Category: Life

In what can only be described as a fit of madness a few weeks back, I finally reneged on my long-running really funny [citation needed] new year’s resolution to never make any new year’s resolutions thus automatically failing all my new year’s resolutions, and instead followed the same Discord crowd that got me posting here last time into making a full-on 5×5 grid of the damn things as a bingo card to try and complete over the course of 2026. Maybe I’m just easily peer-pressured or maybe I’m finally insufficiently depressed (well? I think that’s a valid word, I just can’t quite compute the idea of describing myself that way yet) enough to actually think about hopes and dreams and goals and self-improvement and all that guff. Being realistic, I strongly suspect my main motivation to tick things off will be an urge to do better than everybody else rather than fearing failure or actually wanting the challenge, but hey: motivation is motivation.

And that leads us here, as one of the squares to tick off is to blog every month, caught up as I was at the time in a wave of thinking I might have things to say after a non-zero number of you seemed to like/resonate with that December ramble. The truth is I have no plans for what to do here. I’ve started a few drafts over the last few weeks that have fizzled out into nothing, much like this sentence. Eventually I promise I’ll get around to that thing about music I loved in 2025 if only to formally add myself to the chorus talking about how great Ninajirachi is, and I claim full credit for her putting Brighton on the tour schedule, but my two most played songs of the year so far are by Gracie Abrams and Geese, which I feel speaks volumes about how scattergun and disoriented my listening has been of late.

Trying to have any ideas while in the midst of [redacted current nonsense] and endlessly reflecting on last January, comfortably the weirdest and worst and longest year of my time, feels even more pointless than usual. I beg and I plead for time off and peace away from it all, but any time a quiet day does come around I’ll invariably end up spending it in bed just feeling drained and with my brain taking the silence as a cue to remind me of all the woes, real and fake and old and new alike. This particular version of post numero uno started life yesterday, a Wednesday that began with two hours sleep interrupted by anxious vomiting (both fun new recurring features of mine the last couple of years) before productivity peaked in the hour after I was meant to finish working, had me in a grand depressive spiral for a couple of hours before I finally took my meds, ate some food, watched the Community bottle episode and came back to my senses. But it’s a regular pattern.

At my worst, I feel resigned to my default being a feeling of worthlessness and endless, endless fear. Whatever happens, and whatever steps I might take to mitigate it and improve my life and those of the ones I love, I always just end up back in the hole wondering what the fucking point of it all is. It happens less than it used to for sure, and I’m generally far better at digging myself out of said hole when I find myself there, and I know I’m more likely to avoid these slumps if I keep myself busy and occupied and around people rather than idling insignificantly. But, alas, that’s where I was last night, and pretty solidly for a week earlier this month. My therapist at least pointed out was my first proper extended dip since September or October. That’s something, I guess.

Anyway, back to those resolutions.

I’m making fairly good progress on a few. My New York Times crossword streak now sits at 29 days, my best since November 2024. I’ve successfully made it outside every single day so far too, accepting it’s probably easier to just get out of my pyjamas and wander down the road than quibble with myself over how much leeway I can really give myself with that over the course of the year just for the sake of a few more minutes wallowing in bed hiding from the world. Cinema trip number one was Marty Supreme and by the time I’ve done next month’s Charli XCX doubleheader of The Moment and “Wuthering Heights” I’m pretty sure I’ll have met that goal in just two months. (I think the full 2020-5 list is Oppenheimer, Interstella 5555 and Hot Fuzz in case you were wondering.) Elsewhere, barely a week goes by where I don’t at least think about moving or tidying or running or any number of really basic things that might just improve my life and wellbeing or anything, and surely that counts for half! And then the Lego thing is really a deal I made with myself last summer where once I’d handled a particular Big Scary Thing at the very least I’d come away a delightful Nigel Mansell minifigure at the end of it, and Amazon keeps showing it to me at 35% off at the moment, but also why make things bigger and scarier when life is probably going to do enough of that for/to me regardless.

That feels like quite enough for part 1. I’ve avoided the temptation to cheat the system by publishing a single word at 11:59pm on the last day of January. Come to think of it, not trying to pull that sort of rubbish and only end up cheating myself seems like a pretty reasonable idea for a 26th…

I’ve never really been sure what to do here. I’m only back now because assorted friends starting up a Discord blogroll reminded me this place even existed, albeit on a domain that had long expired (not even for the first time) and the heavens opening up over South Africa tonight has meant my work shift was somewhat quieter than my boss intended.

