Moving Onwards.

At the tail end of last year I returned home after an amazing, 15 month trip around North America with someone whom I loved and respected very much. We were still in love when we parted ways and I had hoped that I would soon enough (after earning some money) get to be back out there with her again in order to continue the adventure. I had some zany plans and ideas.

Well, that's not going to work out anymore!

I've now gone from a fast paced life, and anticipated future, full of tangible, exciting opportunities to a very closed one in which the bellows lighting the beacons of hope consist of me, blowing really hard on embers... and it's raining. Of course it's raining, I live in fucking England.

So. With little money, little social network and little to be excited about I'm trying to make things better.

I learned a lot from the girl I traveled with and I'm trying hard to not forget those lessons. I've done well in the reinforcement of some of them but I'm not in the right environment to excel. To be honest this entire ordeal feels like staunching an arterial bleed with a box of kleenex. It's hard to stay hopeful in purgatory and brains are plastic in both ways- positive to negative. I'm scared of regressing.

For a long while I've identified with Crooks in "Of Mice and Men" when he says the following:

"A guy sets alone out here at night, maybe 

readin' books or thinkin' or stuff like that. Sometimes he gets 

thinkin', an' he got nothing to tell him what's so an' what ain't 

so. Maybe if he sees somethin', he don't know whether it's right or 

not. He can't turn to some other guy and ast him if he sees it too. He 

can't tell. He got nothing to measure by. I seen things out here. I 

wasn't drunk. I don't know if I was asleep. If some guy was with me, 

he could tell me I was asleep, an' then it would be all right. But I 

jus' don't know."

However. I don't want to sympathise with that attitude anymore. I would like to be self assured and, within that change, more able to affect the trajectory of my life, more able to be happy, and most importantly be more able to be a part of the world and the people within it. I would like to be an agent of change and be someone that people can lean on and learn from.

I've made a lot of steps. None of them feel quite good enough and life is rather lonely so I spend a lot of time trying (sometimes succeeding) in keeping myself distracted from being sad. I've got great ambitions and as it stands not the means nor cognitive facility to help me towards them. I hope that with baby steps I will make something for myself.

In this blog I will just be posting dumb, unremarkable things that I can be proud of; that I would ordinarily dismiss as unimportant. I'm not the person I want to be in the place I want to be but at the moment, at the least, I can remind myself that I'm not the person that I really don't want to be.

Ask yourself what dumb things you can be proud of.