This is the stock image I got for searching “fart”, so this is what you get. Photo by Julissa Helmuth on Pexels.com
It really wasn’t a subtle one, either. It was the kind of sphincter-rippling, slack-anused report where you know that every inch, every ounce of buttock fat was involved in producing that triumphant fanfare, and where the moment after it has occurred, you know that there is absolutely no way you’re going to be able to pass it off as you knocking something over or scraping something along a floor.
There are two practical ways you can really handle a situation like this: either take ownership of the situation and have a good giggle about it with everyone around you, or simply pretend that it didn’t happen, implying that anyone who did happen to hear your eruption was somehow hallucinating. I chose the latter option; I don’t have nearly enough social confidence, particularly around strangers, to pull off some sort of “Good LORD! Did you hear that?!” routine around strangers, though I’m more than happy to parp thunderously in front of close friends and family.
Both responses place anyone near you in something of an awkward position, of course. If you take the former approach, then there’s the unspoken expectation that those nearby will participate in your routine, congratulating you on your impersonation of a baritone brass instrument and generally agreeing that having a good old guff is the peak of humorous funtimes. This, of course, does not take into account those who find bodily functions objectionable, particularly in public, and is likely to make those people feel uncomfortable.
If you take the latter approach, meanwhile, you place the responsibility on the people around you to either comment on the situation or remain quiet. And if you heard the noise that I emitted while swinging my carrier bag full of groceries around from the self-checkout into the trolley, I suspect some people would find it quite difficult not to comment.
Thankfully, the situation resolved itself with probably the optimal outcome. The only person nearby when the incident occurred was someone else who was packing their shopping, and they either chose to remain quiet or simply didn’t notice. There certainly wasn’t any sort of reaction, so if it’s the former I applaud them for their self-control; by the time I was out in the car park I was already in fits of giggles. I hope that when they meet up with their friends later, they enjoy telling the story about the fat man next to them in Marks & Spencer who let rip with a humdinger of a bottom burp without shame while finishing their shopping trip.
I mean it when I say it was uncontrollable, though; it was the sort of guff that doesn’t so much sneak up on you as it is suddenly present, without warning. There was no noticeable brewing time, no bubbling in the gut, no time to prepare — it was simply a case of me apparently moving in the wrong direction and releasing the explosion that had clearly been biding its time in my arse, trapped in a sweaty, fleshy prison, for quite a while.
I am pleased to report, however, that I did not “follow through”, as the vernacular has it. It was simply an extremely loud, explosive trump that was gone almost as soon as it arrived. And now I am home I can have a good laugh about it without worrying about funny looks from strangers. Except for all the strangers I’ve told about it on the Internet with this post.
It has been a strange few years, to say the least. Ever since the world went to pieces in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, things have not felt at all “normal” — even though for the most part, things these days seem to primarily be operating as they once were.
I still maintain that this isn’t necessarily a good thing, as the threat of COVID most certainly isn’t over, even if its impact is considerably lessened from what it once was. And I feel like society being forced “back to normal” too early likely made the whole recovery process more lengthy and difficult than it perhaps could have been. But, of course, there were plenty of additional considerations.
I feel like a lot of people have been feeling like 2023 will be a “better” year for one reason or another. There’s no tangible evidence to suggest this will actually be the case — I’m pretty sure we’ve all been thinking “surely next year can’t be as bad as this one” for as long as I can remember, even before killer viruses entered the equation — but I suppose it’s an attempt to bring oneself comfort. After all, proceeding forward thinking that things are miserable and awful and only likely to get worse is not really going to help matters.
A new year doesn’t really mean anything. Nothing magical happens at midnight as December 31st ticks over to January 1st. And yet it’s as good a time as any to decide that you want to have a fresh start, make some changes, improve some things about yourself and perhaps escape from things that have been holding you back for one reason or another.
In contrast to some of the previous years on this blog, I’m in a relatively “all right” position life-wise right now, and so I’m not in a position where I feel like I need to make any particularly radical changes in my life in order to be something approaching “happy”. I don’t feel like I need to change jobs — I love my current job — and I don’t want or need to change anything about my living situation, as my wife Andie and I are both in a good place; the excruciating rise in cost of living in the last year occasionally puts a bit of strain on our collective finances, but other than that we can’t complain too much.
