2129: Devil Drink: A Call for Help

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Real Talk today. Serious business. And I’m probably going to regret writing this and making it so public, but I’m at my absolute wits’ end, don’t know what to do and could do with some support, be it from friends or strangers.

No names or anything will be given in this post, but some of you may be able to work certain things out from it. If you do, please do me a favour and don’t point anything like that out in the comments or say things to the people involved, because that’s just not going to help anything at all.

Anyway.

I don’t drink any more. I used to drink quite a lot when I was at university and the few years afterwards; I was somewhat legendary among a number of my friends for spectacular drunk text messages, with the mangled garbage that T9 predictive text would come out with being far more entertaining than the stuff AutoCorrect spews out from the iPhones and Androids of today. It was fun, though I never enjoyed the hangover the next day.

I stopped drinking for two real reasons: firstly, I’d got to the stage where I simply wasn’t enjoying it any more — alcohol tended to give me heartburn, and I came to the conclusion that being a bit wobbly and lary wasn’t enjoyable enough to justify feeling a bit sick after just a sip or two — and secondly, more importantly, it became apparent that someone in my life had a capital-P Problem with drink.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered someone with such an issue; a friend of mine at university suffered a similar affliction to quite a serious degree, though at the time, young and stupid as we were, it felt like something that should be laughed at rather than something that was a serious problem. More than ten years after that, though, I understand what a horrible, devastating thing alcoholism is, and how horrible it is to be in a position where you’re absolutely helpless to give any sort of aid to the person who is suffering so much they feel the need to take the pain away with excess amounts of drink.

The person in question had a problem for quite some time before seemingly resolving it. I tried several ways of dealing with it — with humour, with sadness, with anger, with disappointment, with honesty, with support, with attempts to engage and understand — but nothing seemed to be particularly effective. What actually happened is that over time, the person in question simply seemingly got over it, stopped drinking altogether and we said nothing more about it, though I always took care to steer clear of conversations that involved alcohol or being drunk or anything like that.

Recently, though, this person has suffered a bit of a relapse. It’s not to the same degree as it was before by any degree of magnitude, but it is happening again. And, once again, I feel completely helpless to do anything about it — perhaps because, if my past experience is anything to go by, there really isn’t anything I can do about it, and the person simply has to resolve it themselves.

This is upsetting and deeply, deeply distressing, though. It may sound selfish to make this about me, but I feel it’s important to note the impact of alcoholism on the people around the afflicted person as well as the afflicted person themselves. Because that impact can be devastating. It can have a huge impact on their mental wellbeing, and on the way they see the afflicted person. It can have a huge impact on the way they interact with the afflicted person, and the things they feel comfortable doing and talking about with the afflicted person. And it can impact on their life at large, preventing them from doing some things and forcing them to do others.

Ultimately it can build a great deal of resentment, frustration, anger and sadness — some of which is perhaps justified, but the rest of which is simply an impotent expression of fury at a sensation of powerlessness. I recognise this, and I would like to clarify that I certainly don’t hate the person involved for this by any means, particularly as I’m familiar with the extenuating circumstances that have brought this relapse on. Rather, I just want to feel like I can support them and help them through it once again, but I don’t know if I have the strength to handle it for a second time.

So that’s pretty much where I am right now. I don’t know what to do. I need help. Although I don’t know how anyone might be able to help, and I feel guilty writing this, given that I predict a significant proportion of you reading this will put two and two together quite quickly. As I say, though, if you do, please, just, shush. That part isn’t important.

Right now, I am sad, upset and angry, and I need help. Please help.

2126: One of Those Times

I’ve been having a rough few days, depression- and anxiety-wise. Things have been “getting to me” more than they have for a long time, and today felt particularly bad; earlier in the day I just needed a cry more than anything. I wasn’t crying over anything in particular; it just happened. Everything was too much. I felt a little better afterwards, but there’s still some residual bleakness lurking around inside my head.

I was interested to see on Twitter that a friend of mine had also been having a rough time with his mental health, in his case noting that his anger at something that might seem relatively “trivial” to an outside observer had actually led him to self-harm for the first time in quite a while. Like me, he noted that the incident itself wasn’t a particular catalyst for his reaction; it was, presumably, just more a case of “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, and everything coming to a head leading to something mental snapping.

