I should really start this post by saying Happy New Year, but I’m really not feeling it this year. Obviously I really hope that you do all have a great new year, but I’m not feeling so optimistic. Every new year’s eve I send everybody a text at midnight to wish them happy new year, whether they are awake or not. Even if the networks are busy I resend and resend and resend until everybody on my contact list has got my message. Often I’ll get a reply from somebody saying “who’s this?” Yeah that REALLY ANNOYS ME!!! This year, I have said happy new year to a handful of people and that is only because they have said it to me. It’s not a happy new year and there’s no point in pretending it is. Covid cases are rising to be the highest on record and England is in it’s third national lockdown.

Last year was a huge struggle for me mentally. Most of the things that I need to do to keep my mind healthy were taken away. I used to go trampolining, I went to a yoga class, I saw friends, I saw my boyfriend, I went out every week to volunteer for a charity (I now do this from home), I spent as much time as I could out of the house. The house is where I think and where my mind isn’t occupied enough. The house is where I have spent the majority of the last ten months. I desperately hoped that this year would be better. I think we all thought that this would have been over ages ago. It took up the most of last year, but by this year we would have started to move on. Fat chance of that. This lockdown is almost as strict as the one in March last year. Schools, colleges, universities are all closed. That doesn’t effect me but in the second lockdown some were able to stay open in a Covid safe way. We do have a few vaccines now though which I hope so much will be the beginning of the end of this madness. I need to move on and get some kind of normal life back. As I have said before, I know in the grand scheme of things I am lucky, extremely lucky and I am so grateful. But that doesn’t make this any easier. If this is how tough and mentally challenging being lucky feels, then being unlucky most be completely unbearable.

For the first time ever I actually dreaded Christmas this year. I have had tough ones in the past, but we’ve always got by and made the most of it. This year I dreaded it and just didn’t want it to happen. Last Christmas (2019) was so perfect. The first one with my gorgeous boyfriend and I spent lots of time with my friends and family, doing festive things. This Christmas was just painful, because of how different it was. I couldn’t go out, I couldn’t see friends, I couldn’t see my boyfriend, I couldn’t do anything that makes my Christmas really special. I did manage to have a better time than I thought I would though. I got some lovely presents and had some very interesting video calls, but it wasn’t the way Christmas should be.

I can’t believe that nearly a year later we are still in this mess. Some people have had positive things come out of all this. Some people have learned new skills and discovered new hobbies. And for others, like me it has just been a year of mental suffering. I really, desperately hope that this craziness in the world doesn’t last for much longer.

Some of you may know that I am not really religious at all, but I did watch an online church service yesterday with my boyfriend. The service was about having hope for the new year and I thought that it may help me to see things in a more positive way. It did actually help me more than I thought it would. It got me thinking about control and how one of the things that I really don’t like about this situation is that I have no control. I don’t feel that I am a controlling person in general. With every day things I am quite happy to let others take the lead and sometimes I need people to point me in the right direction. But when it comes to big life changes I really can’t stand the feeling of having no control over the things that are happening. I hate it when big things happen to me, that were not my choice or because of something I did. The service also helped me to see that these are very tough and confusing times for all of us, some more than others, but we’re all struggling. And one day this will all be over. We will start to see the bigger picture. One day we will be able to look back on this and think about how we did struggle and how it was unbearable, but we may be able to pick out a few positives that came from it. Positive things that we just can’t see yet, but they are there and they are happening and in time they will be revealed. For me so far I don’t see many positives at all, but there have been a few.

• I will NEVER take a cuddle for granted again
• I will NEVER take seeing people in person for granted again
• I will NEVER take going out for granted again
• My boyfriend and I have talked so much and become so close, probably more than we would have if we had been seeing each other in person
• I have learned how to Zoom!
• I have learned more than ever how important it is to talk about how I really feel and how caring and understanding people are. At the beginning of all this a few people even bought me presents to cheer me up. It really means a lot to me that everybody has been so supportive.

xx ❤ xx