Read: January 2023 / February 2023 / March 2023 / April 2023 / May 2023 / June 2023 / July 2023 / August 2023 / September 2023 / October 2023 / November 2023
[text in italics = quotes taken directly from my diary]
DECEMBER
Poems written: 4
Gym visits: 10
Kilometres run: 34
The month begins in Nottingham, where it is -3 degrees and snowing. In the city’s fancy new library, I give The Poet my series of Diet Coke poems and he thinks they are good, which is a relief as I was anxious about sharing what were essentially Shitty First Drafts with this man who I want to impress. We see Tessa Farmer’s taxidermy sculptures and I am obsessed. We freeze to near-death looking for the Byron/Lovelace crypt in Hucknall. My niece turns 13 and I can’t cope. 13 years ago today I was lining up 3 months of meds on my desk, all the tablets in neat rows of 50. Then S rang and said M was in labour and I swiped all the pills into the drawer and ran to get the bus to hosp. T was meant to be born on Christmas Day so I thought I’d never meet her. I wanted to leave before she arrived so she’d replace me, so the family would have new life after a death, something wonderful after something bad. Imagine if I’d never met this beautiful, precious girl. I wonder if I’ll ever tell her that she saved my life by showing up early. I actually think this little angel baby fixed all of us at that time. We were all so broken. I worry about what the next few years will be like for my niece as a teenager in an all-girls school. I fared okay (got out of my girls’ school relatively unscathed because my home life was where the real trouble was) but that was before Instagram filters and 24/7 bullying via smartphones.
Brother returns home from his travels. I bring him a box of PG Tips because he is “fuckin gaspin for a propa cuppa” and I immediately feel safer/saner now that he is in the same country as me. Not sure what I did all day. Work. Gym. Feel brain-dead. How am I even functioning. I’ve felt physically unwell all week but I don’t have time to be ill so I just have to push through it. I rarely DNF books, but I give up on The Shards because as an editor I find the style too annoying and I just want to take my red pen to it. At lunch I wrote about [a bad thing from the past]. Painful and sad to recount what happened — not what happened but rather how it made me feel. Painful to re-feel. I forgave a man but never my mother for doing the same thing. But they were different circumstances. Isolated incident v prolonged campaign. Moment of madness v sustained psychopathy. Still it says a lot that I would forgive a man but not forgive her. I am not sure that I like what this says about me. I miss my best friend’s birthday because I have to work late and I feel terribly guilty. But I meet her for coffee the following week and we talk about how we’ve all been friends for nearly 20 years yet none of us know what each of us actually does for work. “I could pick your vagina out of an ID parade but have no idea what your job title is. You don’t edit books anymore, right? Now you’re in… marketing? Or advertising?” “I know your menstrual cycle and the name of your ex-ex-ex-boyfriend’s neighbour’s dog, but between the hours of 9-5 Monday-Friday you do something to do with… is it travel? No, wait, transport?” We are both wrong and we cackle on Highbury Corner and love each other so much.
Mercury Retrograde causes me problems: several times I try to say something well-meaning but it comes across in the wrong way and I feel I’ve accidentally said the worst thing when I was only trying to be helpful. Maybe I should just take up mutism until January 1st when this retrograde ends? The Grand Literary Tour of Norf Landan continues. The Poet and I visit Verlaine and Rimbaud’s (very temporary) gaff in Camden. The film ‘Total Eclipse’ is worse than we remembered. We go to my old town, walk in Trent Park and go for lunch at Miracles because a friend said to me, “Is he even your boyfriend if you haven’t taken him to Miracles for curly fries???”. I feel sad when we drive past my dad’s flat. Don’t know how to feel, how to act, how to behave, how to play this. Feel so out of touch with my self. What am I doing. On Date #20 we decide to stop counting because I give The Poet his own set of keys to my flat and he moves his stuff in. Admittedly, when I submitted 3 poems to a literary journal this time last year I did not anticipate that within 12 months the journal editor’s socks and boxers would be drying on my radiators, that his clothes would be in my dresser, his books stacked in my living room, his razor in my bathroom, but it’s a turn of events that I’m so, so happy about (him leaving the toilet seat up, less so). Feel so stressed about life, work, money, health, sanity. Absolutely everything is stressing me out today, it’s all too much to deal with, everything is going wrong, feel like I will die of stress. City dropped 3 points. That’s the only plus of today. I don’t get the job I applied for and can only think that it’s because I am grossly overqualified and can’t afford to live on such a meagre salary anyway. A blessing in disguise.
