Thursday Morning

I get an immense amount of satisfaction deleting four plus years of my life where I realise I wasn’t being honest with myself.

I blogged for a very long time out of a sense of misguided obligation. I know this now looking back on what I’ve done and how it panned out: as if you had to sometimes just say something to allow the World to know you existed. Talking into a larger space than your head is important, but not nearly as significant as what you then decide to say. Looking back on the posts that vanished I know this place was a foundation for what I am now becoming; a fully-fledged writer, who is not afraid to be what they are any more. I was scared for a VERY long time, and although I do still have the moments where I want to run away and hide in a corner, I understand that never helps anyone in the end.

The mundane is what you build your foundations upon.

In the last three months I’ve taken some significant steps out of my comfort zone, but the journey is still very fresh and new, and that makes me nervous. However, the only way you make progress is with continuous forward motion. There is a great deal in my private life I still hold very close to my chest, but what I miss in the other places I write in (and I realise this now after six years of dedicating myself pretty much exclusively to one subject matter) is the use of this voice. I speak in different ways, I now grasp. This one is quite separate to the other two I’m using at present (gaming writer, fiction writer) and it actually demands more attention on certain days than others. My problem before was quite simple: I’d assume every part of the process needed to be vocalised, and it doesn’t. You need to pick the right moment and the correct accompaniment.

This is my emotional voice. This is what I am when nobody else is watching.

Therefore it might seem odd to want to let it have a space of its own, but I realise I’ve actually wanted to do that since I started Livejournalling a VERY long time ago. That account I bought back in the day and I suspect, some time in the next month or so, I’ll go back to the site and delete that forever too. I don’t remember a lot of the last decade in glowing terms, and before that even less so, but what I’m not afraid to do now is go back to the places where I was a bad person and admit my failings. Of course, it won’t change a single thing. That’s not the point. I’m not after salvation or validation or anything else. I’m just doing my best to understand what happened to now bring me to this point, and how I can make things better as a result of everything that has passed before. I don’t need redemption, I’m not looking to build bridges or re-establish friendships. If I walk away, it is for a very good reason, and I won’t look back.

If something is worth keeping, I’ll fight tooth and nail to make sure I do.

Having said that, there was one person I’d missed when I cut my chords a while back who, bless his heart, came back and found me. Of everyone I’d spoken to before he was the most decent and honest, and I think deep down the one I related to the most in everything that I am. Nobody had ever come back for me ever and it was his humanity that spurred me on to a great many things I now realise I’d never have had the strength and ability to do otherwise. I look at those who I no longer speak to and think of them all from time to time, and of those that are gone who I have tried to reconnect with, but without success. These were the people I felt I actually had the most in common with. I’m just not sure about anyone else any more and to be honest, I sense that in cases like this if those friendships really did matter people would offer the olive branch. It is hard to tell, sometimes, if you’re being right in your assumptions or if you’re simply being stupid.

Thank you Mike for everything. I sat down this morning and realised I wanted to say that, because of that time in the Turbine Hall, and the morning in Hoxton, and all the random intersections in-between that hold a significant thread of my life very firmly in place. To everyone else? If I matter to you, I’m still here, I never left, but I feel I’ve changed so much in the last four years we might not have anything in common any longer anyway. If it matters to you, I’m still here.

I’m not sure what else to say.