One of our beautiful cats passed away very suddenly between my birthday and Christmas. We’d been giving him medication every eight hours for a heart condition, but other than that he was super healthy. We’d been keeping him in, and he was putting on weight, really happy, shiny coat. Even his dodgy leg and back had stopped giving him trouble.

Afterwards, I was in complete shock for about three days. We had our company Christmas meal, and I think that was the only real thing I ate in that 72 hour period. We had Christmas, and New Year, and I just basically went through it without really being too aware of what was happening. I vaguely remember doing a lot of washing up and people arranging plans to come see us around us.

Joe was a million percent amazing. Although he was grieving too, those 3 days he kept our company going, and took over a lot of the household tasks, sales tasks, and other general things I typically do. I had no idea how to deal or cope with a lot of the things that were being thrown at me; we went from a cat that looked happy, healthy, and was by no means old, to a paralysed body in the space of fifteen minutes, and then soon after being asked what we wanted for the burial.

Grief is always different to depression in that it comes in huge waves rather than being a constant.

Although I have a lot of plans for this year, and there are so many things I’m working on or going ahead with, I’ve spent the start of the year doing a lot of reading and writing. These have always been a major source of help for me (along with anything that involves creating, or using the logical side of my brain to answer questions or list stuff out). My problem with writing is generally that I don’t get the time I want to do all of it, so it’s been nice to be able to do that.

Normally by this point in the year, I would have read maybe 250 pages of a book, because I just don’t have the time/it’s not a priority. Instead I’ve read around 2000 pages. Scribd has really helped with this; I’m now much more likely to continue reading a book on my phone (that’s already open and doesn’t require buying/downloading) compared to mindlessly scrolling Facebook.

Normally I might have written one blog post; this is my ninth. I’ve also written probably 20,000 words of a course I’m working on. My scheduling game for Lyrical Host is on point; everything is scheduled to June and beyond (apart from Pinterest, which my lovely assistant has been working on).

(EDIT: I’m now up to 17 blog posts written and 16 books read).

Does it help? Sometimes. Now I’m at this stage it’s helping more, because just after it happened I just wanted to sleep for ages. Interestingly, my brain has been on my side with that and sent me lots of really nice, if a little weird, dreams. In fact in one it even put the thought in my mind that what I was dreaming wasn’t real so I wouldn’t be disappointed when I woke up (!)

I started writing this post over two weeks ago, and never got around to finishing it because this blog was totally broken. I did a few upgrades and I *think* it’s fixed now (cross fingers), so hopefully I can be around a lot more now because I love this blog. It still needs a huge overhaul, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be turning it back into a regular WordPress install rather than a Multisite one.

How did January treat you?