All this means that we — well, I, as far as this post is concerned — can focus on the relatively “smaller” things to try and sort out. Chief among these for me is my overall health and wellbeing; I want to do something about my weight, and do something that hopefully lasts, because I’m fucking sick of having this hernia and not being able to have anything done about it because I’m too fat.
Slimming World worked for me a few years back, as past entries will show, but when Andie and I went back after various personal circumstances caused us both to have a fairly drastic “rebound”, we found that it didn’t really work for us. Calorie-counting didn’t really work for us either, and nor did self-directed Weight Watchers (or “WW”, as they now prefer to call themselves). Last time I saw my doctor, though, they did say that they could refer me to a “health coach” to help sort me out, but this was dependent on getting a blood test to ensure that there was nothing major wrong with me.
I’d never had a blood test before, so I was kind of perturbed by the whole experience. I don’t like hospitals at the best of times — my mind has them permanently associated as “the place where people die”, even though the rational part of my brain knows that this is a vastly unfair assessment to our hard-working healthcare workers — and the prospect of having mildly invasive procedures carried out on me was not helping matters.
This only got worse when they had a bit of trouble finding a vein on the inside of my elbow and had to draw from my hand instead, and as the whole process went on a bit longer that was comfortable I found myself having a cold sweat and feeling nauseated. Thankfully I didn’t throw up over the nurse who was working on me, but my condition did cause enough concern for her to get me a glass of water and give me a moment to recover after she was all finished. Thankfully, the results of the blood test showed nothing of concern, so hopefully I won’t have to deal with that again for a while.
Anyway, getting advice and/or referral from my doctor on what to do next was dependent on those blood test results, so now the holiday period is over I need to go back to them and figure out what to do next. I’m certain it will be a difficult process, but it’s something that needs to be done, as not only is my hernia continually bugging me, but I’m having a lot of joint pains and suchlike also, and I suspect losing some weight will help all those problems.
Aside from this, I feel like I might need to shake things up with regard to friendships and personal relationships also. Over the course of… probably the last decade or so, really, I’ve been dismayed at how far a lot of people with whom I used to be very close have drifted away for one reason or another. In some cases this was down to lives going in different directions, in others it was down to misunderstandings and in others still it can be attributed to some seemingly being more willing to make a bit of an effort to maintain a relationship than others.
I can’t pretend that I’m not at fault in some of these situations, but there are also plenty of cases where I have been the one who has been making an effort, only to get things either thrown back in my face or met with silent indifference. I won’t go into specifics right now as this isn’t about naming and shaming or anything like that, but when discussing a couple of instances privately with some more recent acquaintances, I felt somewhat vindicated when these relatively neutral “outsiders” (to the situation in question, anyway) confirmed my suspicions that yes, indeed, the things that I had previously felt were a bit out of order were indeed out of order.
It’s hard to know what to do in cases like this, though. Do you just cut and run? That’s probably the sensible thing to do; if you’re the only one willing to make an effort, that’s not a friendship, and it’s really not worth trying to maintain something that isn’t there. But at the same time you have to ask if you’re having unreasonable expectations of people whose circumstances have changed, as your own have. In that instance, is it appropriate to “punish” them for just the natural process of your lives going down different roads?
There isn’t really a right answer, but I do feel like in this new year I want to have another go at rekindling some of these friendships where possible. There are, I’m sure, multiple instances where I can still do more to try and fix things, but equally there are also plenty of cases where I’m sure the situation is beyond “help”, for want of a better word. And that’s sad, but it’s also supposedly a natural part of life. I vaguely recall reading something the other day that suggested men of my age generally only have one honest-to-goodness friend that they feel they can rely on — and I’m certainly in this position now.
Well, just make new friends, you might say. But, well, social anxiety tends to put paid to such plans when you explicitly make them — although in the last year or so I have added a number of new people to my personal acquaintances through both work and online socialisation. So I suspect it’s probably going to be worth cultivating those friendships further rather than continuing to make an effort in cases where I feel increasingly excluded.
