A Bad Seven Months

A recurring question in interviews seems to be to ask someone what the most difficult period of their life is. I don't understand that. I don't know why, if there are no guarantees that someone has moved past that period, anyone would ask that question.

So here's the thing - I don't want to be asked that. If anyone wants to know what, at the time of writing this blog post, the worst period of my life was, they can just look here, for a glimpse at that time. There's some stuff I'd rather not talk about at all, online, which you'll just have to accept. Anyway...

It started in February 2010. In the space of a week, I lost my job, an online friend went missing, and - less catastrophically, more upsetting with the others happening at the same time - my iPod broke. (Actually, it was dropped on the floor by someone else and broke, but that's not the point.)

I felt broken inside, lost and confused and with no idea how any of this was going to pan out. I didn't know how I'd fund any sort of writing career, if I ever hoped to have one, and I didn't know whether or not my friend was going to turn up safely.

While Darren Shan helped me cope with the job-loss-writer-problems, bad news was around the corner. My friend, a young writer by the name of Jonny Havron, was found. He had fallen into a river on a night out with some friends.

A couple of months later, my aunt was admitted into hospital, having just given birth to her second child. She went into a coma, and stayed that way - undiagnosed - for several weeks. During that time, while studying for exams, we had to accept that this was not going to end well - if she woke up, she wouldn't be the same. If they couldn't wake her up, she would remain in a coma. And if they couldn't fix what was wrong with her, she would die.

I can't say I coped very well with that idea, the finality of which hit the week after my exams. It took a lot for my best friend to calm me down over the phone.

A couple of weeks later, after a "successful" diagnosis of vasculitis in her brain, she entered the recovery stages. When she eventually woke up, she had no memory of giving birth, of naming her daughter, of feeling ill before her hospital visit.

There's more, things the family as a whole are still dealing with, but four years later she's still in permanent care. She's not the same woman she used to be, emotionally, mentally, in terms of personality, but she recognises her children, she recognises her husband, and she has some good days when she makes her family laugh.

Anyway, back to 2010.

After six months of hell, between the job (which I got back - Rise of the Phoenix sort of stuff with the company), my friend, my exams, and my aunt, I was on edge. That's putting it lightly.

The icing on the cake came in September, when my best friend - the same person who calmed me down after our fears over my aunt - left college. (There were circumstances, but that's not my story to tell.) That tore me up inside in ways I can't really describe (not without explaining the circumstances, anyway.)

It felt like I'd lost him as a friend - which I didn't, not really - and after everything else I'd gone through, it just felt like too much. It was a couple of months before I really integrated myself back into social groups properly, and longer still before I could talk about a lot of this stuff with people without getting upset all over again.

I'm putting it all down now for one very clear reason: this isn't something I want to talk about all the time. This is a time in my life I want to put behind me. I will always remember it, but I don't want it to rule me, and I don't want it to be something other people fixate on about me.

Let it be clear: I have moved beyond these seven months of my life. I finished my degree. I published my first book. I'm about to start a Masters - which I saved up for myself. I'm happy with my life, and the fact that it took me a long time to say that doesn't make it any less true. Sure, this isn't the full story, but the end result is the same. In the four years since all of this, I've learned to cope, I've learned to grow, and I've done a lot to make myself proud.

A Brief Note on Saying Goodbye

Tonight I said goodbye to three of my best friends. Over the next couple of weeks, they're leaving the country, each for least one year. I've had friends leave before, but not three at once.

I could say it's easier having given them going-away presents and getting to see them one last time before graduation. I could say it, but I don't know if I believe it. It's certainly more real, now, since we've given them our gifts, but I don't think anything could make it easier.

Over the past four years, a bunch of us from various parts of the country have grown close. We've faced essays, exams, Friday morning lectures, Teaching Placement, weird masses, explicit films and bad hangovers together. We've celebrated birthdays and Christmases and completing exams. Now, though we face departure and new currencies and strange cultures and different timezones, we can still celebrate new beginnings. New jobs at home and abroad, new challenges academic, social and professional, new lives to be explored and survived and celebrated.

Life won't be the same with them gone, but even goodbye and good luck doesn't mean The End. We might not see each other often, any of us, but I don't believe this can ever keep us apart.

We're friends despite national borders and county lines, no matter how long it takes to get us all in the same room again.

In 2012...

