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.

Happy New Year

So at the beginning of every year I like to make a blog post covering a retrospective of the last year, or a target for the next year. First, though, I should probably address the fact that I’ve not written or published anything here since July. This is for a few reasons.

First of all, I’ll mention that I do run a gaming blog, where I’ve published four (and a half) posts between July and now, including a recent 3.5k post about my top 10 games of the year. So technically I have been blogging, but not in a fashion that’s relevant to this particular space. Gaming is easier to write about because it’s a hobby and it’s what I know. And I’ve actually done a lot of it in the past year. Unlike writing.

Additionally, I did write a blog post for this space at the beginning of the December. A very detailed, very pragmatically written account of grief that I put a lot of work into and was very proud of. After much consideration and reflection, however, I decided that this was ultimately too personal to publish as a public piece and sent it to some friends instead.

2017 also saw me pick up my second job. With the two jobs combined I work 29 hours a week, mostly as split shifts and at one point, often without a day off throughout the week. This is fine, but it’s not a lifestyle that encourages the pursuing of personal projects in my downtime. When I have free time, I want to be gaming. I still love writing, but it’s ultimately a difficult and productive activity which detracts further from any relaxation. (Suck it up, right? Sure.)

But the biggest contributor to the emptiness on this page is motivation. It’s probably also the most boring thing to read about, so I apologise, but I’ll be attempting to go into detail here.

Throughout the years my motivation to write and produce content has been running at an increasingly lower ebb. This isn’t because I don’t enjoy it, but because – as well as the reason of busyness above – a sort of pit of cynicism and disillusionment grows within me with each passing day. Actively I stray from it, guiding myself to continue believing in things and enjoying events like Christmas and so on. But passively, as a default, I find myself having a hard time bothering to produce content because of a combination of prior failures and the sheer amount of people like me making content and going unrecognised by the world. I tell myself that talent rises to the forefront of creative industries, but then I find low quality content dominating the mainstream while anything thought-provoking or legitimately engaging is buried under a sea of neglected media. In this day and age it’s impossible to tell whether you’re somebody with talent who’s work has never been acknowledged, or another of the mediocre millions who waste their time giving themselves to thin air before finally falling silent.

So why bother when I could find guaranteed gratification in hobbies instead?

Nothing really happened in 2017. I got a new job. I enjoyed my hobbies. I got angry at politicians. I met nobody life-changing. I don’t particularly feel like doing a reflective blog post due to the alarming stagnation of my life. I don’t have a resolution for 2018. I don’t really want to think about it.

Happy New Year.

2016 in Retrospect – Change

I find that change, in retrospect, brings out the most emotion in me. Whether it’s the loss of friends or the beginning of some new era of my life, I’m always struck by the ever-changing nature of life, and how, through tragedy and comedy, the world is ushered into new chapters and can never be the same as it once was. And I used to find that horrifying, but now, I find it quite the opposite. But, to be less vague and emotional:

At the beginning of this year, I acknowledged how it would be a defining year for me, as it’d mark the end of my time at University and, somewhat alarmingly to me at the time, was going to force me out into the “real world” in pursuit of a job. Which, yeah, I should definitely have gotten before leaving uni, but that’s a self-criticism for another time. My New Year’s Resolution for 2016 was ‘Actualization’, meaning… well, I’ll let last year’s blog post speak for itself:

I will write my dissertation. I will finish my degree. I will find a job and I will live with it and in it. I will write fiction, and I will work on a story, and I will learn to live outside of my comfort zone even if that currently scares me in irrational volumes. I have spent twenty years of my life hanging back, for multitudes of reasons, and it’s time to stop. And just saying it won’t make it any easier, or make me any less likely to fail. But it’s time to start trying to try.

I’m delighted to say that I managed to achieve this, for the most part. I most certainly finished my dissertation. I graduated University with a 2:1 in Creative Writing. And I’ve got myself a job that I actually enjoy going to, and that I’m pretty good at… or, so I like to think. Of course, I’ve not written or published any fictional works, and I’m certainly not financially independent. But this is a blog post for looking back on 2016, and my (self-inflicted) descent into penniless hell is 2017’s demon to tackle.

