Tag: Journalism

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Made it

You know when people tell you to see what difference a year makes? But you struggle to do that because even though in hindsight a year goes by really quickly, in reality it’s a long time where all manner of things happen? It’s so annoying when those people are right.

At the start of this year, I was on my arse. I’d just come off the back of a shitty end to 2021, had just tanked an exam I had hyped myself for and was predicted an A in, and was going through the motions in a dead-end job that I despised.

I won’t make light of proper mental health issues and say ‘I had this’ and ‘I had that’, but I was low. I was on the floor. I couldn’t see how this year that was only a few days old was going to be any better than the last two stinkers that had gone by.

Eight days into it, I spent a really good day with a mate at the football. Accrington away. Had it not been for the freezing cold and the turgid 1-1 draw, it would’ve definitely been in contention for my favourite away day, given the fun journey, the food and the fact it was the first away game I’d done since Covid. After that, I started feeling better. For a bit, at least.

Then my head was up to its old tricks and produced what I’ve now named (after deliberating in literally the last few seconds) the Great April Wobble. I wrote about it then, I won’t subject it to you again now. But it was bad. Crying alone in the loft bad.

Then it got better again. Then it got worse again. Then it got better again. That seemed to be the rough pattern for about four or so months after that. Had I not been so open about it with one friend in particular, it may have again been a case of ‘then it got worse. Then worse. Then worse’.

I’ve never been that open with anyone. And we helped each other through our own rough patches. Whether it was at the pub or in the sauna at the gym, it was like therapy (and way better than actual therapy, at that).

I spent the summer doing a different job. I didn’t despise it like the last one, though at two days a week and crap money it was hardly anything to be excited about. But I think if I didn’t have that extra time to myself and had instead carried on mindlessly pushing trollies around Tesco, I’d have accepted that as my fate. Instead, I had time to finish what I was doing – getting back into journalism – and apply for jobs.

As summer ended, I kept getting the feeling that it was only a matter of time. I was getting exam results back that I had never thought possible. I was getting job interviews (not actually leading to anything but before then interviews were like gold dust). I felt ready to tackle the real world.

But, as the pattern goes, it ebbed again. The job rejections were piling up. I crashed my car and had to use the money I had saved for a holiday to sort that out. On that holiday I then had my wallet stolen.

All trivial things that can happen in life. But when they’re thrown at you in the space of a few weeks, it feels like life has got it in for you.

But then comes the bit at the end. The bit I was told to wait for at the start of the year. In the space of about four days, I went from applying to a job to finding out I’m moving away from the only town I’ve ever lived in at the start of next year.

Journalism is the only job I’ve ever wanted to do. I’d argue it’s the only thing I’m half-good at, even though I still have to deep breathe before phone calls and convince myself of the existence of certain words.

To be back doing that is a great feeling. To be going back to Accrington (as well as other places in East Lancs), the place where 2022 took its first good turn, is weird. Funny how the world works.

2022 has been strange. It’s been better than the two years before it combined. But it’s also had moments lower than anything I experienced then. I’ve made new friends, strengthened friendships with people I’d known for years, moved on from others.

I’ve gone from working at Tesco, to making chemistry kits in warehouse, to being a journalist again. I’ve gone from crying in the loft and dropping my AirPods in a bucket of piss (did I ever mention that on here?) to getting NCTJ Gold and having five of my closest friends fly out to Lisbon for my birthday.

I’m not on top of the world. I’ve learnt it’s better not to be, otherwise it’s too big of a fall. But I’ve gone from being on the floor at the start of the year to sitting comfortably at the end of it. I’m happy with that.

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The job that drained me

Back when it was fun and I did fun things to have fun.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything. Like, anything. Whether that’s on here (as if that’s even a surprise anymore) or for Last Word, where I’m still clinging on despite not having done anything there for about four months.

Been a bit of an odd one, so far, 2022. In many ways, it’s just been an extension of the absolute shitshow that 2021 was. In others, it feels like I have actually made progress on the things that made it such a shitshow in the first place, although actually producing something to prove that is apparently a difficult task.

Truthfully, I feel drained a lot of the time, which is why when I do get a sudden surge of productivity I try my best to scrawl my thoughts down on here before it evaporates and I end up reverting back to mindlessly swiping through Tik-Tok.

But I used to be better than that. I used to be able to write all day, every day. Very few breaks. Not eating my first meal or taking my first drink well into the afternoon because I was so focused. Admittedly, that’s not great either – you should eat and you should drink before 3pm so please do that – BUT the point I’m making is that I COULD do it, whereas now it feels like a mini-achievement to have had some breakfast and dragged myself to the gym by that time.

