Over the weekend, I thought about going on holiday in a few months, and then changed my mind. Instead I came to the decision that I was going to use that money on moving out of the flat I share with my friends and live on my own again. That moving date is still about five months away, as my current plan involves moving in January, but already I can feel a change in my mood. It’s not that I dislike living with my friends, it’s more the fact that I missed living on my own much more than I actually realised.

Since I’ve made the decision, each day brings a lessening of a weight on my shoulders. It’s a weight I hadn’t even realised was there to such an extent. Yes, I knew I wanted my own space again, but until I made the decision to do it, I never appreciated the level of stress, and unhappiness that part of my life contributed to my damaged psyche. I’m quite honestly shocked at how much better I feel already, and I haven’t even moved yet.

When I look back at the issues I’ve had over the last few years, and the deteriorating mental state I’ve had in the last few months, I can’t help wondering how differently a lot of things would be if I’d decided to move sooner. There’s no point looking back at past mistakes and wondering “what if?”, but I don’t think my reaction to various moments in my life would have been so dark. It’s a moot point really. If I hadn’t bottomed out the way I did, I probably wouldn’t have made the decision to make such a big change, and then wouldn’t have come to understand exactly how badly I needed to do this. It feels like I’m moving forward again after stagnating for so long. It feels fucking fantastic!

There’s still plenty of time between now and then, and there’s still a lot of shit I have to sort out in my life, but for the first time in a very long time it doesn’t feel like such an impossible task.

I realised the other day that I haven’t left the UK in a few years, and ever since then I can’t help myself from thinking about packing up my things and just leaving. Of course that’s not an option open to me just now, but it is constantly in the back of my mind.

In an effort to calm down the crazy part of my brain that just wants to get the hell out of the UK and never come back, I’d considered taking a quick holiday in November to either New York or Paris. However that idea has been shelved because I’ll be moving house at the end of the year, and I should really keep my money to ease that transition.

So in a bid to sate my wanderlust I’m planning a big trip to Canada, and the USA next year. At the moment I’m looking at visiting Toronto, Vancouver, San Francisco, and then possibly having a couple of days in Las Vegas before coming home. It’s still very much in the planning phase at the moment, and my brain keeps adding destinations into the mix, which is making things more interesting. For example, just after writing that sentence than my brain decided I should stop off in Seattle after visiting Vancouver. When I initially thought of the trip it was just San Francisco with a brief stop in Las Vegas, but it keeps evolving every time I think about it.

The last time the wanderlust struck me this strongly I ended up living in Australia for a year. That ended up being one of the best year’s of my life, but back then I hadn’t accrued the baggage I currently have. Still, the idea of a mini backpacking holiday fills me with a level of excitement I haven’t had in a very long time. It’s just a shame that the trip is almost a year away.

The house move, and the especially the financial aspect of it is going to be the key to this trip. If I can still put a decent amount of money into my savings once I’m living on my own again, then the trip will be the kind of backpacking holiday I want. However, if I have to really tighten up my savings because of the new place, then the holiday will have to be distilled. Which means starting in Toronto, and then finishing the trip in San Francisco. There’s still a very good chance of me going to Vancouver in between those two stops, but that decision is one that will have to wait until nearer the time.

My ideal scenario would be to somehow manage to move into the new place, and then bring in more money so that I can have the crazy three week North American backpacking adventure that’s in my head. You never know, I might just be able to figure out a way to do it.

Danny & Annie from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Danny Perasa and his wife, Annie, came to StoryCorps to recount their twenty-seven-year romance. As they remember their life together from their first date to Danny’s final days with terminal cancer, these remarkable Brooklynites personify the eloquence, grace, and poetry that can be found in the voices of everyday people when we take the time to listen.

Credits:

Directed by: The Rauch Brothers
Animator: Tim Rauch
Background Layout: Jim Smith
Background Painting: Bill Wray
Audio Producers: Sarah Kramer & Michael Garofalo
Music: Frederik
Label: The Kora Records
Publisher: House of Hassle

One of those projects is my technology blog Silicon Souls. I’ve never really been able to get the momentum for that site going properly. My ideas for it have either been too vague, or far too niche for me to come up with enough content, or I’ve simply lost interest because there was no real direction. I’ve had various attempts at getting it going, and even enlisted the help of a few friends for one of those iterations, but for whatever reason nothing ever seemed to stick. It always annoyed me the site constantly failed to capture my attention, or my imagination, and it’s something I’ve wanted to rectify for a while.

