Yes you read that right! In case you haven’t already noticed, some big changes have been occurring over here at Kirsty Through The Looking Glass HQ, and I guess to some extent you deserve an explanation as to why this is.

This blog is not a baby anymore – if it was an actual human being it would have just started school – but for various reasons it has suffered from long periods of neglect. This is why I have decided to store all of the original KTTLG posts in one place – so don’t worry, all of your favourite posts about adventures, cheesecakes and dinosaur porn haven’t disappeared they’ve just been moved! [Update: at the time of re-launching on October 1 technology issues mean that they haven’t been moved but they hopefully will be soon!]

This means an almost blank slate – welcome to KTTLG 2.0!

Since I was last properly dedicated to KTTLG a few things have changed. It is three years since I stopped working at the place with I often referred to fondly as Absolute Hell. Since then I have moved to Edinburgh, where I got myself and honours degree and met a handful of wonderful humans. The problem was that while life wasn’t bad, life in the city left me feeling constantly trapped and the excitement of the freedom that city life can bring had eloped before it even arrived. I found myself constantly stuck in a bizarre state of confusion – I was really unhappy even though I was enjoying myself.

I finished university in 2016 and moved back to the North-east shortly after – having lost my job in Absolute Hell when I moved in 2014 and only briefly managing to secure a summer job in 2015 before procuring a pesky injury, I found myself filed under the statistic of unemployed graduate and you just can’t afford to live in Edinburgh when you don’t have any money coming in.

Even when I moved home I couldn’t settle in. I was fortunate enough to have chosen a diverse degree which opened up a number of career possibilities, but that doesn’t make finding a job any easier. I had just moved back to the corner of the country where Oil Problems meant that people were losing their jobs left, right and centre and this meant that I was up against not only other graduates, but also people who had been working in the industry for decades (literally) who now also found themselves unemployed. This meant I was applying for jobs everywhere – all over the UK as well as America, Switzerland and China. There was no real point in unpacking myself and making myself at home if I was just going to have to pack up and move out again – the likelihood of getting a job close to home seemed impossible.

The three months (ish) when I was looking for work seemed to last forever, but looking back now I realise how ridiculous that is and also how fortunate enough I was to not only find a job close to home, but to find a job I really, really like.

You read that right. I love my job (mostly), and that alone has changed my life.

So for the past 13 months I have been working at as a junior reporter at a local newspaper. This does mean, however, that often after sitting in front of a computer screen writing all day I don’t always feel like coming home and sitting in front of a computer. I realise, now that I have settled into my job, that blogging caters to something which my job can not – my need for personal release and a certain level of creativity.

I realised at the turn of the year that in recent years my personal happiness has heavily relied on other people, and my new year’s resolution for 2017 was to work on making myself happy.

When I took some time to think about things that made me happy, this blog was right up there at the top. The more I thought about it though, the more it didn’t feel right to just start posting again as if nothing had happened. You can’t just ignore the fact that you have practically vanished off the face of the Earth for three years. I also didn’t want it to feel like a rushed college project any more – it just didn’t fit with how my life has changed.

That’s why it has taken me so long to start again – I have spent a lot of time trying to work out who I am now compared to who I was in 2012 when I started KTTLG and how I could best portray this. I considered starting a new site, but realised that KTTLG was who I am and who I wanted to be, I just needed to make the Five Years Later version.

So here it is – soon to be home to posts on a variety of things from my life…which by the way, is as dysfunctional as ever!