Times like this seem to come for a lot of people around the same sort of time. I don’t really know what causes it, but it’s interesting to ponder. In this particular instance, it’s entirely possible that the horrible things that have been going on in Paris have subconsciously infiltrated our minds and have been influencing our thoughts in negative directions, but to be perfectly frank, it doesn’t feel that way to me at all; I’d been feeling bleak and miserable before all that happened, so perhaps it’s something else.

Maybe it’s environmental? We’re coming into winter now, and the evenings are getting darker earlier, making the whole world seem just a little bit more closed-in and oppressive to some people. I’ve always quite liked the night, but it being dark outside is very much a signal to the body that “the day is over, it’s probably time to do relaxing things and/or sleep now” and as such isn’t particularly conducive to being productive.

Maybe there’s some sort of physical reason; a literal “something in the air”, as it were. Air pressure can sometimes have an effect on the way you feel physically, so perhaps there’s an effect on mental wellbeing too, or perhaps just the changing weather of the advancing seasons has an impact on how everyone’s feeling.

Or maybe it’s even some sort of metaphysical, spiritual thing; the balance between Light and Dark, Good and Evil being off or something. (It’s probably not this. But you never really know, do you?)

Whatever it is, it’s pretty crappy, and I know from today that I’m not the only one who is feeling a bit bleak and miserable about everything for no real reason at the moment. As such, I’d like to say to anyone out there who is feeling a bit low that I hope things look up for you soon, and remember that it’s often really helpful to try and express the things you’re feeling, even if you can’t quite explain them. Talk to a friend; write them down in a journal; blog them as I have; tweet them to your followers. Looking at things from another perspective can sometimes be helpful, and even if it isn’t, it can give you a much-needed sense of relief and release to just get all those stray, dark thoughts out of your head.

Be well, everyone!

2121: Blehhhh

It has been what can be politely described as a “challenging” couple of days, in the same way that a child in a classroom who eats curtains and communicates through punching his adjacent classmates in the face and testicles can be described as “challenging”. I shan’t go into details, but suffice to say I have spent a considerable proportion of the last couple of days either staring at a wall, staring at the ceiling, crying into a pillow, just plain ol’ crying and wanting to set fire to everything and everyone in the world. Sometimes all of the above at the same time.

These periods seem to come along every so often in most people’s lives, and different people deal with them in different ways. I’ve never quite figured out the best way of dealing with them — or “coping”, as experts in psychobabble like to describe it — but I have at least never found myself in a place where I want to hurt myself, block out the world with drink or drugs, abuse other people for my own gratification, or anything else actively harmful to myself, others or both. This is for the best, I suppose, but it also leaves me feeling, at times, like I should be doing something “more” to bring myself closure in these dark periods of my life. Perhaps the act of writing this is a means of providing closure in itself; I couldn’t say as I type this, because I haven’t yet finished writing it and I’m still feeling pretty shitty but can’t yet comment on how I’ll feel when I get to the end of it all. If that makes sense.

The mental capacity we humans have can be troublesome at times. While our wonderful brains allow us to enjoy art, music, emotions, love, sex for more than procreation, video games, the taste of HP sauce on a sausage sandwich and plenty of other things besides, it is all too apparent that it’s an extremely delicate chemical balance going on in there, and it tipping slightly one way or the other can have pretty devastating effects on your mental wellbeing, sending you crashing into depression, flying into rage, becoming wracked with anxiety or paralysed with fear. And it never seems to be predictable, either; sometimes something can make you feel one way, making you think you can prepare yourself for it the next time, but the time after your brain decides that no, you’re going to feel something at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum this time, even though the stimulus was the same. It becomes a constant rollercoaster ride of emotions, when all you really want to do is to be able to sit back and enjoy life, genuinely content and free of worries for once.

I wonder if anyone out there is truly content and has absolute, complete inner peace. I bet even the Dalai Lama worries about leaving the gas on sometimes.

2120: Farewell to Socks

Hello, Socks.

You can’t read this, because you can’t read. And because you’re a rat. And because, saddest of all, we lost you today after your battle with illness. But I wanted to write this for you anyway. Perhaps someone wherever you’ve gone has my site bookmarked and can read you this post, or perhaps they can just feed you bits of poppadom as you try and figure out, once and for all, whether or not it’s possible to get to the top of the wheel.