But anyway. That’s enough rambling for today. Because aside from all of the above, I’ll also be making more regular use of this blog in 2023, too. With the general collapse of my enthusiasm for social media — coupled with the right hash Elon Musk has been making of Twitter — it’s probably the optimal means for me to freely express myself and communicate with others. So if you’re not already following me here, hit up the links at the side (or wherever they are on your screen) and stay up to date with me that way. This place is probably going to be the most reliable means of “seeing” me online from hereon.
Happy new year. And may your own “fresh starts”, however small or grand they might be, bring you joy and satisfaction.
I love dreams. I’ve found the concept of them fascinating since an early age, to such a degree that when I was a child I used to deliberately try and think about something really hard before falling asleep in the hope that I would subsequently dream about it. It rarely worked quite so simply, although I have had enough dreams about, say, the video games I was playing immediately before bed to make me think that there probably is something to influencing your own subconscious while you’re still conscious.
My favourite dreams are the ones for which there is no rational explanation, which make no logical sense and which sound ridiculous when you talk about them. Take the example of the dream from the title above as just one of many.
Like most memories of dreams, my recollection of the circumstances leading up to the incident in question are hazy at best. But I do vividly remember the conclusion, which was, as has already been noted, the fact that I was ejaculating like a firehose all over my childhood bedroom.
I also vividly remember the fact that I knew I was about to ejaculate, and that I was thinking two things: firstly, the slightest bit of pressure on my todger would set me off, and secondly, that if I aimed carefully I’d probably be able to clean things up without anyone ever knowing that I’d done anything quite so obscene. The reality of the situation became abundantly clear shortly after an inadvertent mild impact caused the incident to commence in earnest, and before long, the question of cleaning things up was… well, it wasn’t a question any more.
I’d started by firing at the window. This seemed logical and sensible, as I thought it would be easy to clean up the glass. It apparently did not occur to me to open the window and simply aim out through it — hoping that there were no unfortunate passers-by in the street below, of course — but it made sense in the heat of the moment. Before long, though, it was clear that a single rather narrow sash window was to prove an inadequate receptacle for my product, and I somewhat lost control of the situation.
Teddy bears, books, old cloths that had been draped over things, the wardrobe door — before long, everything was covered, and there was no sign that the tide would be stemmed any time soon. I began to panic — up until this point, for some reason the situation had not appeared to be all that unusual — and, oddly, found myself less concerned about my apparent inability to switch off the flow from my apparently bottomless ballsack but rather more worried about how I was going to explain the situation once it had concluded.
I never got an answer to that, as I woke up shortly afterwards — dry as a bone (no pun intended), if you must know — thoroughly confused by what I had just witnessed and/or experienced.
Since “dream science” is hardly an exact art, there almost certainly isn’t a “fixed” definition for this, but most people who claim to know what they are talking about claim that dreaming of ejaculation in some form or another, unsurprisingly, represents a desire for “release” of some description — not necessarily sexual, but perhaps emotional. Specifically, one article I read noted that dreaming of “excess ejaculation” is a sign that you are “in immediate need of emotional and sexual release” and that you are feeling a “loss of control and power over your life”.
But then elsewhere on the page it notes that dreaming of “male ejaculation” is a “bringer of good luck and success”. Which suggests to me, as I already suspected, that any and all interpretations are largely bollocks (again, no pun intended) and that dreams like this are just your subconscious having a bit of fun with things that would never happen in reality.
Just to be safe, though, I probably better go have a quick wank.
People love to complain. This is a trait traditionally and historically associated with the British, but it’s most definitely not an exclusively British thing. Perhaps it once was, but it most certainly isn’t any more. And as with so many things, we can probably blame the way in which the Internet has brought people together — something which should, inherently, be a good thing, but which has somehow become corrupted along the way.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I’m not spending a ton of time on Twitter any more due to a combination of the horrible atmosphere that seeps from every pore of that website and the constant ridiculous changes Elon Musk keeps making on a seemingly daily basis. But occasionally, I can’t help myself from clicking on one of the Trends out of sheer curiosity.
The other day, I happened to see that Evri was trending. Evri, if you’re unfamiliar, is the new name that the courier company formerly known as Hermes decided to adopt for themselves a while back. I don’t know the reasons for the rebrand and honestly I really don’t care, because they’re inevitably absolute bullshit and everyone knows that Evri is “really” Hermes anyway, so it’s largely irrelevant.
