Dysphasia is a language disorder that comes from a variety of different sources, one of which is damage to the brain. As you'll know if you read my blog, I had cancer back when I was around 17/18 in my brain, which wreaked havoc across my entire body, ranging from the bottom of my spine to my frontal lobe and pituitary gland. The result for me was, of course, issues with the hormones in my body, damage to my nervous system and, of course, learning difficulties (at least for a while).
One learning difficulty that comes and goes for me is dysphasia. When I say it comes and goes, I believe it's always there; it just worsens occasionally. It's gotten worse over the past 10 years, and a lot of the damage done was from radiotherapy more than anything else.
Dysphasia is not just a disorder that affects speech; it also affects comprehension and understanding of what people mean. For example, sometimes I know what a word means and then, occasionally, when I see the same word and cannot understand it.
It leads to extreme frustration with myself, particularly what happened to me, and I feel useless. I feel people sometimes look at me and think I'm stupid or something, yet I know when I'm having a day where I'm in control of this, I can talk. You see, I'm typing this up without anyone else's help, so right now, you can see that right now I am not feeling the effects of dysphasia. Sadly, I have, in the past, considered committing suicide because this gets to me more than anything else in the world.
People aren't really aware of how difficult it can be to have dysphasia and don't think it's a real problem. Over the last few years, I have found it incredibly challenging, particularly when doing job interviews and public speaking (I usually blame stress for this as I don't want to come across as 'stupid').
I moved into my current house four years ago today!
This is my first house but not the first time I've lived away from my parents house as that was in 2013 when I moved into my halls of residence at university.
It was strangely easy buying my house back in 2021 as I had saved enough money up myself (I was saving an awesome £1200 - £1600 a month at the time and had been for the last 4 years) and I got a slight discount of 5% for being a teacher so I had the deposit I needed. Buying the house took place in August 2020 where I put down my deposit for the house to be ready for April 2021. I remember it kept moving between April and June but eventually towards the end it ended up being February.
Living here has been so much nicer than living at home (obviously) and I've done a lot of stuff to the house since moving here including running a network around the house, I've had my garden done beautifully (thanks to mum), getting my loft boarded (I couldn't live without this as I'd have nowhere to store stuff), I've installed my own smart home with Home Assistant and I've now got my fabulous CleverCloset understairs storage.
I'm always happy to come home to this place and whilst I have plans to move to a different life style in the next few years, I will continue to enjoy living here.
I made some New Year's Resolutions and plans I want to try and stick to this year.
First of all, welcome to 2025! This is my first 'life' post of the year on my blog. I wish you a happy new year. At the end of 2024 I sat and had a little think about what's really important to me right now. I made a couple of decisions on what needs to change. Let's start with the basics.
Social media
x
While my website states that one of the people who inspired me the most was Elon Musk, I now wholeheartedly dislike what he stands for and have decided that I don't want anything to do with him or his platform. It's not political; I just don't like him anymore. This means starting right now; I'm beginning to move from x.com to Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/jamiebalfour04.bsky.social), which I am hoping many others will do too, so that it can become the number one platform.
Second, WhatsApp. I rely heavily on WhatsApp, but for the last few months, I have considered moving away from WhatsApp and, generally, Meta. It came up in the staff room the other day, and it reminded me that I was thinking about this a few months back, so I added it to my plans yesterday. I want to move to Signal, a more open, privacy-centred chat platform. The problem is trying to convince others to follow suit.
Facebook is slightly more complex than the two previous ones. I've found some social networks like MeWe, which offer a similar experience to Facebook, but I'm not entirely sure about this yet. This is probably the hardest one out of the lot so far.
Life
I want to prepare myself for the next chapter in my book of life, and that is to move to somewhere new. I've lived in this area all my life (apart from 3 years living in Edinburgh when I was very young and living in Halls when I lived in Edinburgh for most of the year).
Some people who follow me on here know I want to own a boat and want to live on a boat at some point in my life. Narrowboating has been a dream but actually isn't so much of a dream now but something I could potentially do now. I've got more than £150k invested in my house, and the sale of that could give me a narrowboating lifestyle. I want to prepare for this because I want to start by the time I reach forty (that's still 7 years away, though!).