2016 has personally been a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, I graduated, achieved elements of the previously mentioned actualization resolution, and actively developed as a person in regards to maturing into the adult world and learning to get shit done. (Not that I’m by any means perfect.) But I’ve also had low points; creative stagnancy and personal emotions have caused many gloomy days. I’ve said more goodbyes than I’d care to this year, either through circumstances of natural change or of my own volition. I’ve had to introduce elements of frustration and negativity into my life to keep my head above water in certain situations. And the future is as unknown and as frightening to me as it was at the end of 2015, a feeling I’d hoped to have conquered by the end of this year.

As far as the state of the world goes, I can’t say it’s been amazing. Democratic votes such as Brexit and Trump have been a sour note for me and my world views; the spread of hatred and violence appears not to have slowed one bit, and the prospects for next year are, to put it simply, glum. That being said, one should never count their politicians before they’ve declared war (sorry, that was awful), and you can never tell what the future will bring.

As for the so called Curse of 2016, I’ve been somewhat lucky in not knowing many of the celebrities who have passed away, though the recent loss of Carrie Fisher has been a personal note of sadness. What is getting me down is the irrationality of those who lean too heavily on the idea that 2016 is a year to escape from death; comments on Carrie Fisher’s health during her hospitalisation that claimed that we merely needed to make it to 2017 for her to be okay caused me to grit my teeth on many an occasion. It’s hard to put into words exactly what irritates me about this, but the general gist of it is that while it has most definitely been an unfortunate year regarding the frequency of famous deaths, the notion that it will simply cease in 2017 is highly irrational; these years, these groups of months only exist because we perceive them to, and to base your feelings and expectations around this is exactly the kind of ignorance that this world cannot afford to entertain right now. Anyone over the age of 40 can’t so much as cough now without social media making jibes about hiding them away and keeping them safe until the passing of the year, which I’d personally find somewhat offensive were these comments directed at me.

But hey, rant over. 2016 is (almost) a closed book, to be either shelved or stowed away in the attic and forgotten, depending on who you are. We’re mere hours away from a whole new year, and, human perspective or not, it’s always exciting and intriguing to try and predict just what kind of retrospective I’ll be writing a year from now.

Happy New Year. I’ll see you on January 1st.

(Sidenote: This evening I discovered the song Soon Soon by Tom Rosenthal which put me into the state of mind to write this blog post. It is a charming song with a beautiful music video, and I highly recommend it.)

New Year’s Resolve

It’s that time of the year where we all talk of how awful this year was and how everything will change in the next- wait, hang on a minute, we’ve done that one already. But viewpoints change over time, so we’ll truly start as we mean to continue:

Happy New Year! To some people, the turn of the year means nothing, but for the majority it’s a time of self-reflection and prospective planning. Last year I ragged on this a little bit, saying that people shouldn’t make themselves wait for the New Year before doing this, but in retrospect, anything that causes masses of people to find it within themselves to improve their lifestyle gets a thumbs up from me.

Last year, my New Year’s Resolution was to update my blog more frequently. In all honesty, I kind of forgot about this after a few months and it seemed that this place would forever be yet another writer’s abandoned project, doomed to the depths of WordPress save for the occasional, half-hearted polish. Resolutions are resolutions, however, because they’re a necessary improvement which nags at the back of our minds, and though I didn’t remember it to be a resolution as such, I came back on the 1st September announcing weekly blog posts across both my sites. So for once, I can actually say I achieved my goals! I don’t plan on halting the updates any time soon and I thank you all for reading my ramblings. To be honest, I’ve still only just started.

Personally, 2015 was a bit of a stagnant year for me. I didn’t really do anything new besides put effort into this blog, and I’m really not that much different of a person than I was the year before. It’s not exactly been a bad year (though it’s definitely had its lows), and it’s not been something I’ve disliked living in (apart from the aforementioned lows). If you wanted to call it a calm before the storm, then it’d be an overcast, chilly kind of calm.