However, what I found when looking at the Evri trend was that everyone was complaining about Evri. Everyone had the same stories to tell of parcels being lobbed over their fence, of packages arriving broken or tampered with, or generally some tale of misfortune and woe related to getting their package delivered from this one specific carrier.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never had a problem with Evri or Hermes. I spent a brief period working for them while I was looking for a proper job and I know what it’s like “from the inside” also. While it was a time-consuming, underpaid and largely thankless task for the couriers, it was a reasonably well-run operation in general, and there were various ways in which said couriers were encouraged to do a good job, up to and including being “watched” through the scanny things they’re supposed to carry around with them.
As fortune would have it, for some reason during my brief time with the company I never actually got a scanny thing, so I never had to worry about such things — not that I had anything to particularly worry about anyway. But I digress.
I’m not saying no-one has ever had a problem with Evri or Hermes. But if you were to look at that trend on Twitter, the conclusion it would be easy to come to would be that they were a company that should be absolutely, completely and without doubt avoided at all cost, because literally every delivery they do is the absolute worst possible thing that has ever happened to someone, and they have ruined too many Christmases and children’s birthdays to count.
This is nonsense. While it’s foolish to assume that they’re completely without fault — in any sort of “gig economy” sort of situation, you have a risk of bad apples, but this is also true for more formally structured corporations — it’s also ridiculous to put across the impression that they’re a complete failure that should never be trusted.
It’s just one of many examples of the Internet painting the worst possible picture of something. And I could provide plenty of other examples at this point, but I’ll refrain from doing so for the sake of time.
What I will urge you to do, however, is that if you see any sort of seemingly universally negative reaction towards something — particularly on any sort of standards-free platform such as social media or user reviews — then be cautious. Chances are the thing that is being ranted and raved about is nowhere near as bad as people are trying to put across — because let’s face it, people are a whole lot more likely to complain about something than post about how they had no problems whatsoever with a company or service.
Perhaps we should change our outlook on such things. Perhaps we should start posting positive comments when a company does the right thing and does what is expected of them. Or perhaps that’s ridiculous — after all, a service that is being provided to you conforming to your exact expectations should not be particularly worthy of comment at all, because, well, it’s what you expected.
But then that means the negativity will always win, because the complainers will always speak up, while the satisfied customers will just quietly get on with their day, thinking nothing more of the company they’ve interacted with or the service they’ve received.
Perhaps the answer is just not to listen to anyone and make your own mind up.
As the stereotype of growing up goes, when you’re a teenager you’re supposed to decide that you want to “rebel” and be something other than the person that your parents took great effort attempting to craft you into.
For me, I don’t think that really happened. I mean, sure, I had plenty of the obligatory stroppy teenager moments, when I’d get angry with my parents for what I saw as irrational or unfair decisions, but I never really stepped into the realms of what I’d describe as “counterculture” in any way other than that which I already was: a computer nerd.
And, in our household, that wasn’t really counterculture or rebellion at all; our whole family were interested in computers and video games, since they’d been part of our culture at home since before I was born. Not only that, but my father and my brother regularly contributed to the Atari magazine Page 6 (later New Atari User) — and as I moved into my teenage years, I started to contribute a bit also.
But I digress. Nostalgia for times gone by isn’t the point of what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about how homogeneous “Internet culture” has made people today — and how, at the age of forty-one years old, I crave nothing more than rebellion against that homogeneous culture, and feel nothing but frustration at the hordes of people all acting and talking the exact same way.
I’m sure this has always happened in some form or another, but the global nature of the Internet makes it feel like people are losing their own unique (often local) identities. Now, wherever you go, it feels like everyone describes things in the same way, and uses the same often nonsensical turns of phrase.
Every opinion is someone “lowkey thinking” something, even though that doesn’t really make any sense.
Every misunderstanding is confronted with “Tell me you haven’t [done thing] without telling me you haven’t [done thing].”
Every vaguely energetic YouTube video is accompanied by people going “me on the way to school [doing something urgent].”