We brought you into our lives to keep Lucy company. Lucy was older than you, but she was very lonely after her friend Lara passed away peacefully, so we decided to get her some friends. That was you and Clover. You were both so tiny, but both of you captured our hearts right away; you because of your sleek, grey-brown coat, and Clover because of her endearingly scrappy-looking, extra-fluffy fur. We brought you home, and while we were worried about how Lucy would react to some unfamiliar new friends, as elderly as she was getting, it wasn’t long before our minds were at rest and she was fussing over the pair of you. Where Lara had once been the one to fuss over Lucy — who always seemed “younger” than Lara, despite being a similar age — now Lucy was the one fussing over the pair of you.

You were both very jumpy when we were first getting to know you. You seemed to feel safer when Lucy was around, though; the three of you would even come and wander around on the bed if we let you. Clover built up a bit more confidence than you; you were always the scaredy-rat, starting at any noises slightly louder than “silent” and being a bit more hesitant to come and be sociable.

You came around, though, partly with a bit of help from the treats we liked to spoil you with, and both you and Clover started to take on your own distinct personalities — and we grew to love you both as much as we loved Lara and Lucy (and, for the short period we knew her, Willow). Clover was more adventurous and sociable, and quite possibly — forgive me — the brighter of the two of you, though both of you quickly came to recognise things like the sound of a treat bag being rustled, or a piece of lettuce being pushed through the bars of the cage for you to find and enjoy.

You were the active one, though; you loved running on the wheel, even when you were a little bit too big for it and its curvature made you have to bend at some funny angles while you were running. You’re a rat, though, and thus made of rubber, so it never seemed to be much of an issue for you. It’s because you were so active and energetic that it was so sad to see your decline, though; we’d become accustomed to you charging around the cage, climbing into every nook and cranny just to see if there was anything interesting there today. To see you suffering with a wheeze that made it look painful to breathe, let alone eat or do anything more strenuous than move a few feet around every half an hour, was heartbreaking. We really felt for you, and we know that you didn’t like it when we grabbed you and gave you medicine, but I think you knew that it was for the best; the last time I gave you some, you barely struggled at all, and it all went in your mouth rather than over our bedsheets and clothes.

We hope you know that we loved you very much, and that we were very sad to see you suffering. We didn’t want to have to say goodbye to you, and we did everything we could to try and make you better, but every night before I went to sleep I worried — or perhaps hoped? — that I’d wake up in the morning and you’d have found some peaceful rest with no more suffering. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you turned out to be a stubborn little fighter, though; even though there wasn’t much you could do towards the end, you kept on hanging in there, having a little nibble at some food when you could, indulging in your favourite pastime of draping yourself over Clover’s sleeping figure when you just wanted to warm up a bit, propping yourself up against the side of the cage to help yourself breathe a little easier.

Clover loved you very much, too. The two of you were very much a pair, and it’s hard to contemplate a future where Clover’s by herself without you by her side. But that’s what we’re facing now. We will miss you very much, and Clover will too; she’s been very tired for a few days, because it’s plain to see that she’s been fussing over you and wishing she could do more to take care of you, just like we were. I hope she understands that it was time to say goodbye, and that wherever you are now, you’re happier and more comfortable than you would have been wheezing in that cage. One day you’ll be reunited; we hope it won’t be too soon, because we love Clover a great deal, too — and, because, God’s honest truth, it was impossible to pick a “favourite” out of the two of you — but when that time comes, I like to think that you’ll be together again, free to do as you please, like munching your way through a massive poppadom without any sort of consequences.

We love you, Socks, and though you can’t see the tears we’ve shed today — and doubtless will continue to shed for a little while yet — we hope you know how much you meant to us. You were part of our lives for far too short a time, but in that time you were part of our family.

We’ll miss you. Sleep well.

2114: Million-Dollar Question

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Million-Dollar Question.”

“Why do you blog?”

I’ve answered this question before numerous times on these very pages, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to contemplate it again, particularly for the benefit of those who have only found me recently and are disinclined to trawl through over 2,100 previous posts to find previous answers.

I blog for numerous reasons. Mostly habit, to be perfectly honest; after 2,114 days of writing something each and every day, it is very much part of my daily routine now, even if I do habitually leave it until the “last minute”, as I have done once again today, writing this at 1:10 in the morning when I have work at 9am.