There was a considerable time I fancied the idea of being a writer, but that never quite meshed with my sheer hatred for actually writing rather than basking in the glow of having written. I vividly remember one SATs mock almost two decades back where I couldn’t decide how to start and thus simply didn’t put a single word on the page for the entire hour. Sure, that’s a particularly extreme example, but it set the tone for what was to come: most of the more recent attempts to churn out words either academically, recreationally or professionally were only somewhat more productive, and usually cobbled together around 3am through fits of severe deadline pressure, panic attacks, vomiting, profuse sweating and self-loathing. In the end I got everything done that mattered though (mods do NOT check this).

Two domains ago, the last thing I published here was nearly seven years back, a County Championship match report to use as part of a job application that ultimately went nowhere. Six months later I did get myself into that same place as an intern, fending off over a hundred others to earn single-digit pounds on the days I’d commute to the London office on a peaktime train. Locking the place up on a certain Friday in March 2020 I had a feeling I might not be back particularly soon – oh what an innocent little boy that was – but this summer I did go back to that same building (now overlooking the street, no rear-facing basement office these days) to train some folks who’d travelled from New Zealand in the tedious minutiae of the work database, with one of the official agenda items being for them “to be as knowledgeable as Xavier”. Different company, albeit with several colleagues also having migrated similarly, and still the same looming fears I’m never doing enough to justify my salary, that without work there is no point to my existence, and that it’s all going to come falling apart at a moment’s notice somehow, but anyway.

I’m working on trying to have some sort of confidence and/or hope, I swear! I have been (incredibly slowly) for approximately 29 years, two weeks and four days. But it’s tough when, hypothetically, you survive one of the most stressful and frankly insane weeks of your life, begin to feel the slightest glimmer of something good on the horizon, and eight hours later find yourself having to smash your grandma’s front door down. That was precisely 11 months ago now, perhaps even to the minute.

Even before borrowing the neighbour’s hammer and calling 999 we were operating from a very low baseline, with 2024 being a year defined by grief and love and despair and endless, endless fear that all ricocheted off each other and just tore me apart, and it didn’t particularly feel like there was much of me to tear apart to begin with. But after what one pal called a “season finale” moment in A&E that night in January, a [REDACTED] number of long walks strongly considering throwing myself into the sea to escape it all, a particular low point in Brixton over the summer where I spent an hour on the floor crying out unknown fluids having already become the sweatiest person ever present at an LCD Soundsystem gig, thankfully the prophecy did eventually start to demonstrate itself. I’ve graduated from counting the hours between spirals where I lost all hope to bragging to my therapist that I didn’t have one Bad day in November – several very good ones actually! Amid the first chaos it felt like a logjam that had been holding strong since about February 2017 was finally coming unstuck. Well, either that or I’d finally lost any last shred of sanity and was simply on autopilot through circumstances too surreal and stressful to comprehend, which would still have been enough of an upgrade. But then the good bits started. Moments of calm and joy were no longer immediately sandwiched between intense bouts of despair and loneliness. I finally started losing track of how many days had, in fact, been worth living.

And that, in essence, leads us here. I think I do feel like an adult now. I think I’m happy with where I am and who I am in most aspects of life at long last, and the majority of what plagues me the majority of the (increasingly rare) time I do feel plagued is out of my control anyway. Last year I made perhaps too much of a habit of journaling thousands of self-deprecating words a night, which might not have been the best method of dusting off the keyboard cobwebs, but at least it happened. This is quite possibly the first thing I’ve ever written with the vague intention of other people reading it that hasn’t been half a dozen disparate ideas chaotically linked together and refined to the point of obsession over several hours/days but instead written from start to finish in one go and published without allowing myself to start overthinking it.

I quite like the idea of trying to write words and get excited about things and think out loud again. This isn’t the first attempt at putting something together here – most have been tucked away as they’re perhaps slightly more suited to discussions in therapy than going on the World Wide Web for eternity, but there’s been enough going on in life and inside my head I’m sure a good portion of it will be better out than in. Certainly I’d love to start enthusiastically yelling about music again, and if you’ve read this far it would be wonderful if you could incessantly pester me to finish off a piece on my favourite things I’ve listened to this year that didn’t make it into the Spotify Wrapped festivities. That feels as sensible a place to start as any.

Maybe this is the start of something fun. Maybe I’ll be 36 by the time the next post goes out. But I hope it’s the first one. I’m getting used to hoping again now. It’s quite nice really.