Friday, July 31, 2026
July
Saturday, July 25, 2026
The Devil In Disguise
Earlier this week, I had a massive problem with my blog. Most of the images across multiple posts became low resolution to the point of looking pixelated. I was heartbroken and incredibly upset and angry. Upset enough for it to cause me to have a massive neurodiverse melt down. Tantrums, panic attacks,stimming, and tics were all there along with more than a few tears. It was the whole works. Possibly worse than I had ever experienced before. But why?
It's just a blog. Yes it was something to be upset and a little angry about. It was a pain in the backside trying to sort it out. But it wasn't the end of the world. Most things like this can be sorted out eventually. Get a grip. Pull yourself together.
I have friends who are going through things much harder than some pixelated images on a web page. Illness, bereavements and such. Proper hardship.This really was a storm in a teacup.
Now being neurodiverse with autism as one of my conditions, does mean that in these situations, it is difficult to get a grip, or pull myself together. I'm not fully in control of myself in these circumstances. So something that is a pain in the proverbial, which should only trigger some frustration and annoyance, can sometimes produce an emotional overreaction. But this was on a different scale.
For a couple of days, I was in freefall. I was just about able to fulfill my caring duties for my Wife, but everything else seemed to be unravelling. I was making knee jerk decisions to try and sort out the problem. I was obsessed with sorting out the problem and each setback triggered a neurodiverse response.
Eventually I stopped spinning and managed to get calmed down enough to think more clearly. I made a decision to step back from social media for a week or two. And I placed the blog out of the public eye. And then I experimented with different ways of resizing and uploading the images to a test post that only I was going to see. And this more analytical and measured approach paid off, and I found a way forwards. Yes it was a pain. Yes it was tiring and tedious. But I was calmer and able to put the actual malfunction into a more normal perspective.
The blog is slowly and surely being fixed. I found a solution. Everything is OK. I have fixed all of this years content, and I'm slowly working through the older posts.
So now I'm in a calmer frame of mind, and the neurospices have slowly ebbed away, I have been in a position to try and make sense of my massive overreaction to a mere bump in the road.
It's been a difficult year, especially in recent weeks. My Wife has been unwell and is now having to deal with her second cancer scare within a month. The hot weather is making her poorly. As a result looking after her has been tiring. Much tougher than usual. So I am less resilient than normal. A little more vulnerable. But even so, having a complete mental breakdown over a blog?
And then hit it me. The realisation of what this really was? Why I was behaving like this. Yes it was autism. Yes it was being worried. Being tired. Being stressed. But the straw that almost (but not quite) broke the camel's back, was a devil in disguise. A devil I have been visited by on many an occasion throughout my life.
Dysphoria. Gender Dysphoria. Not being able to be the femme person I am. And it was triggered by the issues with my blog, because that is a major part of my femme persona. My feminine portrayal of myself to the world. At a time when finding time to put on the wig and make up and pull on a frock is limited, being able to be my true self on my blog, or my Flickr page,or on social media, is my way of existing as Deeanna. So a sudden perceived attack on my feminine existence triggered an unrecognised but very strong sense of dysphoria. And the dysphoria triggered the neurodiverse melt down.
So now I know that this is what happened, I can recognise the signs in the future. And take steps to protect myself. And to try not to ignore my femme needs, just because things are busy, or stressful or difficult.
Being able to express my femininity is one of the most calming and soothing ways of suppressing my autism and ADHD. I'm rarely agitated or manic or stressed when I'm dressed as Deeanna. In fact I'm never affected by my neurodiversity when I'm dressed as Deeanna apart from the dyslexia and dyspraxia.
Life is full of bumps in the road. It's also full of major hazards like potholes and the occasional IED. I need to recognise the difference between things which don't really matter too much. Recognise what are the bumps, and try and stay calm for the small stuff and find a way to cope with the big scary stuff. And find ways to alleviate and banish the dysphoria devil.
Dee
💋💋💋
Friday, July 24, 2026
Back In The Saddle
Apparently, Google have updated Blogger with a new way of storing the images we upload. It started when they took the editing tools from the task bar at the top of the post writing and editing page, and hid it behind three dots instead. At this time they changed the photo uploading and display.
For the past 3 years, I have been using a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smart phone to take my crossdressing photos. It's a powerful piece of kit. The rear camera has an array of lenses and a sensor of up to 200 mega pixels available to use and the front (selfie) camera has 12mp. For comparison, my DSLR camera, the Canon Eos 7D, has an 18mp sensor. So the image file sizes the S23 Ultra can produce are massive.
Up until now, Blogger has happily created decent small versions of the image for the blog, and stored the full size file for viewing if the viewer clicks on the image. It still does store and allow the full size image to be viewed in all of it's glory. But with massive files, it can no longer handle them on the blog posts, and it compresses them until they are pixelated and horrible to view.
I uploaded a post on Sunday morning, and noticed the awful image quality on the post. And then my heart sank, as I realised that every image created on the S23 Ultra, on every post on the blog, was affected. Suddenly my blog, looked awful and ugly to me.
I tried to find a solution to the problem by looking through online posts and Google AI. They confirmed it was a file size issue. Google AI gave me several potential solutions to try. But none of them worked. We concluded that it was an unsolvable issue.
By now I was having a neurodiverse melt down, and I was suffering mentally. I'll write more about that on a future post. It may seem like an overreaction, but to someone with autism, like myself, it's something that happens when things get challenging. My blog is very important to me, as it keeps me in touch with the true me, who only gets to appear in physical form, about 15% of the time. The other 85% of the time is a charade I am forced to maintain for the benefit of others in my life. So having my blog disfigured was triggering.
