CONTENT WARNING: This post talks candidly about the passing of my dad, and what I experienced on his last day.

So a few weeks ago I started coming out to people as queer, I’d always known what I was and had simply not made an issue of it, letting people make assumptions about who I am, and how I feel about certain things.

This year started with intentions, hopefully good ones, of gettign back into the swing of things with blogging. Needless to saym this year had other ideas.

2019, the year that was…

So it’s now officially 2020 here, and this year wishing someone a “Happy New Year” seems somewhat hollow, I mean it’s kinda hard when a fair part of your country is quite literally on fire at the moment to think about having vast amounts of positivity for the new year, and reportedly, new decade.

As I write this it is December 24th, 2019, which makes it twelve months to the day since I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Last Christmas due to the medication I was put on to manage my production of glucose I was actually not well on Christmas Day. This year, I’m on top of things, and in fact in November my doctor reduced my level of medication, as my diet and lifestyle changes had been having a big impact.

This week marks the first of three consecutive weeks where I am off work, so it also means three weeks to play around and try things.

So yesterday I was in the garage, untangling some tie down straps for the ute and packing them away properly, like a grown adult, and my mind wandered as it does in times like this. I’ve been a little bit stressed about my diabetes, and how well I’m going, and it occurred to me that I was sufferring a osrt of imposter syndrome, that I couldn’t accept that I was doing as well as all the proper scientific tests were telling me I was.

I’ve always found it hard to write, I mean there are ideas in my head all the time, but the actual committing them to writing has always been a challenge for me. I had something of an epiphany today, that it may be how how I was trying to write. I was trying to force my self to write from the third person perspective, separate to the character, and it wasn’t working for me, the words wouldn’t come out. It wasn’t until today when I revisited a piece I’d started in 2013, that was written from the first person perspective, that I finally understood that I needed to mentally be the character in order to find their voice, that writing for me could not be from a cold third person perspective, because I could not engage with that.

I’ve been listening to the audiobook by Neil Gaiman, The View from the Cheap seats, and it has made me thing about my own introduction to the world of reading.

Just before Christmas 2018, and I mean literally on December 24 2018, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. I’d been seeing some signs for a while, and there is a history of it in the family (I’m a fourth generation diabetic) so the diagnosis was not unexpected. Indeed it was kind of a relief to have something that explained why I had not been well for a while.