages is a lot more than I thought I’d get through when I sat down because there were several scenes that I had no idea how to execute. To get through all of them and a couple more and – always important – to know what’s next next feels like a big win.

Music

My back hurts. When I’m trying to get to grips with a new piece, I have a tendency to hunch over the keyboard looking at the music and my fingering. Trying to get that little bit of Angels right has had me hunched for nearly an hour.

On the plus side, I’m making progress.

Other stuff

Last week I was contacted about a trustee position in a sport’s governing body, which was exciting. Having only spoken to a recruiter about it yesterday with a deadline tonight, that means writing an application has been the priority this afternoon. Coupled with needing to go and run some errands like pick up drugs from the chemist (always good not to run out), that means I’ve not had time for coding.

That’s a handy excuse and all, but I’m so tired and my brain feels so fried from the application (I hate them) that I probably wouldn’t have been able to actually learn anything if I’d tried a coding session anyway. That’s the biggest life obstacle right now: tiredness (at best) or exhaustion (at worst) get in the way of so many things.

The first few days of this daily log feel slightly fraudulent, tbh. Getting this much stuff done in a day is more of an exception than a rule. Not that I’m not enjoying it, but I’m not sure it’s representative.

I suppose I hope that by capturing everything like this, it’s a useful way of showing myself how much I am (or am not) capable of and how much progress (or otherwise) I’m making day-to-day.

The post Daily Log 003 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

Sleeping

Exceptionally and annoyingly poor. Couldn’t get to sleep because brain. Couldn’t stay asleep because noise. However, I’m surprised by the amount of energy I’ve had to do things today. Albeit the things that I’m doing are incredibly sedentary.

Writing

Seven pages of screenplay is impressive for me, more than I usually manage to write. It was perhaps a little bit misleading because I was writing a sequence that jumps around a lot – writing lots of sluglines takes up more space on the page – but I’m still happy with the day’s work on it and particularly how I managed to solve the problem that the sequence was trying to solve (namely, how do you make a long science lecture interesting).

Coding

I went back to the beginning of the Python tutorial by Programming with Mosh (it’s brilliant and wonderfully easy to follow) because when I last opened it – yesterday? day before? – I was about halfway through and realised that I hadn’t absorbed enough of anything to successfully completed the exercises he was setting. Which was demoralising.

This time I’ve started a text file¹ to take notes on the key terms and copy and paste the code blocks into as I go along so I have a quick reference guide to things that have already come up. The paper notes I tried jotting down in the first part were suboptimal to say the least.

Music

I’m trying to learn Robbie Williams’ Angels at the moment and I’ve got most of it down, but the twiddly instrumental bit three-quarters of the way through is an absolute nightmare for my level because it involves a few different rhythms and some tricky hand movements to get between chords on the right hand and simultaneously span an octave with the left.²

Contentedness

Mid-level. I’ve so tired it’s hard to be totally happy, but I’ve achieved a lot more today that I was expecting I would when I woke up.

1. For notes around coding a plain text file works really well because unlike something like Word or Pages it doesn’t try to capitalise or autocorrect things. Given Mosh told me that Python is case-sensitive, that could make a big difference between useful and useless notes! ︎
2. I have annoyingly small hands when it comes to the piano, so an octave really is full stretch for me. If you don’t know anything about the piano this information will be irrelevant, but it’s OK to be impressed if you’d like to be. ︎

The post Daily Log 002 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

That’s something I learned this week because I’ve been trying to teach myself to code, starting with Python. It’s hard. I feel like an old dog trying to learn a new trick: it’s hard to wrap your brain around something so completely alien when you haven’t been in a learning mindset for so long.

Given how dormant my brain has been recently, I’m hoping that the more time I spend trying to learn, the more my brain will adapt and allow me to take in information. Perseverance is key.

The point of the hacker thing, though, is to say that I thought maybe I could/should/would track what I’m doing each day to show myself the progress I’m making and illustrate that good things often take time.

It’s not going to be exclusively code-related. I’m trying to write a new screenplay, which is going very well but also very slowly. I’m trying to learn the piano, which is going very well but also very slowly. I’m trying to move house, which could be going better, is going very slowly, and is providing a quantity of stress I’d rather not have to deal with right now.²

Anyway, that’s what this is. Like a daily vlog, only in blog format. Oh, wait, that’s just a blog. I suppose you could say this is taking me back to my roots daily blogging my journey to transplant. Only it’s more for me than it is for anyone else. You can read it if you want to, though, because I’m nice like that.

PS: Given its purpose and format, there may be a bunch of Spag errors in these posts because I won’t be spending large amounts of time editing them. Obviously I’ll do my best to check through, but it’s not the priority nor the point of these entries.

The post Daily Log 001 appeared first on Oli Lewington.

Over the past few years life has felt like it’s been moving backwards, regressing to difficult times and missing out on things we love. There are many reasons, not limited to the pandemic, that are not the things to go into here.

The point I’ve been reminding myself of is that while life might feel like I’m moving two steps forward and one step back, that still means I’m consistently taking one step forward.

It doesn’t matter if that step is tiny, simply shuffling forward is what matters.

There are and will be setbacks, times when I feels stalled or pushed backwards; what matters isn’t the micro picture of what happened today, but the macro picture of what’s happened in the week, month and, eventually, year.

Here’s to inching forward in 2023.

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