Like the empress from the NeverEnding Story, it’s time for a new name.

And that name will be………. Grab-Bag.

I will briefly explain the reason for this name, before going a bit into why I even choose the former name to begin with – “Grab-Bag” basically sums up my current approach to life which has best served me up until now, and may well yet serve me for some time. I’m even seriously considering changing my IRL name and the only thing really stopping me is not being able to decide upon an appropriate new one which I feel like I could actually stick with for the foreseeable future. Hopefully an idea for one will spring up into my mind almost as readily as the website one just has, and *that* took quite a while…

Due to myriad personal reasons, I’ve had rather more trouble kicking off a steady career (primarily in writing/editing as I’ve been aiming towards for a while now) than I ever thought I would, even in this increasingly hostile and unceasingly shitty economy. In fact I went through a rather short-lived phase of thinking that it might actually start getting easier for me. One might think that I would in fact have an edge over most other people having “worked from home” for several years by now, but apparently not… however, I seem to also have a rather pain-in-the-arse tendency to refuse to *completely* quit when faced with certain obstacles such as having little money at any given time and having steadily decreasing self-confidence the older I get with still little to no career stability to rise alongside said age. So if/when I ever get a chance to do certain things like, say, try out a new activity, learn a new skill, or even *gasp* travel to a new place… basically when the stars align and the fates allow, I tend to not want to fuck around too much and risk missing the opportunity – I tend to just grab a bag and go (hence, “Grab-Bag”) – preferably before I change my mind and allow enough time to pass (usually a few seconds to minutes will do) to convince myself of what a stupid idea it is and how I’ll inevitably end up getting something terribly and embarrassingly wrong.

It’s pretty much the only way I can really feel like I’m still properly living.

The site itself will remain for a while, at least until it makes more sense to “migrate” it elsewhere, or even to start a new site entirely. The latter seems like the better option if/when I manage to boost my writing/editing career a little bit more, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. I don’t want to change too much too soon in the off-chance that it might backfire. I’m going to make this post, then I’ll go about backing up the site more formally (I’ve already saved individual posts but somehow I feel like I’ll need to do more than that), then I’ll rename the site and set up one of those redirect thingymajigs if I somehow manage to figure it out… then that’ll be it. At least until such a time as I change my mind *again* about the site name. In the meantime, the site itself will remain, and it will remain somewhat similar in theme, with most of the sections remaining in place. But the name HAS to go. After nearly a decade, it’s well and truly time.

The primary reason for this is that I think that this site – and I, by extension – need, and more importantly, deserve, a better name. Dare I say it, a more… dignified name?

You see… once upon a time, I was, shall I say, “gifted” the name/title by an ex partner who used to call me a “silly goose” as a term of endearment. At least that’s what I’m hoping it was. He was around to witness (and to be honest, at least partly inspire) the birth of the website, so he gets some credit for that. And at the time, I was sufficiently enamoured with the gesture of giving me the name *and* the idea for the website (and also I had a sufficiently low self-image, I suppose) to allow the name to “stick” far beyond the point at which I should have “rebranded” – the relationship is long gone and we don’t even have contact anymore, a long and boring and far too personal story in and of itself – and yet here I still have a site that carries this particular “legacy” and very likely gives off the image of me being something of a nutcase… so why the hell would I keep it for so long?

I guess one thing I’ve learned about myself in recent times is that, any time I have a “sentimental” reason to hang onto something, I tend to have a hard time letting it go. This goes especially when little if anything comes along to fill the void take its place. I once liked the name, it suited me for a while, and by the time it didn’t exactly “fit” me anymore, I didn’t know what else to change the name to. Thus years would pass with this, erm, silly name. However, as people tend to do, I have changed a HUGE amount personally in the intervening time – quite a few of my values have changed, however frustratingly slow other aspects of my life have been to follow suit and keep up with this change. Even as I was making my very last post (before this one) I was already thinking that I was long overdue a change, not least because I was just BORED of posting, at least as much as I figured what few followers I had were of reading whatever self-involved drivel I came out with. I KNEW full well at the time that I needed to make things a lot more interesting if I was going to keep the site going, but unfortunately I had just entered what has turned out to be a pretty long-lasting “fog of meh” in which I had no real direction for the site, or indeed for much of anything.

