Gum on My Shoe

Check out our top blog posts for the past month. Posts are listed by the number of page views they attracted during the month, most popular first.

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way. — Napoleon Hill In my final post of 2025 I commented that while I was happy to assert my identity as a writer and blogger I wasn’t ready to accept the label of “influencer” despite it having been suggested on several occasions. That all changed when I learned (via this guest post by my friend and fellow blogger Aimee Wilson) that there are different categories of influencer. The article Aimee cited was Types of Influencers: Mega, Macro, Micro, and Nano Explained by The Viral Union (TVU). The types are distinguished by their respective number of followers and thus their perceived influence. Mega Influencers (1M+ followers) Macro Influencers (100k to 1M) Micro Influencers (10k to 100k) Nano Influencers: (under 10k) That last category caught my attention. I’m pretty sure I have fewer than ten thousand followers. Does that make me a nano influencer? It sounded kind of cool, especially when I read that TVU — w...

You don’t need to do this perfectly. You just need to keep choosing yourself often enough that life remains liveable. That’s the work. And you’re already doing it. — Cheryl Stott I recently shared my thoughts inspired by William Styron’s “Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness.” Since then I’ve been reading a very different yet no less engaging book on mental health. Living with Bipolar and other mood disorders by Cheryl Stott was published in paperback on January 26 this year. This review is based on the Kindle edition which came out a few days later. I was immediately drawn to the clean presentation of the text. There’s little to get in the way of the content itself. This is in keeping with the author’s aim to help people newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder understand what their diagnosis means — and what it doesn’t mean. Living with Bipolar is not a clinical manual and it’s not a Memoir. It’s the conversation many people never get when they are diagnosed. This Extended E...

It all happened so quickly. One moment I was walking to the car after a meal out with friends. The next I was lying face down in the dirt. It took a few seconds for me to realise what had happened. My life didn’t pass before my eyes — no Chicken Run “it was really boring” revelation — but as I lay there my priorities were surprisingly clear. I was most concerned for my (rather expensive) glasses. Then my beloved tweed jacket. Then whether I’d dropped anything out of my pockets. Then that I must be covered in mud. It was a while before I realised my left hand was hurting quite badly where I’d extended it to break my fall. As I got slowly to my feet I figured I probably hadn’t broken anything but I had no clear idea how I’d ended up on the floor. My friends were no less bemused. Jack and Aimee had been on the opposite side of the car and saw nothing. Walking behind me, Spencer had seen everything. Except there’d been nothing to see. A stumble, then me flat on my face. They were all ...

TW: Mention of suicidality and self-harm