Life – Xavblog

Q1 performance review

I’ll stop being so work-brained one day I promise

The sun is out, the sun remains out at 7pm, the County Championship is back on Friday, I keep chuckling out of nowhere thinking about a man named “Beyers Swanepoel” deciding to leave his team a man down in the middle of a South African domestic final to fly off for pre-season with Worcestershire instead, on my phone there’s shiny new Tom Misch and Courtney Barnett and Robyn and Snail Mail and Raye albums downloaded and ready to tuck into, Tom Scott is posting YouTube videos again. In other words, nature is healing. Life is good lads, life is good. I don’t know how often I’ve genuinely got to say that over the years.

I feel like this has been the first winter ever where I’ve been well enough mentally to even begin to get bogged down by the long dark nights, although as the Day One app’s ‘on this day’ notifications keep reminding me literally fucking anything is going to feel better than this time last year. One particular day in the hospital with my grandma in mid-January echoes as the epitome of the low, where I think I threw up on three different floors certain my body had finally reached its limit and was literally imploding. Then, once I’d eventually steadied myself enough to crawl outside for the bus home another wave of sickness hit me, terminating the bus mid-route and causing its very kind Irish driver to both console me in one of the worst panics of my panicky life and fend off the one passenger of six who was more concerned about getting to work on time than the mental and physical disintegration of this stranger.

There were glimmers of hope starting to peek through at times in that turmoil, but it wasn’t until April or May those ever felt remotely real and not some sort of manic delusion I was conjuring rather than facing reality. Things steadied once March was out but it wasn’t until the very tail of the year that they ever began to feel settled, even if the unsettling was only my brain launching back into the horrors whenever allowed to idle. Having 2024 as the single worst year of my life immediately followed by one of the single worst days of my life on January 3rd and the absolute worst day of my life on January 10th and six weeks of hospital visits every other day realising nothing in life would never be the same again? Wouldn’t recommend, funnily enough. But we made it through. I made it through. There is not one single thing that isn’t better now.

I started a draft of this month’s blog a couple of weeks back when I did the hitherto unthinkable and took An Entire Week Off Work Like A Normal Person, and that concept got me reflecting on how the last time I had one of those would have been when I was desperately unemployed and depressed and anxious in the winter of 2021, where job applications got me as far as Christmas temp weekend nightshifts at Sainsbury’s purely because they required less a CV/application and more a warm body with a pulse. Even those had me in the occasional violent panic attack when I wasn’t hibernating through daylight and limiting my social interactions to those with villagers on Animal Crossing, and even that marked a significant upgrade on the winter before. Any time I think about any of those feelings I just want to go to that scared little boy/man/adult and give him a big hug and promise him it will genuinely all be OK. I could still do with someone doing that for me most days now, but never so desperately. Hopefully never again so desperately.

Anyway, I mention that mostly to show whichever figment of my imagination is reading this that I haven’t deliberately left it until the last two hours of March to do this blog nonsense, I promise! I’ve been going outside! I’ve been living life! I had a haircut and got a new passport, albeit not in that order! I’m getting used to the idea of trying to do things that make life better rather than merely fighting desperately to stay afloat between existential panics! And I think the latest version of the resolution bingo grid backs me up here:

*Luminous green are the ones we’ve ticked off properly, the other green the ones we’re on pace for*

Other than the whole psychological thing of breaking off from 2025 and writing 2026 instead, I think the two biggest factors to keep me ticking along really quite nicely this year so far have been the existence of this grid – having goals and aspirations, what a novel concept! – and specifically that one in the top left. Starting off the New York Times crossword streak from January 1st as well has let me both get a lovely little jingle every day and see a tangible reminder of how many days (90 and counting) it’s been so far. Even on the two or three days I have felt like rotting away to mush, and that being of the 90 rather than per week as was frequently the case before, I’ve still managed to crawl to the shop for some milk or take the bins out or something even if just to keep the streak(s) alive and give myself a brief moment to be proud of. I think I’m finally getting the hang of being nice to myself rather than relentlessly critical.

The step count might be one I’m behind on but less so than before: from 6,563 as an average last year I’m now at 6,735 per day, helped massively by 70km in total over what turned out to be eight mental breakdown-free days off basking in sunlight and feeling alive. For the ‘impulsive train trip’ square I trotted up to the Young V&A in London for their joyous Aardman exhibition, only realising en route to Victoria the Young V&A is in Bethnal Green rather than anywhere near the Actual V&A in South Kensington, so I just put Oklou, Caribou and Big Thief albums on back-to-back and walked right across the city through a lovely spring breeze. The next day I ticked off the cinema square courtesy of Arco, a truly endearing French animation now with the vocal talents of folks like Natalie Portman and Andy Samberg and Flea for some reason, and that only because there’s literally nothing stopping you and a pal going to the cinema with two other strangers for a random film you’ve never heard of in the middle of a weekday afternoon for £4 each if you both have the day off. It’s great. You can do things on a whim! You can just have fun!

I mentioned in January the Lego bit was essentially shorthand for rewarding myself for doing one Big Scary Thing in particular, and without going into it too much here I’m pleased to report I did the Big Scary Thing and the sun came up the next morning and of course there was nothing to be terrified about for years and years even though it didn’t pan out quite how I might have hoped, and now there’s an FW14B and moustachioed Brummie minifigure on my desk forevermore to help me keep that in mind. Putting that one at the centre and randomising everything else was incredibly deliberate as well, and if nothing else the weight that’s lifted off my shoulders and the sheer relief of having done Big Scary Thing feel as good as anything. For a moment that felt like all it would be, with sod’s law ensuring the Lego store had Nige and his car next to an OUT OF STOCK tag when I walked in for my victory lap, but at the very least it gave me a chuckle to distract myself from the world feeling like it might collapse in (which, of course, it didn’t and was never going to).

This also means there’s also now a couple of diagonals looking pretty good for a bingo: a couple of pals who’ve been trying to bully me into going away with them for 18 solid months are finally kidnapping me for a few days in the Balkans in May, so that and some SQL and 275 more days heading out of the front door would do it, or else nine more blog posts and an 11 mile walk over the South Downs and some sort of successful job application that’s looking ever more tempting to make by the hour. I joked (?) at the start I’d end up ticking these things off if only to outdo my other bingoing pals but the more the year rolls on and the more my life feels rich and rewarding the more it’s become a fun way to visualise and keep track of what feels like substantial personal growth. So that’s nice isn’t it.

Anyway I’m really never quite sure how to write conclusions so instead have an incoherent playlist of some music I’ve been really enjoying lately:

Contractual obligation blog post #1

So I guess I do new year’s resolutions and write self-indulgent words on the internet now?

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.

Look I’d try and make this an actual table or do proper alt text but I’m meant to be in the pub in 20 minutes

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…

ANUSTART

Xavier starts again on WordPress, part 71,812,125

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.