Closing Out the Year

It's been a while since I posted anything here, and I'm sorry for that. Sorry too, because I started this in 2018 and um... Yeah. Hi, it's 2019 now... Oops.

Anyway, here we go...

The last few months have been hectic with work, visiting friends (and apparently losing them too), sleeping (yes I know that's an odd thing to be hectic with but my current role has exhausted me and I lost about a month of evenings because I was just falling asleep when I got home), making friends, and um, meeting someone special. What writing I've done has largely been squishy, icky, love poetry and essays, though I'm planning out a few things to see which ones get to a point where I can do something with it first. I must admit it's been nice to get my head out of the clouds and feel as if I can deal with the world.

It's been a positive experience, overall, one that's affirmed that I'm not some alien from another planet. I've not felt I have to sacrifice who I am in order to meet some imaginary target of acceptability. I can be myself, grow in a way that feels natural to me. In many ways it's felt as if I've found 'my' people, right on my doorstep, and that's something I'm truly grateful for. They aren't tribe, but I hope they will be, and that I have found my intentional family.

The past few years have been ones I've spent in isolation, and I don't regret that for an instant because I like my own company and it allowed me to do a lot of thinking about what I wanted and where I wanted to go in this all too brief existence. At the same time they've served to underscore negative experiences and bring them to the fore of my mind rather than allowing me to grow. Part of my plan to relocate was based on how uncomfortable I felt in Birmingham where the city centre, at least, seemed to be intimately linked to my life and how it had all gone wrong.

Changes are afoot, and I'm making a real effort to do things like shift my mental health issues, learning to meditate and getting my body under control (cholesterol and weight etc). It means making some changes, but so be it. It's got to be done, so I might as well get on with it. After all, nobody's going to swoop down and save me, and I hate being dependent on pills to feel like the world is something I can face.

Some things are the same, or have snapped back to the position I was adopting in the recent past. I think, for instance, I might be done with gaming unless I can find a good group that wants to game the way I do. I think I may be switching to get comics (my main nerd fix these days) off Comixology, but I don't know - I'm sort of tempted to abandon reading them at the moment, or at least cut back to only reading Ellis' indie books and Wicked and the Divine. It's odd, the number of things that when it comes down to the crunch, you can do without or don't actually mean anything.

This year is going to be dominated by that and by writing/finding out what I want to do for this lifetime. I was all set to plunge into PhD country and now... I'm not so sure. All I really want to do is write and I find myself pondering the best way to do that and be able to keep a roof over my head (aka the hard part). I'll try to blog more, and keep in touch more often (honestly I have no idea how many of you care about that but I will, nonetheless).

Anyway, Happy New Year to you all. May this year bring you happiness, humour, fun, filth (if you're looking for that), and most of all, fulfilment.