The reason why I started, though, was to be part of something that sounded interesting. A few people I followed on Twitter at the time started talking about the hashtag #oneaday, which I investigated further and discovered was an attempt to write something each and every day for a year. The intention was not necessarily to write something good each and every day for a year, but more to get into the habit of writing something on a daily basis. The more you do something, the more you develop your craft, after all, and in something inherently creative like writing, the more you do something, the more you develop your own personal style, too. Since most of the people participating in the hashtag were games journalists to varying degrees, keeping their writing skills fresh was obviously a good idea.

I jumped on board — a little later than some of my comrades, but still within January. I kept an eye on what others were up to and sometimes drew ideas and inspiration from their work, but I was somewhat surprised to discover that a goodly proportion of the people who started in that January decided to abandon the project remarkably quickly. One of these people who jumped ship quickly was the person who appeared to have started the whole shebang in the first place. I decided that I was going to be stubborn, though, and I was going to stick it out until the end of the year.

So I did, along with a few others with a similarly stubborn streak. Then I kept going. Some of those others continued on with me; others joined the cause; others still abandoned the idea altogether. I continued for another year and kept going and going and going. Now, to my knowledge, I’m the only member of the original crew who is still writing something every day, though I have stayed in touch with quite a few of the people I met over the course of the first couple of years of this project.

Writing something every day is challenging. Not because the act of writing is itself particularly difficult, but because it can be a real challenge to come up with something to write about every day. I don’t like to spend too many days in a row writing about the same thing — those who follow me regularly will know that I could probably rabbit on about Final Fantasy XIV for months non-stop at a time — but rather spread my wings a bit and write about other topics, be they things that have happened that day, things that I’ve seen on social media, frustrations I’ve felt or successes I want to celebrate.

Finding those topics has encouraged me to use writing as an outlet for the things that occasionally swirl around inside my head and are in need of expressing, but which I find difficulty expressing out loud to another person face-to-face. Writing allows me to put things across I am unable to — or unwilling to — talk to people about in person, in other words. Interestingly, though, the more I write about things, the more I feel I am able to actually talk about them too; perhaps because I know that some people have read the things I’ve written and thus know all the most pertinent details before I start actually addressing them directly.

It’s been a helpful form of quasi-therapy, in other words; it allows me to work through things that might feel like they were unresolvable or frustrating if I left them inside my head. Sometimes the things I want to talk about really are unresolvable, but the simple act of communicating them in some way relieves some of the “pressure” because I’ve been able to express how I’m feeling — and indirectly help other people understand what it is I’m thinking.

So, as long as I have an Internet connection, a keyboard and working fingers, I have no intention of stopping just yet. I do occasionally ask myself why I keep bothering when my regular reader numbers are so (relatively) low, but my answer is pretty much always the same: I’m writing for me first and foremost; if other people derive some entertainment, comfort or understanding from it, so much the better, but my first priority when I write is always expressing my own thoughts and feelings.

2112: 1984

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “1984.”

“You’re locked in a room with your greatest fear. Describe what’s in the room.”

My immediate reaction to this prompt was to say that the room was absolutely full of spiders. And to be fair, that would pretty much scare the shit out of me, particularly if they were of the deadly variety.

But that would be too easy. Someone who truly wanted to break me psychologically — as opposed to kill me — would go for something much more subtle, and something that wouldn’t physically hurt me, but which would deal some damage regardless.

And, on reflection, I came up with an answer pretty quickly.

There is nothing in the room. Nothing at all.

The walls are plain. The floor is plain. The ceiling is plain. When the door closes, you can’t even see its frame, so flush with the wall it is. There’s no clear delineation between floor, wall and ceiling; no sharp corners, no right angles; everything just sort of flows into one another, making the room take on a somewhat otherworldly quality where no matter which direction you face, you see the same thing.

The nothingness extends to sound, too. There is not a single sound in the room, save for any noises I might make. I become very aware of my own breathing, and of my heartbeat pounding in my ears. But there are no other sounds; I can’t hear anyone moving around outside, and my captor certainly doesn’t seem to be in any sort of hurry to communicate with me. Perhaps they’re just watching somehow — though it’s impossible to distinguish even a tiny spy camera anywhere in the room, because that would be a distinguishing feature by which I would be able to orient myself, and clearly that would go against the intention of this place.

