My Positivity Diary

I have made no secret of the fact that 2015 has not been my best year. Far from it. I know that there are people out there who have had much worse years than me, for much more legitimate reasons, but from my point of view it has not been a good year and I won’t be sorry to see it end.

Most of the reasons are personal issues that come with a hat-trick of breakups. Yes, the first one was technically in 2014 but there was about 10 hours in it and, as the relationship lasted four and a half years before we called it a day, it’s been hanging over my head all year. The second didn’t end badly at the time, but for reasons that are still unclear to me, the person concerned no longer speaks to me. The third one, I feel, was a disaster, and the burden of all three have contributed to the worst mental state I’ve been in for seven years. The fact that, as I write this, I’ve got a cough that is now making my chest hurt as well as my head, is doing nothing to improve my mood.

Other things have happened, but as an overall experience, it has not been a good year. This situation has created issues for me that are not going away; wracked as I am with guilt and shame, I may never have an entirely good ‘year’ again.[1] But I can’t sit around all day feeling sorry for myself about it, so I will pick myself up and get on with my life, as I always do.

Then again, one might reasonably wonder why one needs to have a good ‘year’ at all. It’s not as though we’ve reached some arbitrarily-designated date where we wipe the slate clean, pretend none of it ever happened and erroneously presume that we’ll never get upset again for as long as we live. Things that affect the course of our lives happen on a daily basis, some good and some bad. Why should we have to judge where we are in our lives by the standards of an entire year?

Nonetheless, this is that time of year where people make so-called ‘New Year’s Resolutions,’ a list of things that they’ll do differently to how they did it in the current year to make the next one better. I’ve done it myself, have even succeeded on a few of them (2011: I did a gig every week,[2] 2014: I didn’t buy any video games.[3]) And while I don’t necessarily expect a good year out of 2016, I might have some good days, and some good things might happen to me.

So my New Year’s Resolution for 2016 is this: At the end of every day write down one positive thing that has happened during that day, in this diary:

This could be something passive and mundane, such as: “I woke up this morning.” (Not always a guarantee. After some very uncomfortable nights of not being able to sleep, I sometimes sleep well into the afternoon.) Or it could be something that I’ve done, like “That gig at the Stile went really well.” Had I made it this year’s resolution, I might at some point in July have written: “I passed my Grade 2 music theatre exam with distinction.” It could be something that happened in my guitar lessons, it could be something that I saw happen to someone else, or I could have simply been in a good mood that day.

I won’t be able to share it all with you as some of it will be subject to Data Protection laws, and some things might be interesting to me and boring to anybody else. But I might make a ‘Highlight Reel’ of it at the end of every month, unless it gets filed in the ever-growing folder of “can’t be arsed.” I’ll pick the best entries from each month, explain why it was important and how it might contribute to a more positive situation for me.

I’m hoping that by doing this, however good or bad 2016 turns out to be, I can legitimately say that good things have happened. I won’t need the whole year to work out well, because I can look at any individual day and say that it was a good day because [insert here] happened. Hopefully taking time to appreciate the good things that happened will make the coming year a far more positive experience for me than the last one.

So, Happy New Year to you all. My one piece of very general advice to you all: Make it a better year than the last one.

P.S.

If you’re wondering how I’m getting on with the depression mentioned in my previous blog, there has been progress with the relevant situation. However, for the first time in 13 Christmas Holidays I am neither working in any meaningful way, nor am I in a relationship. While I don’t deny I need a break from both after a gruelling Autumn term at work and the way my last two relationships made me feel, I have little to take my mind off the issues that have been plaguing it for the last two months. (Except my Wii U. That’s going to be a big help in the coming weeks and months.) I’m hoping this will improve when term begins again. Until then, I’ll spend my days playing video games, eating chocolate and building Warhammer models.

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[1] I will mention at this juncture that, while this is very much the way I’m feeling at the moment, I haven’t ruled out the possibility that it may change. It’s difficult to see how, but it might.

[2] Except when I didn’t. I gave myself two weeks off to go on holiday.

[3] Except when I did. I bought a game on impulse and realised after the fact. As it was a game I previously owned and was replacing, I was given a free pass on it.

I am ill with depression again.

If you’ve seen me around over the last few weeks, or some of the things I’ve been posting on social media, this won’t be news to you. But this is something that I think you all need to be aware that I have acknowledged: It appears that I am ill with depression once again.

