Strange Week.

     I woke up and my first thought was 'Fuck. I’m still alive. Fuck.'

     This is my strange week. Not as in ‘ooh, I’m so strange and weird, aren’t I?' week. No. This is the week when I start to look back over the last twelve months. And reflect that had things turned out as I’d planned, then this Friday would have been the fourth anniversary of my death.

     I’m normally very matter of fact about that, but just writing those words has made me shiver. The anniversary seems to be hitting me harder this year. Maybe because in previous years, it was simply a marker, a milestone that I’d moved further away from that awful and empty place where it seemed the best thing was to disappear, to cease to be. There wasn’t much joy in it, just a further stretching of the elastic of life, moving on, plodding.

     This year seems different. It’s been a bloody odd year since last February, and a lot has changed. I’ve changed. This blog has changed. Or rather, this blog has changed me. Except that it hasn’t. I think I’ve just become more myself. When I started writing this little corner of ramblings last April, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to get out of it. I’m still not sure what I hope to achieve with it. But I do know that having this blog has made a huge difference to me and how I feel about the future.

     This time four years ago, almost to the minute, I was sitting in a meeting with Big Important Home Office civil servants, and I was planning my death. Four years later, I can’t say I’m leaping towards the future, waving at the birds and flowers (fucking hell, anti-depressants help, but they can only do so much with someone as sour as me), but I’m not dead. And I’m glad of that.