I feel constant embarrassment at the prospect of linguists of the future looking back at this age and seeing people unironically using the word “pog” at every opportunity.
And there are myriad more, which I’m sure you can think of yourself if you’re in a similar position to me.
I can understand why everyone wants to “conform”. It’s the thing of not wanting to be the outlier, and of wanting to be understood by everyone. But it’s boring. If everyone talks about things the same way online — and often has the same opinions, spoon-fed to them by their favourite YouTuber, as often happens — then speaking to one person is much like speaking to any other. You might as well not bother.
Which is why I find myself making a point of very deliberately making use of outdated, very local British slang whenever possible. Yes, it’s contrarian, yes, it’s childish and stupid, but it’s my own little way of feeling like I’m actually my own person rather than being subsumed by the festering, slimy monster that is “Internet culture”. Even though I completely recognise that what I’m doing is essentially the exact same thing, only using ’90s games magazines as my model.
I think also part of it stems from my Asperger’s. Since my diagnosis a few years back, and understanding what that means for my mental health, I feel like I’ve become much more conscious of the things that sort of “set me off”, as it were. And one of those things happens to be predictable, formulaic, repetitive structures, particularly in speech and written communication.
YouTube videos that are always the same drive me bonkers. RuPaul’s Drag Race drives me insane for the same reason. And, as I’ve described, people who all communicate in the exact same way frustrate me also.
I guess in some ways we should perhaps celebrate the way in which people have found how to be near-universally understood online, but I can’t help just finding it a bit dull and annoying. I’ll keep describing bad things as “bobbins”, thank you very much, and replacing the phrase “okay, I understand” with “bonza, Toadie”. And there’s nothing you can do about it!
Those who have been following the saga of social media for a while will know that Twitter is a right old mess right now. Between Elon Musk’s incredible ego and a series of bizarre policy changes and introductions (most of which are likely related to Musk’s ego in some form or another) it’s certainly been interesting to watch the world’s most popular social media platform (for how much longer?) go through some trials and tribulations.
But those of you who have been following me for a while will know that Twitter hasn’t been much fun for a long time now. When I first joined (which must have been around 2007 or so, maybe?) it was a great place to make new friends, enjoy good conversation and just generally have a good time. But as the years have gone on — and particularly since the significant online upheavals that can be at least partly attributed to the “Gamergate” mess of 2014 — it’s become a less and less desirable hangout, for a variety of reasons.
Chief among them for me is the combative, confrontational tone the site as a whole has taken on. While it is still possible to have civil conversations there, it feels like it’s much more likely that if you post an opinion of your own someone will come along and shout it down before long. Even if your opinion is not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly important or worth getting upset over.
Anger seems to be the default state for many posters on Twitter, and this is often expressed through some seriously unpleasant behaviour. Anyone who is into Japanese games, for example, will doubtless have seen the disgusting vitriol that gets thrown the way of localisation staff (more specifically, female localisation staff) on a fairly regular basis, regardless of whether or not any “mistakes” have been made. And the same is true in all fields; the quote-tweet dunk is a universal constant, and it does not make for a friendly environment where one wants to hang out.
But alongside all this, Twitter itself has been changing in functional, mechanical terms. The rise of “The Algorithm” on all manner of social sites — with the most notorious being YouTube, of course — has meant that no longer can you count on your social media experience being your own, if indeed it ever was. Rather than showing you the things that your friends have been posting in the order that they were posted, you now get shit you didn’t sign up for pushed into your feed as “recommendations”, based on the ill-defined assumptions that Twitter makes about “quality content”.
I never signed up to Twitter for “quality content”. I signed up to chat with folks from a forum we all used to frequent that we weren’t able to use any more due to the site’s closure. That’s all I really wanted. And that’s emphatically not what the site provides these days.
So between the change in atmosphere, the change in the way the whole site works and the whole Musk fiasco, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s simply not worth wasting time pissing around on Twitter any more — if indeed it ever was. Rather, I think it’s high time that I brought this blog back, since it’s a much better means for me to express myself — plus the comments section is a much nicer way to hold a conversation in most cases. (Unless those people find their way here, but you know how it is.)
