Neverland

I have always felt a deep understanding for Peter Pan. Not in that I have any particular penchant for green tights, but in that I have never wanted to grow up. 

My childhood was an extremely cosy and happy one and, knowing that the adult world could be quite the opposite, I had absolutely no desire to leave it. 

Even after getting married and leaving home, buying sofas and signing car leases, purchasing alcohol without ID and being put in charge of other people's children (not at the same time), I've never properly felt like a grown up. I've always felt like a "grown up".  Like I have been faking it and could be discovered and sent back to the kids table at any moment. 

There is a lot to be said for being a child in an adult's body. If I want chocolate for breakfast and McDonald's for dinner, there's no one to stop me. If I want to suddenly drive off on a ridiculous adventure, then that is what will happen. Usually with my husband as instigator and partner-in-crime on both counts. 

But then, suddenly, things changed for me. I had to deal with a grown up situation in a grown up way. I had to make real, grown up decisions. I felt like, after spending years as a "grown up", the quotation marks fell away. And, to my astonishment, I actually really like it. I feel comfortable in myself. I feel happy and settled, confident and in control. I feel like a grown up. 

Now, this could just be an extremely short lived thing. You could find me tomorrow, throwing fairy dust over myself and thinking happy thoughts, or curled in a ball, sobbing. And I by no means rule out future random adventures or chocolate breakfasts/McDonald's dinners. For goodness sake, I'm not a Grown Up yet. 

But, for the moment, I feel like being a grown up isn't the worst thing in the world. Maybe Wendy was not as stupid as I thought  after all. Maybe when we refuse to grow up, we just tie ourselves to living in the past. Maybe I shouldn't write blog posts when I'm feeling quite so philosophical, who knows! Whatever the case, I will just quietly enjoy my budgets and to-do lists and proudly state "I...am an adult! And it's not that bad." 

P.s Although, I did buy drain un-blocker for the first time this week. How boring and unglamorous. I could happily do without the part of adulthood where you have to deal with plumbing. 

Well, so much for that.

For all my good intentions, I did not manage to become blogger extraordinaire after all. 

Sometimes things go wrong, and life becomes something you never thought it would be, and you need to take a little time to reevaluate. Some time to figure out who you are, who you want to be, and how you want to progress from here.  

I have taken that time, and I feel now that I have a much clearer idea of all of those things and so I am ready to start again. 

I won't promise any kind of regularity but I will write when I feel like it, and when it makes me happy. As I'm pretty certain that my rather protracted hiatus will have lost me the three followers I managed to attract, I'm guessing that there is no one out there to mind! 

This is what it is, and I hope you enjoy it. 

Oh, Internet!

Hello peoples! 

This week I have been pondering slightly more serious subjects and I have been thinking a lot about social media. 

In a news week that included the re-accusation of Woody Allen, the untimely death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman and the 48th Super Bowl, the world of social media was alight. But not everything being said was necessarily agreeable. 

And it got me thinking. 

In social media, we have in our hands the ability to craft a world for ourselves. We can pick and choose the news and opinions we are faced with on a daily basis and completely alter our perspective of the world around us. 

This occurred to me as I was in the process of unfollowing someone on Twitter because they had expressed an opinion I disagreed with. And I thought, what kind of world do I want to see? I want a world in which paedophiles are condemned, death is greeted with only sorrow and respect and I get to see Payton Manning make this face. But that is not the world we live in (apart from Payton Manning's face, fortunately that is here to stay!). 

Obviously, I want a world where bad things never happen. But is shutting the bad things, or people's bad reactions to bad things, out unhealthy? How can we ever generate discussion if we "unfollow" all opinions that differ from our own? How can we form well educated opinions or make intelligent arguments of our own? Does that make us closed-minded and stubborn or does living in our own world just make us a little happier? 

While I support that others have the right to express themselves online, I also have the right not to listen. And with the impersonal face of a smartphone screen, expressing ourselves negatively has never been easier. So as we are left to wade through the negativity, the trolls and the plain hateful, how do we know what to shut out and what to respect? To be honest, I simply don't enjoy spending my (virtual) time with people who routinely say things that anger me. So, I often choose the unfollow button. And I just hope that I can tell the difference between protecting myself (and this lovely bubble I live in) and stubbornly closing myself off from other opinions. 

How do you tackle social media? The good news is that the comments are now working so you can let me know!

Sorry for the slightly heavier post! 

Thanks for reading, I love you all! 

Aims xx

Thank you millions to Tim for taking and editing the photo! He's a total genius.