Since I’m currently in a head space where I need to push myself to get everything back on track, and considering I want to write full time, I think now is a good time to relaunch. There’s nothing there at the moment, simply because I’ve only just reinstalled WordPress on the domain, and there’s no content written for it yet. For once I do have a few ideas about the direction I want to take the site, and how I’m going to go about keeping myself interested in for the long haul. I think one of the major issues with each previous attempt to get it going, was that I simply got too far ahead of myself, and never really developed a plan for the site to grow naturally.

One thing I don’t want to do is spend all of my time planning the site, and never actually doing anything with it, so I’ll be writing the initial content this week, and then launching the site over the weekend. It’s a quick turnaround considering there’s nothing there yet, but I think the only way I’m going to really force myself to actually do something is to talk about my plans publicly, and then set short deadlines. This time I intend on starting very small, developing a posting schedule, and only writing about things that catch my attention in the tech world.

It’s time all of my projects stopped being ideas, and became realities. Silicon Souls is the first, but expect a few more to come over the remainder of 2010.

Recently I’ve been feeling increasingly more depressed and I slammed hard into the bottom of that depression the other day. I initially thought that it was caused by one singular incident, but on further reflection I realise that isn’t truly the case. It was simply the final, fatal, crack in a veneer I had created around myself. With that realisation I uncovered a few things about myself, the most important being:

I can’t remember when I was last genuinely happy.

That statement can be read many ways. What I mean by it is that I simply don’t remember when happiness was my underlying, base emotion. We all have happy moments in life, but for me they seem to have become bright sparks in the fog of everyday life. Those moments are becoming more difficult to achieve, and when I do find them, that feeling never lasts as long as it used to. I walk around numb and completely indifferent at best, and my worst is no fun for anyone around me. There are things I’ve been doing for so long now that I forgot that they’re not healthy. I struggle to sleep almost every night, though when I do manage to I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. When I wake up, and at random points throughout the day, I’ll notice my jaw hurts because I’ve been clenching it tightly for a while, and then even when I notice I still struggle to unclench it.

I realised that over the last few years I’ve been building this veneer of happiness around myself in an effort to hide my true emotional state from everyone. Then as time wore on the veneer would crack. I’d struggle briefly, and then somehow hold that lie together, and to everyone else I would appear as normal again. If the cracks grew too wide, I would contribute it to a bad day, or having too much to drink. Then I’d carry on hiding myself in plain sight.

I can’t stand the job, or the industry I work in anymore. I lost all passion for it so long ago that the thought of going into the office, any office, to continue doing it fills me with more despair than I can truly articulate. This doesn’t have anything to do with my current employers, whom I actually like and have been pretty good to me, but simply the industry I work in, and the issues that come with it. The cracks on the veneer I hold around myself are continually caused by this. I continue to do the job because the next major issue in my life is money. I lived very recklessly in my twenties, and because of that I’ve accumulated a lot of debt.

Debt that has grown more damaging to me over the years than I’ve ever really told anyone. I make all the repayments I have to, but there never seems to be any real headway made with it. I constantly seem to be stuck in the mud when it comes to clearing it all. I found myself in the sticky situation of having high credit card debt, and then taking out a loan to clear the card. That sounds reasonable, until you realise that my spending habits hadn’t changed, and I was still as irresponsible with my money as I’d always been, which meant that the credit card debt increased again, leaving me with the credit card, and the loan to deal with, all of which spiralled over the years. I’m slowly chipping away at it all,and it’s much better than it was, but while work is a big contributor to my unhappiness, this situation tops that by a long way. It’s what keeps me awake at night when I can’t figure out how I’m going to deal with it all. I’m not going to give you a figure, but let’s just say it’s a lot.

These two things combined are enough to make anyone unhappy, and I was willing to leave my introspection at those two points, but I knew that there is more going on in my mind, that are just as dangerous to my well being if I don’t deal with them.

Digging deeper highlighted a fundamental problem I have. One that grew worse after creating this veneer around myself. That problem is that I feel completely disconnected from everyone, my friends included. I have is an inner circle of friends that I love, but in truth I have so very little in common with them that it can be difficult to share anything. That caused me to hold all of my major problems internally, create the lie that I was fine, and then try to hold everything together. As solutions to problems go, that isn’t even a good short term one, yet it’s what I’ve been doing for so long now that I can’t remember another way to manage them.

This disconnect fills every part of my life just now. The more I held that veneer of happiness around myself the more disconnected I felt. I’ve become so indifferent to almost everyone around me that I find it hard to truly care about anything. I think this lack of feeling has grown because if I cared about anything enough, the veneer will slip and then the doubts, fears, and raw unhappiness I’ve held in for so long will finally be allowed to see the light of day, and I had no idea how that would affect me.

Then something happened. As these stories tend to go, I met a girl. We connected almost instantly, and for the first time in such a long time, I felt really comfortable around someone. We were having a lot of fun, and we really enjoyed each others company. Then it ended.

