Hi! Okay, first things first: I’m fine, don’t worry. This is hopefully a good post.
So our beloved Jess posted a blog recently about how we only show the positive side of ourselves on social media, so people don’t see the real us. It chimed with me. I think this attitude is as harmful to ourselves as it is to other people.
So here I am being honest: I took some time to let things slow down this weekend, and it was great. I ran out of things to tweet, so I just put Twitter down. I played a PC game for the first time in ages. And, oops, I tentatively said yes to doing another round of an anthology I’d been involved in.
And that’s part of the reason for this post. Truthfully? I’m too busy. I have too many things to do. So I took some time to assess just why I felt so overwhelmed.
For one, I realised I’d had 45 different DM conversations on Twitter in the last week. And that’s only one platform. My day involves a lot of messaging as it is, and with this too, it takes up a lot of time. So I’m not going to be as responsive to DMs for a few days or weeks. We’ll see. But I just can’t prioritise them right now.
Second, I’ve cut back on some commitments I’d made to other writers and creatives on here. I hate to do this more than anything, I want to be dependable – in fact I pride myself on it – but I don’t have the mental bandwidth for all of them. I’ve had to narrow down to a few I want to keep focusing on.
Third, I will try to get back to betas for my short story collection soon, but it may be a while. It may be a little while before I write for it again.
This is the thing: we all have stresses, and we don’t like to talk about them – often not with those closest to us, let alone the internet. So I don’t want to go into much detail, but my life is a bit complicated and hectic, and to manage that properly, I have to clear a bit more brain space for it.
So hopefully you’ll understand if I’m not as busy on twitter as I was, or as responsive to messages, and if you’re one of the people I’ve had to cancel on, I’m sorry, I really am. But poking my head up showed me how much more I need to do that, and to be able to, I have to recalibrate.
I’ll see you around. ♥️
Dewi Hargreaves 
I seriously limit how much I DM with people. I’d rather use email, when at all possible. It’s important to limit your commitments, especially when it’s creative. You need time to refill your creative well. Even though creativity spurs more creativity, when too much of it is tied to obligations connected to others, it can backfire. Take a breath (or a hundred), and destress, so you can enjoy the commitments you do take one. I have learned this the hard way, by overbooking myself into illness more than once. Best wishes to you.
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