So that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be keeping my Twitter account open because it’s still useful for things like news aggregation and PR contacts, but pretty much all I’ll be posting on there is links to stuff I’ve done, either for work or for pleasure. When I want to actually talk about something, I’ll do it here, like in the good old days.
I’m not making any grand promises about posting frequency or anything like that, this is just going to be an “as and when I feel like it” sort of thing. I’m also not going to commit to doing silly comics or anything, even though I know one particular reader (whom I hope is doing well, given that I haven’t heard from her for a while) is a big fan! This is my scratch pad, my brain dump and my place to express myself. No “algorithm” rules the roost here, and as such it’s a much better means of getting to know me than the toxic bird site.
It’s been a peculiar time of late. The Big News at the time of writing is the fact that Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, has died. Opinions are violently polarised on this around the Internet, and I’m not here to start any fights or anything, but I will say that I err on the side of “mildly upset” about it.
The Queen, you see, was a sort of comfortingly familiar presence who had been there my whole life — more than any of the other Royals. Very little she did had any direct impact on my own life, and yet I still found her presence oddly reassuring. She was a constant pillar amid the swirling mists of change; a storm that only feels like it’s been building in intensity over the course of my entire life, until we reach today — a time when the whole world very much feels like it’s at breaking point.
The Queen was not someone I especially trusted, nor was she someone that I thought was doing a good job of “running the country” — as deliberately disconnected from politics as I have remained for most of my life, I was under no illusions as to whether or not the monarchy had any real power whatsoever. And yet somehow, whenever anyone complained about “our tax money supporting those royal spongers” or whatever the complaint du jour happened to be, I didn’t feel like I could get on board with it. Just like I don’t feel I can get on board with the people celebrating her passing now.
Because yes, there absolutely are people celebrating her passing, and even people wishing that she suffered. Not just weirdoes on the Internet, either — people who move in some of the same circles as I do, though thankfully not people I’d particularly call “friends” at this point, and especially not after some of the vitriol I’ve seen them spouting.
Regardless of your feelings on a public figure that has passed, it feels fundamentally disrespectful to spit on their grave in such a manner, particularly so soon after their passing. And honestly, as bleeding-heart as this might make me, I tend to extend this courtesy to the people that the world commonly regards as “evil” also. I didn’t whoop and holler and cheer when people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden died; I could celebrate the reaching of a milestone in a conflict or a victory for the supposed “good guys” without taking joy in the death of another human being.
And sure. There are plenty of criticisms one could level at the Queen — though I suspect in the majority of the cases she’s more the one who simply rubber-stamped any controversial decisions rather than actually “doing” things herself — but I cannot and will not think that, in any way, justifies some of the genuinely horrible things I’ve seen people saying over the course of the last couple of days.
The monarchy may be outdated, irrelevant, useless and a waste of money — but she was still our Queen, and a lot of us took an odd amount of pride in her, and drew comfort from her presence. I am, by no means, what you might call a royalist — I take precisely zero interest in what Harry, William and co are up to, for example — but I do feel an important part of our culture has taken that big step into becoming history rather than the present. And things are never quite going to be the same again.
I’m going to share some stuff today that I’m a bit uncomfortable about sharing, but attempting to deal with it in private hasn’t been going so well, so I’m hoping that making things a bit more “public” might help me somehow.
I’m not sure how yet — perhaps simply making people aware of what I’m dealing with might make me feel a bit better about it, or perhaps I need some sort of support. Exactly what form that support might take, I have no idea, but… anyway, enough preamble, let me just get into it before I talk myself out of sharing this.
As those who have known me for a while will know, I have struggled for a long time with my weight. It has been on a steadily upward spiral for pretty much my entire adult life and, barring an extremely successful stint with Slimming World a few years back, I have had great difficulty shedding weight and keeping it off. This has been a particular problem during the COVID years, since just general activity was pretty much a no-go for quite some time.
This is a fairly significant problem, not just for the obvious reasons, but also because I have been suffering with an extremely painful hernia for the past few years — and the doctors refuse to do anything about it unless I lose some weight, because apparently if I get it fixed in the state I’m in right now, it’s very likely to just come back. It doesn’t help, of course, that I am terrified of hospitals in general and surgery especially, but I’m kind of sort of coming to terms with the fact that at some point it will be necessary to confront that. But not yet.
