Family Style Network

  Trigger warning! Uncle Tim here. In early December last year, my 9-year-old niece suddenly started hemorrhaging from her mouth late at night in the bathroom of her family home. Thankfully her parents were both nearby, however, she almost bled to death in their arms before my brother-in-law was able to somehow stop the bleeding while they were waiting for an ambulance to arrive. He almost lost a few fingers in the process when she began fitting and her jaw clamped down on him as he was trying to staunch the blood flow from his youngest child's (and only daughter's) mouth. He has bite mark scars on his hand now. What followed this were several weeks of completely emotionally harrowing times for my immediate family during which time my niece and sister were airlifted from Hobart in Tasmania to the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne with my niece in critical condition where she ended up having multiple CAT scans, MRIs, angiograms, ultrasounds and operations where arteries...

“A found family is every bit as beautiful as a born family. Even more so, perhaps. Stories are about choices, after all, and to choose to be family is as wonderful a story as can be told.” ― Dan Gemeinhart, The Midnight Children Life is funny, sometimes.  Every day starts to bleed into the next; monotony of the highest order.  Every day much the same as that which came before it.  You end up on auto-pilot.  You end up in a routine.  Your day to day consists of similar patterns, across the board.  In the best case scenario, you are at least content.  In the worst case scenario, you have relegated yourself to a position of unending misery that is simply your lot in life.  Some years back, I was in the latter category. I had dreams.  I had ambitions.  I had goals.  But somewhere along the line, my life took a hard turn in the opposite direction.  The car got parked, and someone else took the wheel and started driving, like a bat o...

TW: Mental Health, Addiction and Suicidal Ideation. "What's my drug of choice?  Well, what have you got? I don't go broke, and I do it a lot. I do it a lot!" - Junkhead by Alice In Chains Hi, my name is Uncle Tim, and I am an addict. Greetings and salutations Fam-bam (thank you Ma'am!). Shit, hows the above for a blog intro? Am I right? Your Uncle Tim celebrated a milestone 2 days ago, that being 1000 days sober. It was a relatively quiet affair, just like when I hit 2 years last September as I guess I'm still a little skittish when it comes to the energy I put towards it. I told a very small group of people, accepted their praise, best wishes, kind words and support etc and that's it. I set it aside, maybe compartmentalised it a little (I dunno!), and just moved forward with my day and my life. I haven't celebrated it, in all honesty, I don't know how to. I'm also trying to allow myself to be proud of myself but that too is something that does...

  Uncle Tim here 👽👋   Just thought I'd pop in and say hello or "How's it going?" (pronounced "Owzigowen" in Upside Down Talk.) It sure has been a while friends. "Where have I been hiding?" I hear none of you ask, well I've been lurking about on Discord, or working my little buns off but I've been about.  The last few months have been a very strange time for me and without going into too much detail here it has left me feeling quite flat, demotivated and relatively uninspired overall. My muse has been absent of late and that's ok, these things happen, and I always said from the get-go that there would be no timetable to this, it was more when I felt like writing something that I would. A couple of months ago we kicked off the ' 30 mins for 30 days Challenge ' again on the Discord which is where you set yourself a goal for the month and try to carve out 30 mins a day to work on it. The goal can be anything you want, there are no...