I take full responsibility for that. We hadn’t known each other that long, but things moved too fast, adding lots of extra pressure that should never have been there. I’d let someone past my guard, and when I could feel everything slipping away I tried to grab onto it tighter. Which as you can imagine made everything worse. I realise now, I was trying to use that relationship to repair my completely damaged psyche, which is unfair to her, completely unrealistic, and quite frankly stupid on more levels than I can think of right now. It damaged a friendship with her that I hope I can repair, because while I realise that I do really like her, there was never a long term future there. What I saw in that brief relationship was the memory of being happy and I tried to grasp something that wasn’t really there.

There had been warning signs that I was losing my control, although I didn’t comprehend that was what was actually happening at the time. But when I truly realised that it was over, and it had never really begun, the cracks came too quickly. I tried to hold it all together, but the strain of doing so was just too much. I managed to hold it together for a while, but it was obvious my mood was growing darker, and worse. Then, under that strain I buckled. It was not pretty.

It has made me realise something, that should be fairly obvious. Life is too short to be this unhappy. Instead of just holding all this bleakness inside me, I need to find ways to dispel it. I need to stop pretending everything is fine, and actually do something to make myself happy again. I have no idea what that will be or how to go about doing it, but the first step had to be acknowledging the problem. For the moment, that veneer is back in place. Not because I want it there, but because it’s still essential in getting me through the day. I understand it a lot better now though, and because of that I no longer have to wrap it so tightly around myself. That will ease the pressure it causes, and lead me towards a means to remove it completely. At least that is my hope.

I debated the decision to post this here or to leave it offline. In the end I decided that it was something I needed to share, even if I didn’t really want to. Instead of hiding it away again I want this moment of clarity to mark the beginning of this journey. I want to be able to look back on this and see the path I walked to get from this point, to the day I let the veneer fall away completely and never have to worry about it again. I really hope that day isn’t too far in the future.

There’s a Just Giving page setup for the walk, and if you are able to give anything, we’d be very grateful. The reason behind the walk, as well as other info can be found on the Just Giving page, and I’ll be sure to do a write up afterwards to let you know how we got on.

Tomorrow evening, after work, I make my way down to Brighton to hang out with my friend Chloe, and spend three days relaxing in the sun. Having never been to Brighton before I expect I’ll do a little wandering around with my camera and be a tourist for a little while. I always enjoy getting to visit new places so I’m really looking forward to getting there.

I never used to enjoy coming down to London for these work trips. It was simply because work was all that I ever did on them. I had friends down in London that I would get to see, but I was always just in the city on the days I had to work, and then I would head straight home afterward. There was no time to see or do anything other than work, have a few beers, and then go back to the hotel to sleep. Now I try to make an effort to stay an extra day or two and walk around seeing the sites. Those extra days allow me to do other things, and because I’ve started taking the time, my opinion and experiences of London have greatly improved as a result.

I don’t think I could live in London, there is still something about the city that doesn’t sit well with me, but coming down to visit regularly is certainly growing on me.

One thing that has been on that list for a little while is to learn more PHP and CSS, and then to create my own WordPress theme from scratch. It’s something I’d been thinking about for a long time, but never began the process because I didn’t have a specific project to build a new theme for. Now I do have a project in the works that’s going to require a decent looking theme, and I thought that it would be the perfect way to check an item from my list of goals. It also comes with the added benefit of learning much more about the inner workings of WordPress in general, which makes me happy.

A couple of weeks ago I sketched out the basic look of the theme, and broke it down into it’s component templates. Quick aside; “Learn to Draw properly” has been added to the list of goals. Anyway, with a decent idea of how the theme was going to look and the various parts that I would need to build I spent a lot of time reading over the WordPress Codex, and various tutorials on building WordPress Themes. Then with lots of info at my fingertips I began the process of creating the theme.

Figuring out various aspects of the development was satisfying, and since I’m a problem solver by nature, getting something to work after struggling with it gives me a sense of achievement. The one thing I noticed over the last few weeks however, was that I simply wasn’t having any fun during this process. Fixing problems, and figuring something out brought more of a sense of relief than enjoyment. I was constantly saying something along the lines of “Thank f**k that I’ve fixed that, I’m sick of looking at it.” This is not the experience I’m used to having when learning something new.

I attributed the problem to just being tired. I’ve had a hell of a month or two at work and it was because of this that I wasn’t getting any real enjoyment from the process, that was my thinking. I pushed on sure in the knowledge that it would start getting fun and that the more I learned about it, the sooner I’d get over this hurdle. And so, I got stuck back into the project.