I haven’t been officially diagnosed, nor was I when it happened seven years ago, though I was treated for it. But the symptoms are as familiar to me as the school bully. The one that I would have to see every day whether I wanted to or not as I walked through the school, glancing nervously around, praying to a God I didn’t believe in that they wouldn’t decide to mess with me today. It’s been a while since I’ve had it this badly but depression is definitely with me again.

It is different from last time in one respect – this time there is a very clear reason for it, rather than a scattering of different reasons that built up to my poor mental health in 2009. Unfortunately, the reason I am upset this time is not a reason I am at liberty to discuss publicly at this point. Hopefully there will come a time in the future when I am able to say what the situation is, and why it is causing me so much grief. All I can say right now is that over the last few weeks, some of the stress and depressive behaviours started to come out in anticipation of a very bad piece of news. When I finally received it last Monday evening on the 30th November, it broke me, and I’ve been in a terrible state ever since.

It is not different from last time in the sense of my feelings towards my own problems. While they are significant enough for me to be upset about it, I do not believe that other people will feel the same way, nor do I necessarily feel like I deserve to be upset given the hardships some other people are going through. Some people have, in the last year, lost friends and loved ones. As I write this, all of Facebook is talking about how we are on our way to bomb Syria. My problems pale in significance to these things, and acknowledging this doesn’t help my state of mind at all.

What am I doing about it? Well, for now, I am taking things one day at a time. There is no mid-long term plan for me at this point. All I’ve got right now is the following day. I am trying to develop some coping strategies, and if it helps me to do so, I’ll continue to post updates on how I’m getting on with that. However, I do believe some thanks are in order:

First, from the bottom of what remains of my heart, a massive, massive thank you to everybody who has commented on the posts I have been making, sent me messages of support, or even just sat down and talked to me. There are absolutely no words for how much that means to me. Even if I haven’t replied, please know that I have seen your support and I am more than grateful for it. This has come from people who I know and am quite close with, to people I knew from the past who I never really expected to hear from again, and some people who I have never even met. That so many people offer their support is a huge source of comfort and is gratefully received.

There are some people who, whether by accident or design, have enough stake in my personal affairs to already know what is happening and why. This is not an issue I can talk about publicly yet, as I have explained. But the conversations I have had with those people have been a very important part of me getting through the last few days. So a very special thank you to them.

Thank you to my family: Mom, Dad, Mark and Beth. You’re the reason I still have a home to go to in my darkest hour, and I could not have managed without your help and support over the last few days. It helps enormously that I know I can continue to count on you to do so. It wasn’t my plan to still be living at home at the age of 30, but by all the Gods I was grateful for it this week.

And finally, a heartfelt “You’re welcome,” to anybody who in the past has thanked me for supporting them. It is now that I profoundly appreciate what that would have meant to you.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this.

The Day I Turned 30

Well, it finally happened. Somehow, and I don’t quite know how, I made it to 30.

The milestone birthdays are often met with half-joking trepidation, and this one is no exception. I can’t honestly say I was looking forward to not being able to say I’m 20-something, and there’s nothing going on in my life right now that wasn’t happing when I was 29. Sometimes I find myself wondering at what point I celebrated becoming another year older, like you do when you’re a kid, and lamenting it like I do now! In spite of all this, I did actually really enjoy it when I turned 30 yesterday, for a number of reasons.

Not the least of them, that’s when many people Happy Birthday to me.

That might sound like a strange thing to say but it’s to do with the context and relationships I have with the people who say it. Obviously, there are my friends and family, and whoever I happened to mention it to yesterday were polite enough to wish me a happy birthday. But there’s also a large number of people on social media who said it as well.

If you look at my page on Facebook for the next few days you’ll find something like 98 people who took a few seconds out of their day to post Happy Birthday on my timeline. There were all sorts of people. Close friends who I’d seen that day, some friends who I’d seen last week, old friends I hadn’t seen for several months, some people I haven’t seen for years and in some cases, people who I never expected to hear from ever again. So many people. And it does mean a lot that, no matter how long it’s been, I’m still on their radar enough that they can drop me a quick message on the day I turned 30.