The light level in the room would remain constant; not so bright as to be dazzling, but just slightly darker than comfortable. The kind of light you’re bathed in when in an environment lit by a bare bulb; a cold light that seems devoid of home comforts and humanity. A light that is threatening, rather than welcoming. A light that beckons with a smirk on its face, rather than inviting you in with open arms.

And of course, there are no other people in the room. No-one communicating with me. No means for me to get a message to the outside, and seemingly no means for the outside to get a message to me, either.

It’s lonely. And the combination of the ever-constant light level, the total lack of sound and the lack of people or even things with which to communicate makes it impossible to tell how much time is passing. There’s nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to focus my attention on. The room is completely devoid of meaning; it’s devoid of joy, but it’s also devoid of other emotions, too. It doesn’t even inherently inspire “fear”; it just is, and that’s the scary thing about it. It’s impassive, cold, unyielding. No way out. No way in. No-one to help me. No way to distract myself. I just have to wait. And wait. And wait. Alone.

That’s a room that would break me. I don’t know how long it would take, but it would get me eventually. So kindly don’t put me in anywhere like that any time soon, please. Thank you.

2110: Stacking

I’ve been back in the retail sector for a little while now — part time, temporary, but still in there — and it occurs to me that, despite the pay being low, I actually don’t hate it. I even quite like it, I hesitate to say.

This is not entirely what I had in mind when pondering my career choices towards the end of secondary school. This is not what I had in mind when it looked like I was starting to build a career in the games press. This is not what I had in mind when I obtained a teaching qualification. But, well, it’s where I am now — and it seems to be “working” for me pretty much as well as anything I’ve done before, perhaps even better.

You may consider this to not be particularly ambitious, and I’d probably agree with you there; I’ve been conscious over the last few years of the fact that I’m simply not very ambitious when it comes to career prospects. All I really want is to be comfortable rather than rich, and I value the situation where I can completely “switch off” from work at the end of a day and just enjoy my evenings and weekends.

The other thing which occurs to me is that retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with whatever it is that makes my brain work the way it does. I didn’t cope well with the traditional office environment, for example, because I couldn’t deal with all the gossiping, backstabbing, politics and outright lying that went on every day. It didn’t help, of course, that I was forced out of the job in question as a result of my immediate superiors not understanding what depression is or how to help someone with it. But then I hated that stupid, shitty, pointless job with all its stupid, shitty, pointless policies and procedures anyway, so despite getting the boot from it costing me a reasonably healthy salary, I’m not sorry I don’t work there any more; I’m just sorry that the circumstances under which I left it occasionally leave me with horribly unpleasant “flashbacks” when I’m trying to get to sleep.

But I shouldn’t dwell on the past too much; as I say, retail seems to provide an environment that meshes well with me. And I’ve been thinking about why that is: it’s to do with always knowing what I should be doing. because the things that there are to do are always obvious. Gap in a shelf? Fill it. Customer at a till? Serve them. Customer with a question? Answer it. Back counter messy? Tidy it. There’s always something to do, which takes care of what was my biggest frustration with the aforementioned office job: the fact that there sometimes simply wasn’t anything to get on with. (And boy, they didn’t like that being pointed out to them.)

I make mistakes, sure, because I’m still learning how things are done at my current job, but I pick things up quickly and I seem to have been making a good impression so far. It’s tiring, too, but coming off a shift feeling knackered makes me feel like I’ve done something worthwhile rather than sitting on my arse all day — plus it’s a kind of “exercise” that I can do without thinking about it.

So while it may not be particularly ambitious to say so, so long as I can keep bringing in some pennies each month with a combination of retail and the freelance writing work I’m doing on a regular basis (not for any websites or magazines, I’m afraid, so you can’t “see” it anywhere) I think I can probably muddle through like this for the immediate future. I hope so, anyway; I just want to be able to relax and just get on with life rather than wondering what amorphous, unclear, foggy target I should be aiming in the general direction of next. I just want to live, y’know?

2104: Adult Content

From a Plinky prompt:

“When did you realise you were an adult?”

I’ll be frank with you, dear reader; despite being 34 years of age, despite being married, despite being a homeowner, despite having a new(ish) car… I don’t feel like I’m an adult.

