As The Title Says, It Has Been A Messy Month

A lot has happened this month, both personally and on the blog side of things, so let’s get into it.

On the personal front, college has technically ended. I penned my last exam paper and stood in my department as a student for the final time. There is still administrative work left to do, but academically, it is over. I no longer have a reason to simply go to college, attend classes, and come back home.

I wrote an entire blog post about it, so I won’t go too deep here. If you’re interested, you can check it out:

When The Curtain Falls : https://medium.com/@beyondmebtw/when-the-curtain-falls-db142be99d49

Apart from that, I had my farewell, which was a lot of fun. Other than that, life was fairly simple. I stayed home, went to work, came back, and repeated the cycle. It has been a long month.

Emotionally, it has been a bit of a rollercoaster. I’ve spent a lot of time in my own head, imagining scenarios, creating little fantasies, and thinking about the future. There have been sad moments, happy moments, and everything in between.

On the blog side, things have mostly been race recaps and that personal blog post.

I wanted to write more, but motivation has been a little low. That said, I did watch a few things this month, including Project Hail Mary, so it’s not like I’ve been completely disconnected from the things I enjoy.

Right now, I’m working on my review of The Boys Season 5. I’m not even halfway through and I’m already sitting at around 4,000 words. I have a lot of thoughts about that season, so you can be absolutely certain I’m going to talk about all of them.

The race recaps have been moving at a slower pace as well. I posted the Canada recap today and yesterday. The writing itself was finished on Friday, but I was simply too tired to publish it. I’m not bored of writing them. If anything, I’m just taking my time.

It’s strange because it feels like so little has happened, even though we’ve only missed two races. Somehow the gaps feel much larger than they actually are. That won’t be a problem for long though. This month is packed. Four weeks, three races. One of them is Monaco, which could either be brilliant or completely uneventful, but at the end of the day it’s still fast cars going around a track, so I’m not complaining.

The races are becoming an increasingly important part of my routine. I try not to let my entire schedule revolve around them, but that’s easier said than done. College is gone now, and with it a lot of the external structure that naturally guided my days. F1 fills some of that gap. I don’t dislike the structure. I just don’t want to become too dependent on it.

One thing I’ve realised while writing race recaps is that my structure tends to be very linear. I usually narrate the events as they happened and then give my thoughts afterwards. I’m thinking of flipping that around.

Giving my overall opinion early while the race is still fresh in the reader’s mind might make the writing feel more engaging. The key moments would still be there, but they would become supporting material rather than the main focus. We’ll see how that experiment goes.

Project-wise, I’ve been spending a lot of time improving Beyond Money.

The public version is still available, but the version I’m actively using is miles ahead of what’s currently live. I’ll push those updates whenever I feel like it. There’s no rush. More importantly, the project is shaping into something that genuinely suits me. I’m building features I enjoy using, solving problems I actually care about, and making it feel more personal. That’s been satisfying.

I also took some photos of a bird this month that I thought turned out really well, so I built an entirely new page to display them:

https://photos.beyondmebtw.com

Beyond that, I’ve made a number of quality-of-life improvements across the site. Backend management pages are easier to navigate, content classification is cleaner, featured minis now appear on the homepage, and I finally fixed some responsiveness issues that had been annoying me for a while.

A lot of small improvements, but they add up.

Looking back, I think it has been a productive month.

Could I have done more? Probably.

The answer to that question is almost always yes.

But I’m slowly learning that failure isn’t measured by what could have been done. If it were, nobody would ever feel accomplished. Growth to me comes from recognising what was achieved rather than constantly comparing it to an imaginary version of myself that did everything perfectly.

June is going to be a lot. In fact, I want it to be a lot.

There are projects to build, reviews to write, races to watch, and an entirely new chapter of life that’s just beginning.

Let’s see where the road takes me.

Until next time.