Autumn Years

I think about time a lot, specifically I think about how much time has passed between two points. I spend a lot of time reflecting on my life, part of the journey you take as someone with anxiety and depression eventually leads you to that point of reflection. When I measure time I tend to think of it as if a child had been born in that moment and how old they would now be. I attended college from 2004 to 2006, it being 2022 now that marks 18 years almost to the day.

I remember my first day of college with clarity for a number of reasons. We had recently moved house and our post was still being redirected. I knew I had been accepted to the college in question but I did not know the start date of my course, I was waiting for that to arrive. I remember my Mum waking me up one morning in September to tell me a letter arrived from the college. Half asleep I opened the letter and read through blurred vision and that grogginess you feel when you're woken from a deep sleep. It was 12:30 and that grogginess didn't last long as panic set in, I was meant to start that morning. I made it to college that afternoon and the course director was understanding, they had wondered why there was no reply to the letter as there was paperwork I was supposed to complete. Everything worked out in the end and the next two years were two of the happiest years of my life despite some very sad moments in their midst.

Ageing vs Ageism

At what point does being realistic about the limitations of ageing become ageism? The opportunities we have in life change as we grow older, we tend to think more about what opens up to us with age than the things that are lost; for example we think of when we can legally drink, have sex, gamble, vote, or the things that are expected of us with age like taxes. There comes a point in your life when you realise that some dreams can only be achieved by a certain age, and that once you've passed that age, it's unrealistic to ever imagine achieving those things.

Although for many of those dreams they are not strictly impossible when you are older, the odds are just stacked so much against you that the effort required to overcome the disadvantage of age becomes disproportionate and the reward does not compensate you for the investment. In other words your pursuit has to be driven entirely by the desire to achieve it, as the achievement itself doesn't actually benefit you, if anything it will come at a net cost.

The Bird And The Snake

One four zero, three numbers in time,
A short sweet verse of astringent rhyme,
Tweet-tweet said the bird from atop its tree,
But alas the snake, it did not see.

If you follow me on Twitter, then depending on how much attention you pay to my profile you may have noticed I've been winding down my footprint on the site. I've unfollowed about a thousand people at the time of writing and I intend to reduce it even more. Like many people I've been weighing my options of how to respond to the future direction of the website. For me personally, right now my intention is to streamline my account then make it private. I don't know whether I will stay on the platform in the long term, that decision all hangs on how the platform changes going forward, but the direction of travel right now feels as if I'll eventually take my leave.

Hopeless

When the world around you seems to be falling apart, and the future is filled with darkness, it's hard to find hope and harder still to find a sense of stability. Life seems to have gone from one catastrophe to another in recent years with no end to the relentless flow of negativity. Each individual cause for concern fails to reach any point of closure. If you've ever had a bad breakup where you never gained a sense of closure then you'll know that mentality takes years to process and move on from.

I've always been of the opinion that every emotion is valid, both positive and negative, and that when those feelings surface, you should not try and repress them but rather allow yourself to feel them in totality in order to process them fully and be able to move on. The problem is that this mentality requires the source or the stimulus for those emotions to be finite. When that source is never-ending, the only thing you achieve is to mainline negativity like injecting a drug right into an artery - which is a very bad idea.