I mean, obviously I know I am an adult, because I have to worry about things like council tax, credit cards and putting the rubbish out. But I don’t feel like an adult. I’m not particularly houseproud (except when I know people are coming to visit), I’m not the sort of person who enjoys DIY “projects” — I doubt the day when I really want to “do the bathroom” or similar will ever come, whereas for some friends of mine it came practically the moment they left university — and I don’t really know how insurance works.

These are things that people never teach you, you see — or at least, they didn’t when I was in education. During my few years as a teacher, I did deliver a few “Key Skills” classes that, among other things, involved a whole lesson on how to work a washing machine — yes, really — but I must confess to feeling a little hypocritical educating the youths of the day on things that, in some cases, I wasn’t hugely familiar with myself.

Regular readers will, of course, know that my brain is riddled with hangups and anxieties over all sorts of things, ranging from simple communication with other people to how, exactly, you go about calculating your tax code. These anxieties, at times, build into what feels like outright fear, and I find myself worrying that I’ll get everything “wrong” and mess it up; this feeling, when it grows big enough, is enough to completely paralyse me from doing something I need to do, putting it off and putting it off until it becomes a considerably bigger problem than it would have been if I’d just done it when I first became aware of it.

I probably shouldn’t do that. One of these days I’ll end up putting off something really important and getting myself into a disastrous situation. Fortunately, I’m not alone; I have people who look out for me, and while I don’t want to become dependent on them or anything, knowing that sets me a little more at ease with my life than I would be if I was trying to struggle through all by myself.

So, in answer to the original question… when did I realise I was an adult? I don’t think I ever have realised that I was an adult; I don’t feel like I am an adult, I feel like I still have a hell of a lot to learn about the world, and I don’t have the first clue how to go about doing it. And, more to the point, I’m not sure I particularly want to.

That’s probably not a very grown-up attitude to take. But, well… you know.

2102: Seven Wonders

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Seven Wonders.”

“Khalil Gibran once said that people will never understand one another unless language is reduced to seven words. What would your seven words be?”

Regular readers will doubtless be aware that I require considerably more than seven words to get my point across in most situations, but this is an interesting question, regardless. What are the most fundamental things that you might need to communicate with other people? And, by extension, if those were the only things you were able to communicate, what effect might that have on your life?

A hasty answer to this question would consider fairly “obvious” words that reflect basic survival: food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run. Being forced to rely on words like that, though, would essentially put us on the level of primitive man: living for nothing more than basic survival and basic relationships with one another that boil down to people and things being good or bad. That, while a stable existence, would be rather dull.

So you could throw some words in there to spice things up a bit. Love. Hate. Sex. Kill. Although with those latter two in particular, you’re still not really operating on a level anywhere particularly beyond that of the cavemen.

But with only seven words to play with, how on Earth can you hope to make yourself understood? How could you possibly express yourself in all the many weird and wonderful ways humanity does today? These two things aren’t necessarily the same, since expressing yourself “clearly” does not necessarily mean that you’re being understood.

Well, then, you have to consider that not everything about communication involves words. Humanity can communicate with eye contact, with body language, with physical contact, with visual imagery, with music, with sound, with empathy, with sympathy. Consider the works of art that you might have indulged in that have no words as such: silent movies, instrumental pieces of music, visual art, dance recitals, even video games like Flower and Journey.

When you think about it that way, do we even need words at all? Well, yes, I think we probably do, since expressing the fact that you’re hungry entirely through a spectacular but ultimately impractical ballet performance is not really the most efficient way to go about things. But with the above in mind, what it does mean is that we could get by with a bare minimum of language to cover our basic needs — food, drink, friend, dangerous, stop, help, run, perhaps substituting “sex” for one of those depending on your attitude towards fornication — and the actual expressive side of communication could be handled entirely by non-verbal forms of art.

That would certainly be an interesting way to live, but to be honest, I think I like words too much to ever want to abandon them in that way. So don’t worry, dear reader; tomorrow’s post will be made up of more than the seven words I’ve proposed today. And I hope the words I choose will help you to understand me just a little bit more than the day before.

2101: Things I Couldn’t Do

I lost another three and a half pounds this week, bringing my total weight loss since the very end of January this year to five stone and six pounds — nearly five and a half stone. I may not be the sort of person who is particularly good at showing genuine-seeming excitement when speaking in person, but believe me, I’m pretty much ecstatic about this — though I have no intention of stopping here, as the initial “target” I set is still a little way off.

