Last Year

I feel like I may finally be able to start dealing with last year; as a person, it's almost like there is so much for me to square off. I don't know how really to describe 2010, my 23rd year, but it felt like bit by bit the life that I imagined for myself, and with it the person who would live in that world gradually slipped away. Worst of all the harder I tried to change that, the harder I tried to fix things the less anything worked.

I watched an incredible film before I committed these words to paper - a film called "Barney's Version" - it follows the life of an imperfect human being called Barney and the things he'd done. And it was so real. It wasn't imagined, or tidied - it was difficult, it was raw and more than anything it was imperfect.

When I left university I entered this search that graduates do, for something career like to do from the renownedly harsh job market. As like everyone else, I was no different. In hindsight it is those early decisions that aligned my year's direction with a path which would see the things that mattered to me exiled, either by my own action with whatever reasons that precipitated it or from things I felt I couldn't control.

Some of you may know me as one who thinks too much. Others of you may well see me mention things that sound a lot like depression - maybe you'll think that I am making excuses, that I wallow or even that I should just feel better. You know, the older I get the more difficult these things are because I have more perception. Whether I allow myself to see it or not I know those times when I'm getting worse, I know that I'm getting less and less happy and I know that I'm letting go. Truth is I feel guilty because of the people I feel I let down.

If anything please trust me that knowing this is happening or has happened to you yourself is enough torment. Knowing that this has directly contributed at least somewhat to pushing those people who were important away is nigh on unbearable.

I'm not choosing to wallow, though maybe I should be able to just change things. The only thing I want is to be a better person, to help people, to meaningfully contribute during my life....a better person that I find myself having lost an ability to believe I am or can be; and that in itself is a thought that can only serve to break me. Barney wasn't perfect, and he did some really stupid things; I've done stupid things but at some point my mistakes became times when I should have been better and wasn't good enough. I'm not really even sure what I was testing myself against.

All I can bring myself to accept is I'm trying; I don't know what more I can do and somehow to survive I have to heal and make that enough.

Last year I turned the blinkers on and shut the blinds, and I think it was mostly because I'm not sure I could deal with the things that were happening, at least not emotionally, definitely not the hurts...not properly. And at some point turning them off, solving nothing, pushing on and finding instead that I was descending meant that I passed that marker in the sand where I'd be capable of returning on my own.

I feel like I've learnt what the price is of pushing on when you are genuinely unhappy. My personal curse is that the things I imagine as being the things I want to happen least are the very ones that become the focus in all the excessive moments of over thinking. And to come full circle in that damn self fulfilling proficy they are exactly the ones which come to pass.

As for now I'm slowly putting my life and myself back together, but I can't say I'm not struggling to find that belief, find that strength. But most misunderstood is that through all that, when you finally reach the bottom and feel there is no strength left, well that's when you must find what is hardly there. And if making it to that point is crushing, then finally there is an inescapable, indescribable, pain.