Look after yourself. You deserve more than heart ache and struggles. You deserve to smile more than "once in a while". You're better than that.

Love yourself. (But not too much: that's a sin, so they say.) Remember, though, that other people love you, too. Even if they don't say it.

Look after others. It's hard, I know. They might not want to let you. You might not realise who needs you. You might feel overwhelmed by them. None of that matters.

Be happy. Not just for yourself ("Your health is your wealth") but for other people. Smile. It's infectious.

Talk to people. Talk to friends about everything happening in your life, the good and the bad. Talk about nothing in particular. Talk to strangers. But:

Listen. Everyone has something to say. Keep talking and they won't get a chance.

And always remember what's important to you. When you say "I love you", mean it. When you care about someone or something, show it. When you believe in something, do something about it.

Never forget that you matter.

Life and the World to Come

Way back in July, I made a few decisions that would, inevitably, change the way I lived my life. Almost five months have passed since I made the choice to do a massive writing challenge to finish Bliss's Camp NaNo 50K. That, in itself, wasn't massively life-changing, except that it made me realise how much I could do if I stopped messing about, and if I put aside whatever was happening in my life that might distract me from my work.

In that same week, I made the decision to set up a website - which I worked on from then until the middle of September, when I launched the site. That involved a lot of planning, of course, and a lot of mulling over what would eventually end up on my site on Day 1. Over the next month and a half, I edited Stepping Forward, fixing up a novella I was already pretty happy with to give away for free.

That's been the first big change in my life: I now have a book out in the public domain.

The website has, since, been host to a number of articles, poems and short stories. While these haven't exactly changed my life, they have gotten me thinking about the different ways I live my life, and the way in which I write. I also decided to use the website to play host to a couple of projects in the New Year, one of which is an X-Men story I've been planning for some time. (I've checked, and given the fact that Marvel pick up writers and stories from self-published works - and that's the only way they will now consider someone new - I am perfectly within my rights to release this story as I see fit.) That one doesn't have any immediate effects on my life, though it will at least encourage me to stick to creative deadlines.

The other project is an adaptations ezine, which will help me (a) hone my critical writing and (b) review books, films and the adaptation process. Again, no immediate effect, but it will involve, once again, sticking to deadlines.

Aside from my website, I also decided to apply for a writing position at The Phantom Zone. While the rush of college work has stopped me writing for the site in some time, I still have this job. More than that, I still have my first ever writing job. It was something for me to be proud of.

In the two months that followed, I wrote and edited a play, The Rest is Silence. This is where things took another big turn: as a result of this play, I'm going to have something performed on-stage. More than that, it will, hopefully, raise some money for a worthwhile cause.

At the same time, I've set up an ezine in college, which has gotten someone else writing. He's a good friend of mine, and he's decided to put his quirkiness to good use. The immediate benefit for me? I can have a good laugh reading his blog when I'm stressed; he has all of these really funny observations and stories that aren't as noticeable in a group of ten (yes, there are ten of us... we're a bit of a mob.) It's also fun to be able to talk about writing with someone who's only just started to think of it as having potential to be more than a hobby.

The driving force behind a lot of this work was an old friend of mine. Whether I was trying to make him proud or merely using that as an excuse to make myself do something with my life, I mustered up the courage to finally put my name out there. As I said in my dedication in Stepping Forward, he taught me there's more to life than just existing. No matter what happens between us, I will always remember that I was too scared to do any of this on my own. Having a reason to get going has made the past few months some of the best of my life.

That's the immediate effect of knowing him; after so many years writing, and so many years living the same mundane life, I ceased to just exist. As a result of that friendship, I started to live.

Why You Found Me

Since hearing the Chameleon Circuit song Everything is Ending in the middle of July, I've had this thought in my head, based on the line: "And this must be why you found me." We find each other. But, you know, it doesn't seem like it happens on purpose. The most unlikely friendships in the world seem to be of some benefit to the people involved, but there's no real way of planning their existence.

I've been through a lot of crap in my life. That's undeniable, with some of the people I went to school with. (It's not just that, but it's one of the things that stands out that I feel comfortable enough to share with the Internet - friends know the rest.) But it seemed to me that because of all the crap, I just couldn't trust people straight away. It takes a lot for people to earn my trust, even if they don't realise they're doing it. It's not malicious and it's not because I'm not friends with people, I just don't trust very easily.

