2023 A Year in Review

Any year that begins with a VERY BIG health scare is going to see some serious changes.

You reach a point, in your fifties, when you need to pay the piper. Your youthful excesses catch you up, and along with the torches and pitchforks, they’re waving a bill. Whatever price they demand, it’s a wake-up call, and in my case that wake-up call was a lump in my abdomen, along with an odd spiky-spiky pain, an extreme loss of weight (I’m a stick insect, I didn’t have it to lose), and a sharp increase in feeling shaky and unwell. Suddenly and genuinely terrified, I went for all of the tests – the ultrasounds and endoscopies and whatnot – and the lump was only an infection in the wall of my stomach. Unpleasant, but no worse than that.

But still, the big guy with the scythe really makes you think.

So: no more booze, and one year sober today. It’s been a decent while since I drank to excess, in fairness, but that scare was the kick up the butt I needed to finally do the thing. And it’s been amazing. Tough, for the first couple of months, but the longer you go, the better you feel (and tricking yourself with tiny rewards works wonders). Sooner than you realise, the comfort-habits fall away and you find you don’t want or need it anymore. There are times, of course, if it’s been a tough day, or you crave the relaxation, but you can deal. And a year down the line, I feel so much better. Even the dozen niggly, annoying little pains that I’d put down to ‘age’ or ‘menopause’ have gone.

Weirdly, though, it all came with another completely unlooked-for bonus: namely, the Battle of the Brain-Fog.

For a professional/compulsive creative, brain-fog is a terrible, crippling thing. Like an athlete with a life-changing injury, the need doesn’t change, but you just… can’t. Your head is full of cold porridge, your thoughts lost in congealing soup. You can’t focus on anything, you struggle to hear or feel your characters, your manuscripts. You can’t keep a narrative arc in your head. You can’t even make your sentences make sense. Sometimes, you stare at paragraphs for hours, while they stare straight back, giving you the stink-eye and saying, ‘Yeah, and and what do you think you’re gonna do?’

And it’s not just creative. That awful, blurred fatigue is mental, emotional, physical, motivational. It doesn’t only steal your spoons, it takes the knives and forks as well, then fills the entire cutlery drawer with cold glop.

Whatever it does, I’ve fought this particular monster for years. It’s got better and got worse, ebbing and flowing like some thickly seething, grey tide. There have been times when it’s gone completely, and times when I’ve been drowning in it for months, so utterly beyond frustrated. And it comes with endless questions: could it be menopause? Could it be my slightly underactive thyroid? Did I have some strange health something that I wasn’t aware of? I went back and back and back to the GP, and the fight went on.

And the answer was?

Gluten.

Now, binning the booze has helped, fairly obviously, but gluten has been the major criminal. Thanks to the above-mentioned gastric infection, I couldn’t digest or process it properly. And who’d’ve thought that something so tiny, so simple, could be so horrifically destructive? It does mean that I’d had that infection for a very long time, but no words (ironically) can describe what it was like to want and need to make the art, to create the worlds, to hear all those voices and conversations, and to not be able to, And similarly, no words can describe what it’s been like to have clarity back again. It’s like the lights have come on, the tide of gloop had gone out at last, and everything makes sense again.

Reaching the year’s end, the fog does still linger and I do still get bad days. But, last January, I honestly didn’t think I was going to make it this far, never mind lose the fog as well. I thought that my bill was due, that I was done for, and that I would leave my son.

But hey, I’m still here. And better than I’ve been in a very long time.

Reading: Not reading. Combination of aggravating and persistent Winter lurg, and work being very, very draining. Hoping to get my mojo back when everything’s calmed down a bit.

Watching: Christmas Who, which was fun, and it good to see Ncuti really reflecting the personality of the Doctor, with the slight sense of mania. Did think that Henson did better goblins, tho’!

Playing: Penultimate session of our D&D Sigil campaign, plus started Baldur’s Gate again over Christmas, finding loads and loads of stuff (like Books of Necromancy) that I missed the first time round. And who knew the romance scene with Gale would be quite so - erm - shiny?