There were people I knew at school and had barely seen since. I had a Facebook conversation with Jo who I knew at school; we haven’t spoken in years but in the year we all turn 30 she took some time to message me. Mai from Japan, who I haven’t seen for 5 years, still keeps in touch. People I know from work; they’re all nice people and it’s always a pleasure to hear from them. People from Swindon, who were kind enough to stay friends with me even after Amy and I broke up at the end of last year. Some of the guys from The Fakes, who have been my most consistent group of friends for nearly 12 years. Some people I’ve literally met once at gigs and barely know. And of course there are the group of people I find the hardest to categorise, who are the people I’ve been hanging around with for the last several weeks. It was great to hear from you all. Thank you.

And yeah, I know Facebook makes that quite easy with updates and reminders. But they’ve still got to make an active decision to message me, or post on my timeline. Every single one of them made my day a little bit brighter, and that’s always worth doing.

As for me…

Perhaps this isn’t where I thought I’d be at 30 but to be honest I don’t ever remember having much of a plan for that anyway. I still don’t, even to this very day I rarely look further ahead than the end of the week. Does that mean I’ve missed out on a lot of things I could have done by now? Potentially, but I’ll live to see another day and I’m sure I’ll get there in the end. There’s no sense in tying yourself down to plans all the time. Nor is there much to be gained from kicking myself about mistakes I’ve made in the past. There have been many, but if I’m honest with myself, if I had to do it all again there’s probably not a great many things I would do differently.

Right now, I’m fortunate enough to be in a good place, and for the first time all year I find myself looking forward to what the future may bring…

Being Part of a Statistic - The Green party and the Voting System

Last Thursday I did what many people did and cast my vote for the next Government of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. And, like many people whose party did not win the election, or even the seat in their constituency, I found myself wondering what affect my vote had on the outcome of the election.

The answer is: I became part of a statistic. Namely this one:

Yes, I voted for the Green Party. A few of my friends who sit firmly on the left wing side of politics might be pleased to hear this. For most of the other people who I know, I’ll pre-emptively guess that their response will be somewhere in between “You work in education; why didn’t you vote for Labour?” and “You may as well not have bothered; the Green party never had a chance.” But the fact is that I voted for the party that I wanted. If Labour had lost Dudley North by one vote I might have kicked myself, but Labour won that constituency 11% ahead of the Conservatives; it wasn’t even close.

The Green Party finished 11^th, and I therefore ended up as a part of the statistic that says after more than a million votes, the Green party ended up with one seat in the House of Commons. This is commonly punctuated with how the Scottish National Party – who finished third – gained 52 seats off roughly the same number of votes.

My principle motivation for voting for the Green Party was: They are pushing a left-wing agenda. They were not going to win this election, nor did I seriously think that they would. But what I wanted was for them to get enough seats – maybe three or four – so that they could at least start building some momentum, and have a strong enough voice in politics to develop a left-wing agenda. My idea was that in the next election, they could build on what they’d started in this one and have maybe six or eight seats, and continue to build on that as the years go by. I’m playing a very long game indeed, and I may never see the Green Party get in to power, but I would like to be a part of the process that gives them that chance.

Well, that didn’t happen. The Green party got one seat in Brighton. But maybe the idea that they could have an impact on politics is not so ridiculous. Here’s why:

Over the last two days I have seen many pictures up on social media of the graphic shown above or one of its variations. The suggestion is that the ‘First past the post’ voting system is out-dated and not representative of the actual vote, and that we need a referendum to change our voting system. If the Green Party and those who voted for it are instrumental in this process, then those votes might not have been wasted after all.

My challenge to each of you saying we need a new voting system is this: What would a new voting system look like? How would it work?

We went through this in 2011 when we had a referendum to vote for The Alternative Voting system. The votes were cast, and it appeared that the majority of the country were against it. I actually voted for it, although I didn’t have it properly explained to me until about a week after the fact. I’d have been grateful for it in this election. I’d actually have been quite happy for Labour to have won it, and with the Alternative Vote I could have cast my vote on the Green Party, and in the alternative voted for Labour as my second choice.

I also had a conversation with my Dad around a month ago, where we speculated that as we were probably going to get a Hung Parliament again and therefore another Coalition government, it would be good to have a voting system to reflect the parties our with whom our preferred parties should ally. Currently, the UK public do not have a say on this at all.

So what do you guys think? How should we vote for our Government?