2019 – The Year, the Decade, and the Future

Every year – bar last – I do a little retrospective write-up on how the year’s gone, and my plans for the future. The reason I didn’t do one for 2018 was because it was, quite frankly, awful. Didn’t feel like recapping that one. But I mention it here because it informed a lot of my 2019; I spent most of this year with the mindset that I was laying low, emotionally speaking, not trying to make too many leaps and bounds as far as life goes. I just wanted to… breathe. To recuperate. But as a result. this year has been hugely uneventful. The largest change was probably when I left one of my two retail jobs, in favour of taking overtime to make up hours at Job Number Two. How eventful.

The thing is, when living a quiet and dull life like I’ve been doing, happiness lies in simpler things. Hanging out with friends, in reality or online. Getting immersed in a really good RPG. Falling in love with an animated series from 2004. To a certain subset of people this might sound boring or dreadful. but I’ve never been one for loud environments or friend groups with shifting relationships and regular arguments. Outside of actual meetups with friends, I’m happiest behind my PC, talking over Discord, maybe playing a few rounds of a multiplayer game together. And I did a decent amount of that in 2019.

But if you’re reading all of that and thinking, wouldn’t you be in a rut after a year of this? My answer to you is, oh, absolutely, little bit bored to death to be honest. So next year I want to break free of the mould a bit. Give myself license to continue developing as a person, if that makes sense. For a year I decided that attempts to do so were too painful, but if the last month has taught me anything it’s that life can bite you at any time, in any number of ways, and it won’t let up just because you’ve had enough. It doesn’t care that you’re trying to hibernate from life. Life keeps ticking by all the same, and you’ll always be a part of it. You’ve just kinda gotta… deal with it as it comes.

(that being said I still have huge motivation issues so don’t expect me to up and change as a human being in the next five minutes)

But it hasn’t just been a year, has it? It’s been a decade. Blimey. And don’t argue that the decade starts with 2021, because Gregor the Calendar Man disagrees with you and that’s the one you plan all your birthdays with. Besides, it’s just nicer, isn’t it? 2020. Nice even start. The only issue I can see with next year is all the hurr hurr 2020 vision jokes. Make them stop…

So, 2010. At the start of this decade I was checks 14 years old! You do a lot of growing and changing between the ages of 14 and 24, and from where I’m standing it seems that I’ve changed from a loud and brash teenager with far too much energy and an attention seeking complex, to a… well, that’s the thing. The energetic and abrasive me still comes out when I’m amongst friends, I think, but for the most part I’m fairly quiet and reserved nowadays. I have colleagues I haven’t spoken to in three years, for fuck’s sake.

Anyways, start-of-the-decade-Kristian was often abrasive but also prone to bouts of melancholy, which I’d often beat myself up about, having convinced myself I was being overly dramatic. I was preparing for GCSEs, and had vague plans of taking the educational route through A-Levels and then University and then somehow becoming an author. Two out of three’s not bad, eh? I got middling GCSE grades (mostly Cs and two Bs) and took three subjects as A-Levels – English Lit, ICT and History. For History I had to bus to another school which had enough students giving a crap about the subject to actually warrant teaching it, and there I met a new group of friends who I spent a great two years with. I also had a tough second half of 2012, starting with the death of Nathan Wills, an internet personality who I’d sometimes spoken to, which I took quite hard. Events cascaded from there, with each of my closest friends going through various hardships, until the stress of me worrying about them led to me breaking down and crying in front of my parents, which was personally an extreme threshold of emotional stress to have crossed.

Times continued to move, though, and as friends we supported each other and moved forwards. I finished my A-Levels with decent grades, and scraped together enough UCAS points to be accepted into the Creative Writing course I’d applied for at the university of my choice. I spent three years there and made some more amazing friends. Some of the best days of my life will be counted amongst the various writer’s retreats we embarked on in Boscastle over the years. I have never felt so driven as an individual, or felt like I had as much of a purpose as when I was studying there. I learned a lot about writing, about the world and myself. But it was also a course that left me with a lot of free time, and this was the era of my life when I really dived deep into online games like World of Warcraft, and made some of my best online memories, too. But despite Blizzard’s best attempts to distract me, I still graduated from uni with upper second class honors (basically a B, which is good) in Creative Writing. Woohoo! Where do we go from here?