It would be easy to blame all of that on Covid. Not that I had it, because evidence would suggest that having gone through three pandemics with nobody in my house contracting it, I am immortal. But to blame the pandemics themselves? Yeah, a little. When it manages to stop the thing you write about most (football, if you haven’t kept up), it’s a bit of a struggle to be arsed about tapping away at the keyboard for six hours a day.

But I can’t pin it all on that – and I don’t. I blame my old job.

I never wanted to say what it was while I was actually working there, but I ‘revealed’ (big exclusive for the seven people that read this) that I had been working at Tesco as a picker for over a year.

Before I started there in January 2021, I had managed to keep my motivation with writing up throughout Covid. It had had its dips, but that’s normal. But the longer 2021 went on, the more I could feel myself slipping away with it.

As it would turn out, no matter whether you’re still getting 7-8 hours of sleep, waking up at 4.30am to go and work a pretty physical (it’s not exactly heavy lifting but you’re on your feet a lot) job that you absolutely despise doesn’t really go hand-in-hand with then coming home to write for three or four hours. And the more you try to keep it up, the less you want to do it.

Obviously, Tesco was my main job at the time, and by the time it came to having to make a choice, I also had my journalism training with the NCTJ to throw into the mix. Unfortunately, proper-job money and training towards no longer having to drag my ass to Tesco beat the thing that I really wanted to do, which was to carry on the (sorry, I’m going to boast) ‘pretty good’ work I had been doing managing Last Word.

And so life at Tesco continued. On paper, it’s a very easy job. You do what the little machine tells you to do. For eight hours a day. That’s standard. But when you’re in a small-ish shop with not a lot of customers, and colleagues that you barely talk to, you feel isolated. And for me, complete isolation like that is bad, because then it means I’m left alone with my head, and that means I can think about absolutely EVERYTHING.

Particularly when I’m tired from having to haul myself to that hell-hole every day, ‘EVERYTHING’ can consist of some pretty crap shit. Thinking back to the old job I actually enjoyed; worrying whether I’ll ever get another job like that; whether I’ll ever get out of Tesco at all; thinking about all the stupid things I’ve ever said; the things I had the opportunity to say to people but never did; all of the embarrassing moments from school; all of the things that DO NOT MATTER, but while you’re stuck in the cycle, your brain will convince you are the most important things at that moment.

And that’s what it was like – for the whole 16 months I worked there. Thinking like that, constantly, is draining. I never thought about it before, but I find it baffling how much of your energy in a day can be consumed by your brain just functioning. It left me with no energy to do anything else. All just for a job. A job I never wanted to do in the first place and knew that I wouldn’t be staying in forever (however much my brain tried to convince me otherwise).

I’ve been out of that place for a month and a half now. I have another job which, while on paper should be much more boring, I find I’m enjoying way more because I’m not bound by the dismal hours and dreary environment of before. I’m more attentive, my sleep is better, I can see my mates more (shoutout to them for finally getting a WhatsApp group together, too).

But the buzz for writing still hasn’t come back, fully. Yes, I’ve sat here for 20 minutes and smashed my face into the keyboard to produce whatever nonsense this is. But writing about football – the thing that I used to be able to do for hours on end – I want it to be like that again. Like 2019, where it was my job, my hobby and the only thing I wanted to do.

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Let’s talk about something else

I don’t know why I always get the weird burst of motivation to come on here on a Sunday night when I’ve spent the day feeling sorry for myself after one too many glasses of deliciousness in town. I also don’t know what I want to write about, but after going through the effort of publicising that I had had some sort of drastic rebrand on here (i.e. changed two pictures and binned off the cream background) I feel as though I should just write ‘something’. So let’s have a catch-up.

Since I last posted here I haven’t been too good ‘upstairs’, but for once I want to avoid too much about all that. It’s good to talk, and I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t want this to become somewhere where that’s all I do. Then it comes across as if that’s my entire personality, which it’s not (entirely). Other things have been happening too.

I’ve alluded to my job on here before but never actually said what it was, mainly because I found it a bit embarrassing. But now that I’ve left, I can happily say that I survived 15 months working as a picker at Tesco. I’ve had a lot of jobs in my life already, and have worked in some capacity since I was 12 (paper rounds count, okay) and can honestly say that Tesco was the worst of the lot.

Should anyone from there actually read this (which I doubt, but anyway), the people there were sound. I didn’t speak to many of them but the ones I did were good people.

The job itself just stank.

Fifteen months of getting up at 4.30am to drag my ass to Aylesbury to start at 6am took its toll. It was mentally draining.

When we weren’t in lockdown, it was hard to maintain any sort of social life when you have to go to bed at 8pm and all your mates are still at work whenever you have your free time.