Back when I decided to start losing weight with Slimming World at the end of January, I was just under 23 stone. That is, quite obviously, Too Heavy. I’d always been aware I was overweight — particularly when arseholes in the street would make some off-colour fat joke in my direction — but towards the start of the year, I’d started to become somewhat conscious that more than just being roly-poly and jolly, things might actually have started becoming a bit of a problem.

I could tell this in a number of ways. Firstly and most obviously was the fact that I was terrified to know my actual weight. I wouldn’t get on scales, I wouldn’t even contemplate it. I just knew that I was too heavy, and I wouldn’t tell anyone even what I thought I weighed. The most difficult part of attending my first Slimming World meeting was knowing that I’d find out exactly how much I weighed — and, to be perfectly honest, it was actually a little worse than I thought it was, since I’d silently estimated myself around the 20 stone mark for a while.

Secondly, I was extremely uncomfortable all the time. The chairs I sat in at the job I was working at at the time felt like they were too small for me, but I stubbornly refused to order a “special chair” like the one provided for the resident fat bloke in our department — who was considerably larger than me, even — because that felt humiliating. I was terrified of the prospect of going abroad ever again, because I didn’t want to be one of the people who had to ask for a seat belt extension — that felt like it would be humiliating too. And I was still carrying around painful memories of the time Andie took me to Alton Towers for what should have been a really nice weekend — and was, for the most part — but which had at least part of it that felt utterly mortifying.

Thirdly, and somewhat related to the Alton Towers story, there were things that I felt like I simply couldn’t do any more. I didn’t go along to a significant part of a close friend’s stag weekend because it involved doing stuff at Go Ape and riding Segways, and a bit of research beforehand indicated that I would probably be too heavy for both of those things. So instead I just joined the group for the evening’s activities. I didn’t feel like I could climb a ladder because I was scared it would break; I didn’t feel I could even do basic do-it-yourself around the house that involved using a stepladder because there was a prominent notice on it indicating a maximum recommended weight that was significantly below what I actually weighed; I didn’t feel safe standing on anything that was off the ground, in fact, even if it was quite obviously designed to hold up things considerably heavier than one miserable, overweight thirtysomething.

In short, I was utterly miserable, and I knew it was my own fault for not taking better care of myself. I’d eat crap day in, day out, kidding myself that I wasn’t having much junk, just an occasional treat; I’d deal with emotional episodes by eating because I felt like I “deserved” something nice; sometimes I’d just eat because I was bored, and I felt like eating something sweet might relieve that boredom.

I knew all these things before I started Slimming World. What I wasn’t prepared for was how surprisingly easy it ended up being to change those habits — and what an immediate impact it would have on both my physical and mental wellbeing. I lost eight pounds in my first week on the programme, and have seen fairly consistent losses (albeit somewhat smaller ones!) ever since. I feel happier and more confident in myself; I don’t feel ashamed when I see myself in the mirror any more — sometimes I actually quite like what I see, as narcissistic as that might sound — and while I’m still uneasy to do some things such as climbing ladders, I know that even if I’m still not quite 100% at a stage where I can live life “normally”, I am on the right track and that I will get there eventually, at least so far as my physical wellbeing goes. My mental health is, of course, another matter, but that’s a whole other set of things to deal with that I’m not sure how to even start tackling just yet.

I’ve found myself thinking about the future a bit since seeing my progress. Not in a particularly grand way or anything — just thinking about the things that I wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of this year (such as those mentioned above) that I would be able to now. Andie and I are having a belated “honeymoon” at Center Parcs at the very end of November, for example, and I know that everything about that holiday is going to be much more comfortable and enjoyable for me than the last time we went. (Not that I didn’t enjoy last time, mind you; it was just physically exhausting to lug myself around.)

And I feel like it would be something of a symbolic “victory” for me if, once I reach my target (or perhaps even go beyond it if I feel like I want to go further), I return to Alton Towers and comfortably hop onto all the rides that I simply wasn’t able to physically fit onto the last time I went. I don’t feel I’m quite ready for that just yet, but it won’t be that long now if I carry on at the rate I’m going. And that’s a good feeling; there are many things in life that it’s impossible to “take back”, but thankfully the mistakes I’ve made with my body and my habits don’t appear to be counted in that category.