Well…

Stagnation?

Viewing my life from a purely critical or objective standpoint at this time, it becomes slightly embarrassing. I promptly did nothing with my writing degree and picked up not just one, but two retail jobs. I’ve met some great people and don’t necessarily regret my time working there, but they absolutely should not have become my final destinations as they have been so far, and the fact that I’m living such a safe and low-key life while working retail is probably the reason behind my underlying discontent. I also suspect some from mental health is at play to some degree, but I won’t self-diagnose on something that important.

I could sit here and speculate on reasons behind my lack of motivation or success in finding writing-relevant jobs in my area, but I’d only make myself miserable and possibly others frustrated. All I’ll say for now is that in the next decade, I hope to find myself back on a meaningful path in life. And in my defence, as I stated earlier, I’ve found happiness in the more day-to-day aspects of my life, like gaming with friends and creating content as a hobby. And as I’ve been saying for years, the very point of life is to be happy within it. And I am. To an extent.

Next decade will be about pushing that extent to a place that I’m less… ashamed of.

Happy New Year, everybody.

December – A Month of Ups and Downs

Well, I told myself I was going to be truthful in these monthly blog posts, and December kinda sucked. It’s not all bad news though, and I don’t have much interest in retreading every single thing that’s gone wrong this month. We’ll just touch on the highlights – the disastrous general election won with ignorance and misinformation, and complications with my new little nephew causing a lot of worry. He’ll be fine, but not without help from the NHS. Good thing we’re trusting the Tories with that again.

But I have a nephew now, which is fantastic news! Certainly not all doom and gloom this month. Christmas was a thing, which was enjoyable despite everything. We had my niece over, and it was fun to relive the magic of Christmas through a child’s eyes once again. I also went to see Star Wars Episode IX with my friend Reece, and had a blast. It’s unsurprisingly a divisive movie, and it does have a lot of flaws, but I enjoyed it for what it was. I was also reminded of the importance of sharing creative ideas, after a particularly motivating conversation about our respective story ideas shortly afterwards. I think my biggest flaw as a creative is that I let ideas play out in my head until I get bored of them, without any outside perspectives weighing on or encouraging me to actually make the stuff that’s in my head a reality.

Oh, also, Trump got impeached, which was delightful. For all the good that did.

Touching on the election quickly, as I’ve not said much about it since the results came in. It’s caused me to do a lot of thinking about the nature of people, as well as the dangers of existing in an echo chamber. I have attempted to follow and listen to right-wing people in the past, but I’ve always grown too frustrated by their lack of empathy or ignorance regarding the needs of the common individual. And yet, going into this election, I was actually cautiously optimistic that Labour would actually win, which was clearly not the prevailing sentiment. It was a painful but necessary reminder that no matter how things may look on the surface, there is truly only one way to take the temperature of the general public: the vote itself. And incredibly frustratingly, the majority of people seem to believe biased newspapers and listen to millionaires telling them that it’s a tough old life, but that the reward is muddling through it with what you’ve got. And never mind the climate change, best not to worry about that sort of thing.

Anyway. Political segment over. This month I’ve also finally had the chance to play a Halo game (and I love it), I enjoyed watching the first seasons of The Umbrella Academy and The Witcher, I bought nine (nine!) Switch games with a Christmas gift card, bought myself Planet Zoo and relished in finally returning to a Zoo Tycoon style game, and attempted vlogging again. It did not go well. Oh, and I discovered that I quite like turkish delight.

But hang on, there, Kristian. Never mind the end of the month, it’s the end of the year! Where’s your summary of 2019? It’s the end of the decade, too! Where’s your summary of that? Well, let’s save that for a second blog post. I’ll combine them, probably. And I’ll write it tomorrow, maybe. Last month I said that having all these deadlines was reminiscent of uni, so in true university fashion I’ll be handing in my work on the day of the deadline. What better way to round off the decade?