2016… is going to be a decisive year for me. I finish my Creative Writing degree and finally have to face the world whether I like it or not. That may sound terribly cowardly, and it probably is, but it’s something that I’m going to have to deal with. I often remark that I still feel like a child at 20; well, if that’s the case, then it’s time to grow up and face responsibility. And when it comes to me, that is so, so much easier said than done. But facts are facts. If I’m the same person at the end of the year as I am at the start of it, then I’ll be in a very tough spot.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Whenever we wonder what we’ll be like exactly one year from now, we picture somebody who has grown in bounds, conquered fear and forged success; somebody who has become confident, found someone to live their life with, stepped outside their comfort zone and made the area outside it just as cozy. I envision this every year, and if you go back and read last year’s New Year’s blog posts, you may find them laced with that anticipation. And the troubling thought that crossed my mind is that, if you showed January, 2015 Kristian what January, 2016 Kristian was like, he’d lose all motivation and hope and consider the year a write-off.

On a less… morbid… note, I have here my new New Year’s Resolution, considering how splendidly the last one turned out! (Can’t believe I’m writing that without sarcasm.) After pondering a few ideas that ranged from fortifying self-confidence to accepting responsibility to gaining independence, I decided to fence them all into one word. My New Year’s Resolution is simply this:

Actualization.

I will write my dissertation. I will finish my degree. I will find a job and I will live with it and in it. I will write fiction, and I will work on a story, and I will learn to live outside of my comfort zone even if that currently scares me in irrational volumes. I have spent twenty years of my life hanging back, for multitudes of reasons, and it’s time to stop. And just saying it won’t make it any easier, or make me any less likely to fail. But it’s time to start trying to try.

And if I make this public, then maybe it’ll just be too humiliating to allow myself to fail.

A Reflection on Self Confidence

Anyone who knows me – heck, anyone perceptive who reads these blog posts – will probably notice that I’m plagued with self doubt, paranoia in its most self-destructive element. It is something which, when editing myself, I become highly impatient with, as the self doubt of the moment is typically edited out later without much further thought. The reason you see it in some of my blog posts is that some are written on the day they are intended for release.

Last fortnight’s blog post, Devil’s Advocate, for example, originally began with this line: When reading this blog post, I’d like you to regularly refer back to the title, so as to remember that I do not necessarily agree with the viewpoints I am discussing. In editing, this was removed, as it was redundant and written as an in-the-moment reflection of a fear that my point would not be portrayed effectively, and lead people to believe that I preached what I regarded with disapproval. In retrospect, of course, I realised this was unnecessary, and through the magic of editing it was removed.

The other day I made a series of tweets, the first being a sarcastic comment about not needing a Facebook quiz to tell me my personality was superb, the second to clarify that the first was sarcasm, and the third to comedically reply to myself, chastising myself about my self doubt. In the end, it was a hideous mess which I just deleted, not out of shame, but because of my newfound decision to edit myself down a bit more in social media so as to put out things people actually enjoy reading, or which state an emotional response if necessary.

Day to day speech cannot be edited though, and I am constantly lacing my discussion with disclaimers and clarifications which I’m entirely sure that people around me become exasperated with, albeit not to the point of having a problem with me. So I suppose, if I’m going to have a New Year’s Resolution (which I’ll probably blog about and defend the notion of), it’ll be to be more confident in my speech and less paranoid about the misgivings of those around me.

There are many other examples I could pull up of my lack of self confidence, but I think you get the gist of it. One of more interesting ones, though, was a dream I had last week in which my talented friend Jak was dragged away by bandits in a post-apocalyptic landscape of my hometown, and I was powerless to stop them. That’s realistic to a point (I’m not exactly a tough guy), but it was a dream of my own making, meaning I was powerless because I dreamed myself to be so. A humorous situation, but an eye opening one. The kicker was another day when, out of the blue, my mind whispered to me that the only person who ever criticised me in the way I so frequently feared was myself; for instance, only I have ever raised the possibility of me being pretentious.