Walking around a supermarket for eight hours a day being a slave to the scanner you carried with you might ‘sound’ easy enough. I thought that too, that’s why I applied for the job when I desperately needed one. But you soon realise it’s just a mental game, one that I’m still not sure whether I won or not but am nonetheless happy to not be playing anymore.

So with Tesco firmly knocked on the head and fucked off to the back of my mind where it belongs, I’m starting a new job this week. Nothing too exciting, but it’s local, pays good and allows me to properly focus on the actual thing I’m trying to achieve, which is getting back into journalism.

Something I never mention to anyone when I see them apart from to everyone every time I see them is that I was, before that big cold that went around, a sports reporter. Unfortunately when said big cold became quite a bit more serious than that, no sport was allowed to happen, which put ol’ Volleys out of a job.

However, ol’ Volleys had actually got very lucky bagging that job in the first place seeing as he had not actually passed the NCTJ qualification the first time around (bloody law exams).

So, that’s why last year I went back and started the course again, and it’s been going well so far.

I’m using a lot of my old grades where possible rather than re-doing things that I don’t need to (work smart, not hard), but I still managed to get an A grade on one of the new exams (my first ever A on any exam I’ve ever done, which felt just *mighty fine* 🤌) and I’ve got a shorthand exam coming up this week that I’m feeling mildly confident about too.

In all, that side of things is going well. There’s a difficult stretch to come now, where I’ve got to put a lot of focus into law (the bane of my fucking life) but with that being the only major worry (as opposed to the four or five I had at this stage of the course last time) I should hopefully be okay.

Probably the last little catch-up point is that I actually left the southeast of England for a little while last week, for the first time in what felt like too damn long.

I went back to Anglesey, where my mum comes from, for the first time since 2018, and the first time I can remember since I was a kid where my brother and sister were there too.

It was nice going back to all the old beaches and towns we would go to when I was younger, although my siblings probably have better and stronger memories of some of the more out-of-the-way places. My Anglesey experience as a kid was largely limited to Holyhead. That place is just one big anomaly…

Just being somewhere different seemed to calm me down a lot. The anxiety troubles I’d been having in the weeks previously definitely subsided a lot and since I’ve been back I’ve stayed roughly around that level. Maybe getting out more would actually be beneficial.

Anyway, I’m bored of this now so I’m going to not check any of it and just hit publish anyway. Even though it’s a rambling mess it was nice to mostly write about something not to do with what most of my other posts are about.

I’ll do them still as and when it’s appropriate, but it’s nice to have something refreshing on here.

Right. Byeeeee.

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Hard work pays off

Just a quick one, yeah? A little update of sorts.

I’ve been meaning to write something else on here that wasn’t about running because, you know, ✨ varied content✨. However, each day I’ve just decided that, frankly, I couldn’t be bothered so left it.

I will try and do that soon, and I’ll do another Dry Dry January update at the weekend as I’m aware I missed one and I’m sure you’re all devastated by that (it’s going well though, thanks for asking).

Those of you who know me and haven’t just stumbled across this from the three places I share it (most of which are full of people I know anyway…), will remember that back in 2017 I started a journalism course in London. You may also remember that, while I enjoyed it, in the end it didn’t go to plan and I didn’t pass, but still got lucky enough to get a job in the industry. And you may also remember that a pandemic happened and I now no longer have that job in the industry.

WELL, phase one of the return has now been passed, I’m pleased to report. Towards the end of last year I decided I wanted to go back and re-do the course, this time passing and succeeding on merit rather than relying on luck. That, though, meant raising a significant sum of money, which therefore meant I needed a job.

I spent the last two months of that shit show we called 2020 grafting in a warehouse, doing 60 hours a week, to get the majority of it. Although the people I worked with were fine, and I got some cool uniform and memorabilia out of it, I couldn’t have hated every second more. That came to an end just before Christmas, and now I’m working in a supermarket to get the last few hundred pounds that I need.

The key point to this, though, is that I submitted my application to return to the course on Sunday afternoon, and yesterday evening I heard that I’d been accepted to go on without the need for an interview.

The interview part when I did it in 2017 (bare in mind I was 18-years-old, had only ever had two interviews in my life and this course was not designed for people that age) was the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever done in my life. Though I have no doubt I’d have been fine with it four years later, to have to not do it is a big weight off my shoulders and finally knowing what I’m going to be doing come the end of the year is a major relief.

There were mistakes, and distractions, last time around, but I’m determined to make this one a far different experience to the one I had four years ago. The hard graft in that warehouse so that I could get a second chance at following this dream was definitely worth it. Now I need to make sure I can continue that once the course comes around.

Anyway, hope you’re all doing good. Let me know if not – if you want to – and we can talk. See you again.