In all honesty, I don’t really have much more of an overarching direction I want things to move in, but I do know two things: 1) I don’t want my work on this site to have been for nothing so I’m going to preserve what I once posted if only for posterity, and 2) I do want to keep writing about some things, namely the few things that I DO know now that I’d like to write about, which I figure might actually stand a chance of being of interest to some people. The thing is, for an embarrassingly long time, despite *knowing* full well, on some level, that the way I was going about the whole blogging thing (basically just posting personal thoughts and musings and stuff) was never exactly going to appeal to a wide range of people – I’ve had my self-involved moments but there’s a limit even to that – I really wasn’t sure how else to go about it as a complete beginner. I just assumed, hoped really, that the more I blogged, the more my blogging would “snowball” somehow, and end up accumulating interested people, and maybe *then* I could go about being a bit more adventurous about my subject matter. Pretty much the main reason I always stuck to myself and my sad life as “subject matter” is because it felt the safest – as much as I wanted to write about a lot more, I always feared unintentionally saying the wrong thing about the wrong person/people and having that lead to some trouble, and especially as I was basically a non-entity, as bloggers go, I stuck to one of the subjects I knew best, and someone I was quite confident wouldn’t take issue with me – me. Plus I suppose there was a decent element of simply wanting to feel like my life had just a *bit* more significance than it actually had/has, so by trying to pretend that it did, I thought that I was making it matter more somehow. I think the kids would call it “screaming into the void” nowadays, but I’m not the most in-touch person with the current lingo.

Basically there’s a reason why I only ever posted about the “highlights” of what was going on with me – because pretty much *everything* else sucked big-time and I had no idea how to even make my “normal life” matter, being that I seemed to be eternally doomed to rejection from “proper” jobs and other stuff too, and for a long time I wasn’t sure what kind of person I was actually *supposed* to be. That teenage identity crisis most people go through? I’m only just *starting* to come out of that and I’m in my late thirties now. So I guess I just glommed onto “blogger” and ran with that for a while. Because hey what did I have to lose?

But deep down I never wanted to be just another “influencer”, even if I ever had somehow managed to gain a certain amount of commercial success – even the term “influencer” is super-cringe, or is it just me? – I think I was mostly trying to emulate a modern-day version of Bill Bryson, the classic travel writer who basically got me into the idea of travel writing in the first place. However, despite obviously liking travelling and writing – perchance at the same time – I always wanted to be “something more” and indeed would have probably ended up hating being “just another blogger/influencer/whatever” before too long. I think even back at the time when I was trying to convince myself that doing that sort of thing was for me, I might have been on some level holding myself back from properly “putting myself out there” because that would’ve meant way MORE exposure, in almost every sense. Looking back, I think that would’ve been a VERY bad idea. In any case, for the most part, I was largely dependent on what my circumstances would allow, which was not a hell of a lot for quite a long time, and to an extent, even now. And now, for the first time pretty much ever, I don’t think it’s terribly exciting, but I think what I have in mind for this blog is at least… something. Something more boring but also more interesting at the same time. Something more people would actually give a shit about, basically. Which was the whole damn point of this blog in the first place.

So here it is – my first published post in nearly six years. At least until I remembered that I actually posted a “first post in ages” post just a few months ago. To whoever out there still gives a shit about this site (thank you!), I’ll definitely try to revive it with more relevant and reasonably smart content as I always wanted to do from the beginning. For far too long a time, it has either just served as an attempt to go all “hello world” during a time when I had pretty much no idea who or what I even was or where I was going, or otherwise it has just sort of languished in blog-purgatory. Sounds familiar… but I figure if you’re going to post stuff on the internet, you should try to make it something that you’d want to read, not only when you’ve just posted it but at any point in the future.

So yeah… “hello world”, once more. I’ll not leave it nearly so long I’m not kidding where the hell does the time go to post again this time.

Things have changed in five years or so. A LOT LOT LOT LOT LOT. And then a bit fucking more for good measure. I really don’t think I need to mention one of the main things which has happened in the world between then and now, do you..?  

After all this time, I think a general significant overhaul of the site is in order, name, theme, and everything. But for now I’m not quite sure. About almost anything.

The only things which I used to blog about here which are even true anymore are 1) I’m still very much a vegan and I don’t see that changing anytime soon 2) I’m still passionate about literature (reading and writing) but for certain reasons this has slowed down a lot of late, and 3) I still love travelling as and when I’m able to, although that has *also* slowed down a hell of a lot lately, the reasons for which should become clear the further you read on.

Some of the things which have changed the most for me are:

• I no longer identify as having ASD. Trust me when I say that I *absolutely* have my reasons for this decision, and it has not been taken lightly. I’ve been doing a LOT of reflection, recalling my past, viewing things in a much different light, and generally just thinking about the circumstances in which I received the diagnosis in the first place and, without going too much into it (at least for now), I’m now of the opinion that most, if not all, of the “symptoms” I’ve experienced have been more a result of emotional trauma than any underlying neurodevelopmental condition. Furthermore, I’m also now thinking that I was effectively “persuaded” into identifying with the DSM description of the condition, and then I guess it just sort of became a self-fulfilling prophecy type thing? Think a certain way, act a certain way, be treated a certain way, etc. For this I have to take *some* responsibility, because at this stage, even if it was a misguided decision, it was still *technically* a decision nonetheless – I really just ended up at the stage of being like, if it’s *not* ASD, then just what the hell could “it” be, and I guess I just settled for the most “convenient” thing at the time? As to what actually is my “damage”… this is still very much a work in progress, which I think I’m going to not actually disclose for a change even if/when I ever do work it out (because I now notice that in my attempts to become a “blogger” I’ve made that classic rookie mistake of *seriously oversharing*, whilst labouring under the misunderstanding that a little bit of oversharing is just “what bloggers do”… hahahahahahaNO), and in any case these days I’m a lot more inclined to avoid any and all labels wherever possible. Currently, I only loosely and unofficially identify as “neurodivergent” but even that is such a far-reaching label now that it effectively means little without further personal information which I’m not at the moment willing to share.
• Above edited to add: I just re-read the “why I don’t volunteer anymore” post I made years ago and by christ I really do sound like an “aspie” in that don’t I… no offence to anyone who identifies as such but I’m aware that they (I?) are quite notorious for acting in a painfully awkward way, at least those with not quite that much self-awareness tend to, and yes I definitely HAVE acted in such a way at times in the past it’s not *quite* as bad as I probably made myself sound. It was likely the result of decades of accumulated rejection and general low self-regard taking their toll and making a crappy situation that much worse. And probably less-than-up-to-snuff writing too. I usually try to make it at least decent but I was clearly at a low ebb at the time.
• I no longer identify as a feminist. Please let me say right here and now that this is NOT because I don’t believe in the core values of what has now come to be known as the first and second waves of feminism – that is, the right for women to vote, to own property, to divorce, to not be considered the property of men, to equal pay for equal work, to own a bank account, to a harassment-free workplace, to be generally treated like a human being, etc. I’ve basically never NOT believed any of these things, it’s just that the feminism “movement” has become so deeply corrupted by outside forces, mutating it into something virtually beyond recognition, and generally just treating the original movement as a great big joke. Unfortunately, the word itself has become tainted by association, and generally these days I tend to abhor labels full-stop, primarily because over time I’ve come to feel trapped by them, the more I grow and develop as a person. Which segues rather neatly into the next thing…
• I no longer identify as leftist/left-wing. Pretty much for the same reasons as the point above, the core values of “classic” liberalism have become so grotesquely twisted that a lot of the things they propose are in total opposition to what they once stood for. For one thing, reducing the right to free speech: I’m not even that old (not even now…) and even I distinctly remember a time when it was the Left, rather than the Right, who was vocally opposed to things like censorship and the increasing encroachment of the government on previously accepted rights to privacy, due process, and perhaps most importantly of all, to not be randomly selected to be publicly felt up while going through airport security, to the point where it might force *some* to realise that this groping is the most “action” they’ve gotten in years and are likely to get for the foreseeable future (not talking about myself at all here… *whistle*) Also to be clear here, I definitely do not identify as right-wing either – I *did* not long ago have a “peek” over at that side of the fence, just in case there were in fact any valid arguments they had that I’d previously overlooked or dismissed due to my hardline identification with the Left. A few things did click with me, if I’m being honest, but definitely not enough to go switching camps, and I don’t know if it’s just me but why do right-wing public figures ALWAYS end up parroting bible verses in order to back up their less-than-savoury viewpoints, as if that at all validates whatever they’re saying? Just smacks of another “cult” to me. And the icing on the cake, for me, for BOTH the left and right alike, is the government’s recent shameless attempts at bulldozing hard-won rights of women to things like abortion and contraception – I’m aware that the US currently has a Democrat administration but you really wouldn’t think it. It’s all just a huge mess now, and they seem to be just rolling back basic rights for erstwhile vulnerable demographics just to show that they can, pretty much dismantling the long-held idea of “rights” in and of themselves, in so far as them being “things” that nations can give to their people. I’m now thinking *that* idea alone is well worth re-examining.
• I’ve no idea who is genuinely in charge anymore, and I’m not sure that it even matters, because it all amounts to the same. So basically I’m politically homeless now. (I’m not even American so a lot of these things don’t *currently* affect me, but everyone knows that sooner rather than later, American politics and culture tends to infiltrate other parts of the world. I fear that the UK may well be hot on its heels with regards to cutting back on rights we all took for granted at one time.)

So yeah… that’s my quick update. I do intend to be back for more just as soon as I get a little bit more of a “something” going!

Just an update to promise an upcoming post on my recent trip of “self discovery” which has taken me from the furthest corners of Western Europe to the nearest corners of West Eurasia. Reasons for this latest venture are primarily centred on a travel blogging conference and the desire to continue volunteering all whilst exploring new places I’ve not yet seen.

However due to my difficulty in adapting to new ways of using technology, lost camera and general and inexplicable slowness of connection (almost always particularly so when I try to post something) this may take a bit more time.

I can promise that I have an array of tales and images to share, I’ve only to find the time to properly organise it into a coherent storyline.

In the meantime please investigate my updated photo gallery, with much more to come soon!