This is extremely difficult and embarrassing to admit, but I hope that sharing it might help some people to understand why I find some things a bit of a struggle — things that “normal” folks would likely take in their stride on a daily basis. Things like, say, walking down to the shops in a group at lunchtime to get a sandwich; I just can’t keep up with people.
I entirely accept that the situation I’m in is my own fault, but that doesn’t make it any less embarrassing. If anything, it makes it more embarrassing.
I currently weigh over 28 stone. I do not like admitting this because it’s utterly shameful, but I’m putting it out there just so you understand where I’m coming from.
This is obviously extremely unhealthy and I am perfectly aware of that. It disgusts me to see myself in the mirror. None of my clothes fit properly. And any time someone in the street insults me for my weight (which has happened rather more often than I’d like) I have a hard time accepting that they’re being unreasonable and unpleasant; part of me feels like I “deserve” the abuse.
I am taking measures to attempt to reduce that — specifically, my wife Andie and I are following the WeightWatchers (or “WW” as they prefer to call it now) plan. This means that we track our food intake daily according to various items’ “points” values and, in doing so, both learn to think about what we’re putting in our mouth and control what we’re eating.
Trouble is, of late we (and particularly I) have been struggling with motivation to such a degree that it’s tough to make it through a whole week staying “on plan”. WW has a certain amount of flexibility built into it in that you can earn points “back” by eating vegetables and doing exercise, but that doesn’t exactly cancel out a day when you eat way too much of the things you shouldn’t be eating.
My trouble is, I have what I’d probably describe as an addiction, having been in a position to care for and be with people who have had other types of addiction. My addiction is not to alcohol or drugs, though; it’s to food.
Food is my coping mechanism. If I’m sad, I want to eat. If I’m anxious, I want to eat. And when I want to eat, I don’t want to “grab a handful of salad” or “enjoy this healthy treat packed with veggies” — I want chocolate, cake, bread, crisps, sugary drinks, that sort of thing. And I often find the urge to eat those things completely irresistible — even if we have none of them in the house. Living near a Tesco Express will do that to you.
Unfortunately, this leads to something of a vicious cycle. I am sad and anxious and angry because of my weight. Because I’m sad and anxious and angry, I eat, which makes my weight problem worse. I feel guilty about screwing my own body up, which makes me feel sad and anxious and angry, which… you get the idea. It is unhealthy coping mechanisms and an unhealthy relationship with food that has got me into this position, but I am having a real tough time breaking out of it.
The reason why I’m feeling particularly anxious about it right now is because in combination with the symptoms of “long COVID”, I feel a complete wreck on a daily basis. All my joints ache. It hurts to sit down for too long. It hurts to stand up for too long. If I lie on my side for too long in the night, the knee on the bottom ends up in excruciating pain for a few minutes. I’m perpetually tired, and no amount of sleep seems to fix that.
I know very well that fixing all this is going to be a long and slow process — but that it is possible. The one light at the far-off end of an extremely long tunnel is that I know I’ve had success with this before. I’ve never felt so good in my adult life as when I was successful at Slimming World — but unfortunately a variety of both personal and professional stresses caused me to well and truly fall off the wagon, putting me in a worse situation than I’ve ever been in my life.
I don’t want to hurt any more. I don’t want to be sad any more. And I don’t want to die before my time. I don’t really know if or how anyone reading this is able to help, but I just want to put it out there that I could do with some help — even if it’s simply a bit of consideration and understanding for the situation I’m in, and the knowledge that there are people out there not judging me negatively and harshly for ending up in such a horrible (albeit self-inflicted) situation, but who will be there to support and encourage me as I attempt to rescue myself from it.
I suspect your experience with what I’m about to describe will probably vary quite a bit according to your own age — but speaking as a forty-one year old man, I have to say, I find it mildly disconcerting that a number of years just sort of seem to have gone missing.
I don’t mean that I’ve forgotten them or anything, or that I’m suffering some sort of debilitating brain injury (not to my knowledge, anyway, ayooo, etc.) but rather that there’s a definite period of my life that feels like it just sort of passed by in a flurry without really very much to show for it.
