The beginning of a new journey for Bex Books 'AND STUFF'

Hello dear readers

I hope you are all well! So you may have noticed that I have not been as present on my blog this year as I have in the past. I have had a few challenges to overcome, namely my health, which have caused me to really change my outlook on things and how I look after myself. Due to this I am going to be taking my blog in a new direction, I want the 'andstuff' part of my blog name to actually become more prominent and work alongside the book reviews and other bookish content. If you are interested in where I am taking my blog please do read on to find out the reasons why, and where I plan to take it!

Since November I have suffered with Post Viral Fatigue which really impacted my day to day life. It is amazing how much fatigue can change how you manage the smallest of tasks, and it is an invisible illness which made me feel like a fraud a times. I just felt like I SHOULD be able to go for a walk, or do the washing, or hoover the house. I mean even reading became a challenge for me, which as you know was especially upsetting. When I didn't even have the energy to read a book, I knew I was not well. It has been a slow recovery but I am slowly getting back to normal. Fatigue still rears itself when I've exerted myself too much or am not looking after myself properly but it is becoming manageable and I am back to my daily activities on the whole.

The whole thing has made me reevaluate how I look after myself now, I realised I was taking on far too much, things at work were new, being in a new setting, so I was back to basics there and learning lots of new things. I was taking on book tour after book tour, saying yes to so many author requests and becoming very overwhelmed in the process. I was saying yes to every event and my calendar was becoming chock full again as the world was opening up after covid. I haven't been looking after myself particularly well, eating healthily and doing any form of exercise fell to the wayside and it all resulted in my body telling me enough was enough!

Since my recovery I have realised the importance of looking after myself and really immersing myself in my own self care. It is vital, I don't want to go back to the height of my illness again, but the only way to not return is to begin looking after myself properly. I turned 40 this year and if I am lucky I am not even half way through my life, I owe it to myself and my family to do my utmost to be the best and healthiest version of myself I can be. With this in mind I have started to focus on my own self care, doing different things in order to look after my mind and body, trying to strengthen things inside and out in order to be able to navigate life the best way possibly.

While I was ill I discovered an amazing podcast, it was just what I needed to refocus my mind on myself and help to work through the fatigue. The Self Care Club Podcast is hosted by two lovely ladies, Lauren Mishcon and Nicole Goodman, a doula and life coach who explore different wellness and self care practices and then report back on how they have found them. It has given me so many great ideas of practices I want to try myself and I love listening to them, they are so dynamic and engaging. I am so glad I stumbled across their podcast and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in laughing a lot and learning about all things wellness!

The podcast has inspired me to try out lots of different things for my own wellness and I think some of the things have really helped on my road to recovery.

I also read a fantastic book for a read-a-long with Love Books Tours called Understanding Human Nature: A users guide to life by Richard Brooks. This self help book covered all aspects of wellness and practices that you could adopt yourself, from yoga to eating well to chakras and sun and moon dances. It gave me some fabulous ideas and had suggested activities that I could complete to start my own wellness journey. Hop on over to my instagram grid (Bexbooksandstuff) if you want to read my answers to questions about the book. I will be writing a full review on here soon.

I have really enjoyed my personal journey and so I wanted my blog to become a place where I can discuss wellness and self care and basically make it a little more personal to me. I will obviously still be reviewing books and joining book tours etc as reading is still a HUGE part of my own self care. However I will be more mindful of the books I choose to read and review, I will be limiting the amount of blog tours I join to 1or maybe 2 a month so I do not overwhelm myself and burn out again. I want to read for pleasure and talk about other bookish related things as well as just focusing on book reviews.

On the whole I won't be making drastic changes to my blog so those of you who follow me for book reviews and the like, do not fear, there will stilll be plenty of that! I just want to branch out a bit more and bring wellness and happiness to the forefront of my blog so you may see some different types of blog posts in the future! I hope you will stick around for that too!!

Let me know in the comments if any of this has resonated with you. Have you found any great self care practices or wellness approaches that you think I should try? Will you stick around to hear more about my personal journey as well as my book reviews?! I do hope so.