Life of Dahlia

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, honestly, I feel like I post them, and then any plans that I have go out of the window because my health issues stop me in my tracks and I’m too tired or too anxious to be able to do anything.

I’ve been wanting to do a bit of an update post for a while but I’ve been working on some other stuff as well as dealing with those always-present health issues.

In this post, I just want to share some personal things that I have been doing, a small health update, some plans I have for my blog as well as some other stuff that I’m thinking about or working on.

Health Update:

First, I think I will get the health stuff out of the way. If you have been following my blog for some time you will already know that I deal with a lot, when I’m not dealing with chronic pain, chronic fatigue or food intolerances, it’s anxiety and depression.

In the past few years, I’ve found that a lot of my health problems have increased or gotten worse. Last year my chronic fatigue worsened significantly, I would get up and feel like I’d hit a brick wall. I felt like I couldn’t do anything, it was extremely frustrating and I felt like my cognitive function was also really impacted. It increased my anxiety and depression and there were times when I felt like I couldn’t even trust my own judgement.

I even struggled to be able to exercise regularly (still kind of am actually), I’ve even struggled to hold up my own body weight when trying to do some simple yoga poses.

On top of all that I’ve been dealing with some other issues that have impacted my everyday life. I’m currently getting help for it, but I feel that it’s a bit more personal so I’m not going to talk about it, at this point.

Turns out though some of my issues were because I was extremely anaemic and had very low B12 and Vitamin D. I know a lot of this stems from the fact that I have quite a bit of trouble with food. I have been dealing with food intolerances for about 10 years or so and even though I have safe foods I have a terrible diet because even those foods can set things off.

It can cause me stomach aches, reflux, heartburn, etc. which means that there are times when I don’t eat very much because something has set it off and I have to go back to super basic foods, like toast and crackers. I have times where I can eat a somewhat normal diet but I’m constantly worried that it will result in one of the above. So my eating is quite disordered, because of this. It’s hard sometimes I just feel scared to eat anything.

Earlier this year I had to have an iron infusion because of my iron deficiency, I can’t take vitamins because of my food intolerances, it sets off my IBS, so I had to have that instead. I also have to have regular B12 injections now, including the 10 I had to have over 5 weeks between January and February this year, now they are every 3 months.

So yeah there has been a lot going on there. Like I said I’m also dealing with some other issues as well, I may talk about them at some time in the future but it’s something I’m not quite comfortable with talking about right now.

What else have I been up to:

Other than that, I’ve been trying to find some stuff to keep me occupied. Late last year I started getting back into doing some of my more creative hobbies like colouring and drawing.

I started watching a lot more art videos last year and I saw some people doing monthly sketchbook spreads and it kind of sparked some inspiration to get back into drawing. I’ve been practising off and on since. I’ve never had much confidence in my drawing skills, but I think I just didn’t have the patience or motivation to practice them in the past. I figure though that maybe there is a reason why it’s come to me now.

Last year I used the money I got for my birthday to get myself some more art supplies and well now I may just have amassed a collection of different art supplies, oops. It’s all good though because I feel like now is a good time for me to explore my art again.

I lost that spark for a very long time, I think because I was experiencing a lot of difficulties with my mental health especially and I just sort of lost it. Which makes me sad because it was really a part of who I was or am. I’ve always been creative and art can be very therapeutic, which is why I think this is something I need to explore again.

So I’ve been trying out a bunch of different stuff, I did a small drawing course earlier this year, on drawing natural history, and I’m still learning techniques from this but it was quite insightful and has helped inspire me to try out quite a few different drawing techniques.

I’ve also been delving into painting with acrylic paints again and I’ve been trying out paint markers and watercolour as well.

I will include a few images from some of the things I’ve been doing.

Blog Plans and Other Stuff:

One other thing I’ve been doing is working on is some Activity books, one of which is currently up here on my blog, you can check out my Winter Activity Booklet here. I started playing around with this idea after my local library shared one over the summer holidays.

I love activity booklets, I have quite a collection of Art Journal-type activity booklets like ‘Wreck This Journal’, ‘Anti-Journal’, etc. But I also like doing word puzzles and stuff as well, I find them quite relaxing. So I thought I would take some inspiration from some of these places and have a go at creating my own.

It took me months, I started working on parts of it using Canva, to then realise that due to their weird user policy, I wouldn’t be able to share the final file. This means I had to find something that I wouldn’t have that issue with, so I switched to using Adobe Illustrator. I signed up for a subscription at the start of the year and It turns out that was a good move because I’ve been using it quite a bit. I like to finish off any of my illustrations in Illustrator because it uses vectors and makes for a cleaner finish.

I’ve enjoyed the experience so much that I’m thinking about putting together some more, but I’m thinking that I’m going to start an Etsy store* where I can sell some printables, including activity books, colour pages, etc. I might also sell some paintings or something. I don’t have all the details yet, I’m still figuring things out.

*note: this may or may not happen because, with some of the things that have come out about Etsy in recent months, I’m not sure that I want to use them anymore If I decide to do this in the future. I may have to look into other options.

As far as my blog and other content go, I can feel myself moving more towards wanting to post more art-inspired posts or videos. I also wouldn’t mind getting back into sharing some more book/reading-related stuff as well.

I actually started a Bookstagram account recently, well I say recently but I actually created it a while ago because I thought about creating a bookish business (I still might) but I ended up deciding to start using it as a Bookstagram account instead. (If you are interested in following my Bookstagram account you can check it out here @ thevintagebookcase.)

Honestly, though I’ve sort of been flitting back and forth with different projects and ideas, I think it’s out of boredom, and trying to distract myself from some of the health stuff I’m going through right now.

One last Idea that I’m going to be playing with is a new feature that WordPress now offers (this is where I host my blog), which is the new Newsletter Visibility feature. What this actually does is it gives you the option to share your post with everyone or only subscribers (free) or only paid subscribers.

I would like to play around with this feature by making some of my blog posts available to my blog subscribers. How I am actually thinking about using it is something like this:

. Blog posts are available to my subscribers only for a week (5-7 days) and then it will be made available to everyone. (I was sort of doing something similar when I would share YouTube videos. I would share them as an unlisted video here first and then make the video public on YT after about 5 days. So it would be a variation on that idea.)

. Some subscriber-exclusive posts (I’m not sure what this will look like yet, It could be free downloadable content that only subscribers can access or exclusive videos, it could also be a sort of newsletter-type post. I’m still working out the details.)

Those are the kind of ideas I’m playing around with in my head at the moment. I will be starting with the first one at the moment. I won’t be offering any sort of paid subscription type of thing, my blog will still be free to subscribe to. I just don’t feel like that is something that is viable for me and I would prefer to make money other ways, like through an Etsy store or something. Also, I don’t want to put more pressure on myself to have to put things out because people are paying for something like that. I also don’t want to put pressure on others to feel like they have to pay to get access to my content.

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I hope you enjoyed this post, sorry if it was a bit chaotic and all over the place, there has been a lot going on and I just wanted to share a few updates. This was meant to be a more casual post anyway.

I’m not sure what the future holds when it comes to what content I’m going to share, I’m just taking one thing at a time and I’m sort of still figuring a lot of things out, like how I can create without putting to much stress on myself.

All I know for sure is that over the next few weeks, I will probably share some more stuff on my Winter Activity Booklet. I want to share some colouring videos where i colour in some of the pages. But other than that I’m just taking things as they go and what inspires me at the time.

Until then I hope that you all have a lovely day,

Erin.

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