Said period covers pretty much from the end of my time at university up until right now, which is a good twenty years or so. That’s a not-insignificant amount of time to feel like you’ve just sort of “lost”, which is why it occasionally weighs on my mind like this. Are there better ways I could have spent that last twenty years? Almost certainly, but at the same time that twenty years taught me a lot of helpful life lessons that have enabled me to just about survive to where I am now.
I think therein lies the core of why I feel like many of those years sort of “went missing” — the fact that I’m unconvinced of their value to my life as a whole.
Out of those twenty years, I spent several attempting to make a career out of teaching, before a nervous breakdown convinced me that probably wasn’t a great idea.
Then I did some retail work with a mind to building up both my creative and technical skills in the computing field, which was going great until the management of the job I was working — and loving, up until that point, I should say — decided to ruin the lives and careers of several of us for no apparent reason.
Then terrible things happened in my personal life that I’m keen to forget and mostly have at this point. That took a good year or so, probably a little more, but as I was coming out of that I started developing what looked like a promising career in online games journalism. That eventually came to fruition… until the publication I was working on (and getting paid well for) closed down relatively without warning, leaving me adrift once again.
After that, I spent some time writing about mobile and social games, which was utterly soul-destroying but paid astronomically well for the amount of effort it took, so I wasn’t going to complain too much about that. Then came USgamer, which was great until I was, once again, fucked over without any control of the situation. A brief stint working a “normal” job for energy company SSE, who — again — completely boned me to such a degree it had a severe impact on my mental health and, after a bit of a tense period… well, here we are.
So I guess that accounts for the last twenty years or so, just about. It’s just strange how a lot of those years have just sort of all merged into one another; I can’t remember a lot of specific details about many of them, at least partly because I probably don’t want to. That would make sense.
It’s just a little odd that I can still vividly remember, say, something like my mother happening to see me at playtime on the primary school field (aged about 7, probably) thinking that I was hitting a girl in my class with a stick when we were actually playing make-believe and having a thoroughly lovely time, and yet what should theoretically be more “important”, defining periods in my life are becoming almost “lost” to me.
I guess you hold on to the memories that are actually important to you for one reason or another. And what your subconscious thinks is “important” doesn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Maybe it’s not worth trying to understand it; just enjoy those memories that your mind has decided to hang on to!
Andie and I are suffering from what appears to be colloquially known as “long COVID”. That is to say, having had COVID earlier in the year, neither of our bodies have quite recovered from the experience, leaving us feeling way shittier than we really should be when we’re otherwise “healthy”. I use the term loosely because neither of us are exactly “healthy”, but we’re not actively afflicted with any illnesses, so far as I’m concerned.
According to the NHS, the symptoms of long COVID include being achey, tired all the time and generally feeling crap. I can confirm that all of those things are present and correct in my own body; the whole experience has left me feeling about thirty years older than I actually am, and I’m rather keen to leave this feeling behind now. I don’t feel I should be feeling intense pain when sitting down for too long, or standing up for too long, or just generally existing at my age, but, well, I’m sure this is at least partly my own fault.
We’re not doing nothing about it, mind; both of us are following WeightWatchers in an attempt to shed some excess baggage, because that will probably help the symptoms we’re suffering. And while it’s slow going — at least partly because with both OG COVID and long COVID we’ve found ourselves struggling with motivation, because the last thing you want to do when you feel like crap is diet — things are going relatively well. We just need to try and stick with it over the long term. Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly when you’re feeling pretty exhausted and all you want to do is eat in the vain attempt that you might regain some energy and vigour.
After the last couple of years — and after the whole news over the “cost of living crisis” we’re presently enduring here in the UK — it sort of feels like we need to resign ourselves to life being shitty in general, so what, really, is a bit of physical suffering to go along with feelings of existential crisis, a sense that you don’t really belong in the modern world and a quite genuine feeling that the world is actually in the process of ending right now?
There’s a cheery thought for your Thursday afternoon, now, isn’t it? So I think I’m off to go and live my life in denial with either some Final Fantasy XIV, Tower of Fantasy or both. At least in those worlds I can do something about the things that are Wrong, both with myself and with the world at large!