The days passed by, and then theme was beginning to take shape. It was still fairly simple, but I’d been inspired by a few themes I’d found in the WordPress Showcase and I’d started making it more complex, and more interesting. It was essentially building detail onto the framework of the theme I’d created. At this point I was sure I was going to start having fun. I was wrong.

Taking it from basic framework to useful and interesting theme is where things should have gone to the next level, and where I should have been happy with the creative and interesting aspects of building something like this. I had the foundation and now it was time to really make it my own. Only I was faced with the simple truth, that I really didn’t want to continue working on it. I tried to push that thought to one side, but last night I had to admit to myself that my time is too important to me to waste doing something that I really don’t want to do. I have to do that most of the day during work, and I’ll be damned if I do it on my own time too. When I really stopped to think about it, I knew there and then that I wasn’t going to do any more work on the theme. I still have all the files saved just in case I change my mind in the future, but I really doubt it. I discovered a few things during the process that I thought were quite cool, so I may add them to a site in future if I think they’ll add some value. I have a lot of respect for developers, but it wasn’t until this process that I realised that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t want to do what they do all day.

For the first time in a very, very long time I realised I didn’t want to learn any more about a subject I have an interest in. I’m happy having a very basic grasp of the skillset and now I know in the future I’ll just pay other people, who do love to code, to do the work for me, or alternatively use Premium themes like Thesis or Headway. Acknowledging that simply fact allows me to dedicate that time to learning, and doing new things that really excite and inspire me. So that’s one item erased from my list of goals, and I think it’s time to begin the process starting another one… I think it’s time I started learning some Spanish.

We kick this period of relaxation off with the weekly Waterline pub quiz in a couple of hours. That’s our recurring period of being embarrassed on how rubbish our general knowledge actually is. At least I get to hang out with friends and have a few cold beers. Tomorrow I get to experience the foodie joy that is Taste of Edinburgh with some friends I haven’t seen in a couple of weeks. Then later that evening there will no doubt be more socialising to be had. Saturday is going to be filled with relaxing in the sun, (hopefully), and then there’s more socialising in the form of a friend’s flat warming party. These first two days are set aside to completely de-stress and allow myself to recover from a pretty grueling couple of weeks.

After these two days of relaxing I’m hoping that on Sunday I’ll be in the correct state of mind to start working on a couple of projects I’ve had sitting in the sidelines. I also want to begin looking at a new project that popped into my head during one of my sleep deprived, marathon, working sessions in the last week. It’s funny what your brain throws at you when normal coherence is difficult to find.

While I’m looking forward to relaxing over the next couple of days, it’s those three days where I can tackle those projects with a clear head that really excites me. I’m especially looking forward to see if the idea that sprang into my head recently is something that I can actually develop. It’s hard to tell at the moment, although the initial scrawls in my notebook hint at a project full of promise. However, until Sunday I’m going to try not to think too much about them. Otherwise I’m going to come at them with a head far too cluttered with day job baggage.

First I need to relax and claw back some of my sanity. That begins now. I’m off to begin my five day break in the pub for some pre-quiz beers.

I’m in the middle of a few major projects at work that are completely consuming my time. Even when I finish work for the day and go home, they are still at the forefront of my mind and are pushing all other ideas, and possible projects away. Let’s just say my life -vs- work balance is completely out of whack at the moment.

I could talk about the projects at work; I could go on about the challenges involved, and the amount of effort I’m having to pour into each project as they run concurrently. But I won’t. I don’t think that it’s appropriate to talk about my day job in any detailed way up on this site. In fact this site is usually a place I come to get away from that part of my life. In fact the only reason I mention it now is because I need to acknowledge the simple fact that it is taking complete control of my life at the moment, and that probably won’t dramatically change for a few weeks.

Acknowledging the fact does a few things to the way I think about it. As soon as I write it down I can begin looking at ways to find a balance again, while at the same time still get everything done. Finding that balance isn’t going to be easy at the moment. It’s going to involve actively moving away from work related thoughts as soon as I leave the office, and trying to focus on other things. Relaxing and doing nothing of any import isn’t going to be an option because my brain is just too active at the moment. If I try and sit down to read a book, watch tv, or kill some zombies on the Xbox then my brain is going to very quickly drift back to work, and I’ll find myself lying in bed at 4am thinking about all the things I need to do… a little like this morning.

This could be the ideal time to begin working on the logistics of a few projects I thought of during my break from work a few weeks ago. My brain isn’t going to quiet down anytime soon so I may as well turn it loose on something that could be beneficial to me going forward. If nothing else it will hopefully stop me thinking about work every minute of the day, and worrying about all the tasks I somehow have to cram into the next few weeks. I doubt it, but it’s worth a shot!