I looked for alternatives. I follow a few WordPress blogs. They look great. But when I signed up to it, and began creating a blog site, I was pretty quickly out of my depth. It's so much more complicated than Blogger. And I don't find Blogger exactly easy. Another alternative that friends and also Google AI suggested, was Substack. I tried it, and set up a Substack page and imported my blog posts from Blogger. It was ok at first. But then I was bombarded with posts from other users, asking me to follow them. And I found out that anyone ftom outside of Substack, viewing my Substack blog, would be getting constant messages to join or sign up and subscribe and receive emails and updates directly to their inbox, from my blog. And I was also getting messages from Substack about how to monetise my blog. I can see it's a good place for artists, writers and creatives, who want to engage with a community of like minded people or run a creative business. But I don't want to exist within a community like that. I want my blog to be out there for everyone. So I deleted my page and account after 24 hours.
So that left me with a choice. Blogger or nowt. I have really enjoyed blogging and I feel a connection with some of the other bloggers I follow. Also I know that my audience extends beyond the blogging world because quite a few friends follow my blog, without being bloggers themselves. And apparently I'm massive in Vietnam, Singapore and Brazil (waves to the bots👋).
So I decided to try and find a way forward. I took my blog out of public view, and set up a Test Post and experimented with different ways of resizing my photos and then posted them to the blog and viewed them. Some solutions worked OK. Others didn't. But all of them were better than what I had. Eventually I found a good solution. ImageResizer.com. Here I could resize my photos to 1200mp, which apparently is the ideal size for Blogger. It worked. Not as well as the old Blogger image interface worked, but good enough for me.
So then began the task of deleting all of the corrupted images, creating resized versions and posting these back into the old blog posts.
So far I've repaired all of the posts from 2026. At this time, I reopened this blog to the public view. I will slowly work through 2025 until the whole blog is fixed.
Another thing I have done is bought a new phone. My Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra was the problem with it's huge files. Resizing smaller files to 1200mp will result in sharper images on the blog posts. My S23 Ultra was going to need replacing anyway next year, as it was only supported by Samsung for 4 years. My new phone is a Samsung Galaxy S25 Fe. The good news is that this year, Samsung extended the support that they now provide to 7 years starting with the Galaxy S26 models. So that's 2032. But they also committed to supporting last year's model, the S25, to the same date. So I bought one of last year's phones to save a lot of money.
The Samsung Galaxy S25fe has a 50mp rear camera, as opposed to a 200mp camera on the S23 Ultra, so it's still a decent performer, but not as good as the latter camera. But it's fine for what I want to use it for. The S23 Ultra was overkill in that department. It's intended for photography enthusiasts. And I have my trusty DSLR for that. So this new phone and it's camera should be perfect for my femme photographic needs.
So I'm back in the bloggy world again, with my original Blog intact and hopefully able to continue for a few years yet.
Thank you for your patience.
Dee
💋💋💋
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Freefalling
OK, I'm having a massive disruption in my blogging life. I'm struggling with this blog because it's ruining my images. I thought that leaving Blogger might help. But for me, Blogger is where I'm happy. Someone suggested moving to WordPress. It's too complicated for a bear of little brain, like me. Someone else suggested Substack. I tried it. It was very limited and quite full on in trying to turn my humble little blog into a commercial enterprise. So I deleted that.
I want to stay on Blogger. It's not perfect. In recent weeks I've had issues with commenting. Issues with the Blog Roll updating. And finally these problems with my images. It's all been a little too much.
Along with other issues in my life, it's added to a lot of noise in my neurodiverse little head. I'm overthinking things, overreacting to things and acting on impulse and not thinking clearly.
My plan is to try and fix my blog. If that's not possible I'm going to start a new one from scratch. I'm going to take my blog offline tomorrow to start the maintenance on it.
I'm also going to take a short break from social media for the rest of July, to give me time to settle myself. Hopefully that will calm the waters a little and let the neurospice dissolve away.
Deeanna Williams Will Be Back
💋💋💋
Sunday, July 19, 2026
HAIR
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Blogging Onwards
Monday, July 6, 2026
Tattoos Denied
Those who follow my blog, will know that I was hoping to get some tattoos done on my arms. However, I do suffer from psoriasis. It's mostly on my lower legs and my scalp. It's never affected my arms ever. So I didn't even think about it being a problem. But after speaking to the pharmacist, I was advised to be cautious. Apparently even on unaffected skin, trauma can trigger psoriasis outbreaks on the area damaged. And that can happen even if an area has never been affected previously. And when it does happen, it can affect just the tattoo, which means it looks awful. It's something called the Koebner Effect. It can happen straight away or sometimes months later. And it occurs in about 30% of psoriasis sufferers that get tattoos. So I'm not going to go ahead, even though I really want some ink. My health is very important, especially as a carer. And I also can't risk anything that makes dressing difficult or impossible, as I need to dress to keep my mental health intact. So it's bye bye to tattoos for me. I've survived 61 years without them, and I can cope with the disappointment.
It also means that I need to be careful about hair removal. Waxing is definitely out. So is epilation. I need to be careful shaving. I was told it would be best not to remove any body hair at all. Well that's definitely not an option. So it will have to be careful about it. But it's not going to hold me back. I've survived until now with this condition, and I will carry on surviving.
Thursday, July 2, 2026
June Bugs
Days In Salisbury
I have a strong connection to the city of Salisbury, in Wiltshire. It's a beautiful city, and when I lived in Romsey, Hampshire, just...
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A crossdresser's first night out is an important rite of passage. But it's a daunting step to take. It should be a wonderful occasi...
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In mid Summer 2011, I had made plans to travel up to London by train, to meet up with my good friend and fellow blogger, Sue Richmond who ...
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Just like the dahlia flower in the photo above, I'm a little bit different to the normal ones. This flower has a splash of pink on one...
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