Job
I enjoy my job and think I'm pretty good at it (certainly my knowledge is!). But my passion is coding, and I feel that in the next couple of years, I need to get a new job back in the industry. My New Year's Resolution is to try and set down the building blocks to try and do this and find a new job. So, I plan to try to make this my last year of teaching (at least at the moment). If it doesn't happen, then I'm still okay with this, and I don't want to put pressure on myself to find that new job and I do like my job at the moment anyway.
If I'm going to be narrowboating, I want to have all this sorted before I move on with that.
I've had shares in Tesla since the middle of last year and bought them at approximately £144. Today, I decided to sell all 25. Each share was now worth £346, meaning a profit of £202 per share! This is only the second company which has been highly profitable, after selling my shares in AMD for five times more than I paid for them.
This is why I think it's important that when you've got some spare cash, invest it into big companies like this! The return I got today was incredible!
Though don't take my advice as I've messed up in the past with investments that didn't work out.
Today is my birthday. Today, I'm 33 years old. 32 was a very cool number, but 33 is also a cool number. I don't feel 33.
That's all.
My amazing nana would have been 99 years old today. Born on July 12, 1925, she was one of the most inspirational people in my life. She supported me and shaped me into what I am today. Although she was very tough on me when I was a teenager, this was solely for my good, and it changed me from being soft into a much more resilient person.
Tomorrow, I'll be 33; my mum is 66 years old, so I'm now half her age. But also, I'll be a third of what my nana's age would have been if she was still here.
May of this marked 15 years since we lost her. The last 15 years have flown by, and I still miss her very much.
I'm delighted with my new photo sorting tool, which I developed to help me organise over 20,000 photos from the last six or so years.
Today, I sorted just over 900 photos and videos in just over an hour. This would have taken a lot longer in the past and required a bit more thinking with the drag-and-drop process of moving files and previewing each image or video. Although this only runs on my MacBook and is pretty fixed to a folder, I've written it so that it could indeed be changed.
It's also been a really easy application to write and only requires a few lines of code, all of which are embedded into one PHP file. It does require a web server to run and knowledge of how to use symb links.
Once I'm done with it, I'll post the source code to my GitHub.
I turned 31 today at 10.30. It's been a really nice day, mostly, except for the fact that getting my new shed delivered resulted in my outdoor lights - which are less than a week old - getting broken.
The day was generally lovely though. For starters, my mum took me to Costa for breakfast which was really nice and unexpected. We then went back to my place and enjoyed the weather from my garden for an hour or so and then my mum headed home. Mid afternoon my mum and my aunt came across to have tea and enjoy my garden with me before heading down to the Longniddry Inn for birthday dinner, which again was really nice.
And that was it, my 31st birthday!
I miss my nana very much having lost her now 13 years ago. She was a remarkable lady who felt like an unstoppable force and was my inspiration for a lot of reasons. I miss her very much and I've never done a tribute like this to her.
Newbattle High School, where I've been working for the last two years, has been to date my favourite job. I've met some amazing people, kids and teachers, that have made my time there the most enjoyable two years of my life. But it's time for me to move on.
As a posted in a previous blog post, I have for a long time wanted to get a job at a specific school and now I've got it. I've been waiting for a position at that school to come up and it's taken a long time (8 years I've been watching for the job to come up), but now that I've secure it I'm moving onto my next chapter in my life.
Today is the first step towards that - at 12.56 today I was no longer a teacher at Newbattle High School. It was a very sad moment to leave such a great place with so many great teachers and kids wishing me good luck for the future. Throughout that time I was reminded by many members of staff how great a relationship I've got with many pupils, which is also very clear from all the cards I've had telling me I've been the best teacher they could have ever had. I tried my best to catch everyone that I could to say a final goodbye and I've just been in tears most of the afternoon.
Newbattle not only was an amazing place to work, but it was also the job that allowed me to buy my house, I passed my driving test whilst there and it was my first job as a Fully Qualified Teacher. It will always have a special place in my heart.
But onwards and forwards, my next school will hopefully be just as exciting a journey for me and hopefully I can continue to build good relationships with staff and pupils just as I've done at Newbattle, push digital more and more, and continue on this upward trend.