But then... well, I suppose I was found. The very first time I thought about telling someone what was going on in my head, about some of the crap in my life, it just felt right. It had nothing to do with anybody else I was friends with: I just felt like I could trust this one person without really knowing for sure that I could. For the first time in my life, I could trust someone completely without them needing to earn it.

Something like that is special. I've never met another person who, the moment I felt like I should say something, I did. I was able to come out of my shell a bit, do things I'd never done and I never felt alone. That's weird, isn't it? I mean, there were plenty of times when this friend wasn't around, but even just talking on the phone or getting the odd text or seeing comments on the Internet, just felt right. Everything in my life just seemed to fit properly because I had a friend I could trust.

Mind you, I never thought I would trust him. I never once thought about telling him anything, because I didn't feel it bothering me. My whole life I'd been looking for a friend like him, though (very clear memories of primary school trying to make friends with different people... none of it seemed right!). I stopped looking a very long time ago, but then it just happened.

Things like that don't happen all the time. I know that. But the point of all this: when you're found by a friend (or otherwise) like this, don't let it go. It'll be one of the most important relationships in your life. It will change you for the better, without you even meaning it to. It will just happen.

Soul Friend

During one of my education lectures (I think...) there was a bunch of discussion about relationships and different types of people, and the term 'Anam Cara' came up. This is, pretty literally, the Irish for Soul Friend. The concept is relatively simple, or I'm making it too simple: you have a friend you can tell anything.

I suppose it goes deeper than that. It's a relationship. Not a romantic one, by necessity, but a relationship nonetheless, like every other friendship or business partnership you'll ever have, and as such the implication that you can tell this one person anything also suggests that they, too, can tell you anything. The mutual level of trust is there, even if it becomes shaky at times - my own personal experience of the matter, and not something I wish to try again.

It's not just about trust, though. I mean, we all place a degree of trust in the people we talk to. We trust teachers. We (used to almost always) trust priests. We trust our parents. We just the chaplain at our school/college. But that doesn't mean we tell them everything, and it doesn't mean we feel the same way about them as we do about our Soul Friend.

The term itself suggests a connection that runs deeper than just the talk and the other aspects of a friendship, like drunkenly laying an arm over someone's shoulder. It's something you can't explain, really, no matter how hard you try and no matter how many words you have in your vocabulary. It's a form of love that can't be broken, but not the same as a parent's love for his/her child, or the same as the sort of love you have for someone in a romantic (and sexual) relationship. It's a run-deep kind of love that doesn't get celebrated on Hallmark day.

I believe in the idea of the Soul Friend. I believe in it because sometimes, even for an attendee of God College, believing in God and having faith in God is difficult. I believe in God's existence alright, but more often my faith is placed in my Soul Friend. It's a comfort thing, on one level, having someone there to talk to, but it's also something more basic than that - I have faith that he can do right. It's what we lack in God, sometimes; there's a great expectation that nothing should go wrong, then a tsunami strikes and thousands die, along with the faith of thousands more. Without getting to religious on the matter, I'd say it's because the love for God and the faith in God lacks two-way communication, lacks the certain security that comes with the sound of another human voice telling you everything's going to be okay, even when there's nothing wrong, telling you how to deal with something when you didn't ask, and letting you talk when you need someone to listen. God listens alright, but the problem I reckon lots of people have is that it's like it's all forgotten a second later and nothing ever gets done.

You can't just look for your Soul Friend. It sounds unfair, I know, that some people have them and others don't, but it's not the richest or the happiest, or the poorest or the saddest that find a Soul Friend. It just happens. It happens and you can't escape it, and you don't want to lose it when you find it. I know if I thought I'd like this friendship, nothing would stop me trying to make things right. I suppose that's dangerous, too, because it means I can put myself in some sort of physical danger, firstly, as well as emotional danger if it just can't be fixed, if the pieces don't quite fit back anymore.

That was my worry once, until I found new pieces that held the old ones together, too.

I write this, on a Friday night because really I don't do anything beyond going to the cinema, but specifically on a Friday because that's the day my interviews will be posted when they're done. Friday is my sort of Friendship Appreciation Day, and Hallmark won't ruin that. But for me, friendship isn't just confined to one day on my blog. Every day in my friendships is important. I just make sure not to test things with my Soul Friend on a Tuesday. Long story. I won't be telling it.