My father’s 75th birthday passes with little fanfare because everyone is too ill and/or skint to go out. The Poet reads at the Peverse event at The Wheatsheaf and it is SUCH a banging night of poetry, I feel so inspired afterwards. He dedicates his poem to me and I feel disgustingly, cringily in love. I wonder if I’ll ever have the confidence to perform my poems or if anxiety will keep me in a headlock forever. Felt good for a while, then back to fear + dread. Brother turns 29 and we go out in Shoreditch, which is fun socially but terrible financially. The Poet records an episode with my favourite poetry podcast girlies, Wendy and Charley. I didn’t expect him to say such lovely things about me or to read one of my poems, so obviously I cry into my wine while I listen. Felt so loved + appreciated which is such a nice feeling + also makes me realise how under-appreciated I’ve felt for so so long. It really is such a beautiful feeling, to be appreciated. I’ve missed it.
I keep up with my non-fiction reading though 75 Semi has ended. I demand that Neville’s The Power of Awareness changes my entire life — I think it may do, if only I can use the laws of metaphysics to completely rewire my hardwired modes of thinking and being in the world… no small task. I read Deaths of the Poets and idly wonder if I’ll ever achieve enough to warrant having a blue plaque. After November’s shitshow, I do not attend my 5th or 6th SCM session with C. Thankfully my neighbour goes away for Christmas so I feel safer in my flat, though the situation still bothers me every day. I take a punt on a literary opportunity. It would mean a lot to me to be able to do this, to give back to the poetry community, but I must try not to be too offended if I don’t get it. I’m quietly hopeful though… The word ‘desgracia’ becomes iconic.
I look up my medical records via my GP surgery and the data startles me. I’ve undergone 277 tests, been on 77 medications and had 42 health conditions. How am I still alive. I notice many of the biggest (i.e. worst) psychiatric incidents I’ve endured were not recorded by or disclosed to my GP; of course these will be found in my psychiatric records but still, reading the limited information that the surgery has access to it’s like these life-altering events never happened. For a brief moment, it’s as if I’ve never been handcuffed and locked up for being unwell. Interestingly, my records still state that I have bipolar disorder; I thought this diagnosis was revoked in 2014 but it’s still labelled ‘active’ and I wonder how this misinformation has affected my treatment. I’d completely forgotten about drug overdoses in 2009, 2011, 2014, 2015 and 2017. Of course they were soul-shattering at the time but now they are just tiny blips on the landscape of my existence which makes me believe in the adage ‘time heals all wounds’.
Seeing some of my pain tallied up on a screen like this makes me want to cry but it also makes me feel awe towards my body, towards myself — what it’s been through, what I’ve survived. It is sad that my first recorded occurrence of suicidal ideation was in 2004, when I was still at primary school. Yet here I am, determined to live through 2024. I decide that I want to request access to my psychiatric records next year; it will make for horrific reading and will be massively fucking triggering, but I feel I have a right to know what’s been documented about me over the past 20 years, and this material will be helpful when writing my new collection. Something good has to come from all of this suffering. All I can do is make art of it.
December is always the most out-of-control calorific month. All healthy habits fly out the window and it’s suddenly coffee with Bailey’s and cream for breakfast, endless beige food, wine most nights, cheese and champagne and constant chocolate. My weight increases by the day. My friends and family say I look healthier but every single thing I consume that isn’t a green vegetable just makes me hate myself a little bit more. I am excited for January so I can detox and reset, get back to my strict routines and get back down to my GW. I don’t know why I allow myself to ‘let myself go’ every year like this. I suppose it feels like a reward for “being good” all year, but is this really a reward? To eat too many Quality Street and feel obese? To drink three bottles of prosecco in order to have a long sleep? To decide I deserve to be lazy after working so hard all year, and skip gym so many times that I lose my gains and I’m essentially starting from scratch again in January? Sounds pretty fucking stupid to me. I remember at the start of 2023 I thought that this year I might end my toxic relationship with food but alas another year has passed and I still feel guilty whenever I eat cheesy chips after a night out. Spent a fortune on the kids’ presents today. This is what I graft all year for, so they can have nice things. They deserve the world. I receive the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award anthology and read the shortlisted poems and they are all so unbelievably good I cannot believe I’m included. I meet more of The Poet’s family and in a mortifying incident I misjudge the height of a step, trip, and spill a glass of wine on the family dog. We drink margaritas at ArtHouse and dance to The Pogues.
In what is genuinely a Christmas miracle, I manage to get not one but two Ubers on Christmas Day. Brother and I cook a banging roast dinner, watch 6 hours of basketball, and laugh until we cry. Our mother makes a 10 minute cameo appearance in which she tells us about when she first visited London in 1989, aged 37. She says her mind was blown when she tried rice and salad for the first time. Fish fingers were also a revelation to her. Her telling us this brief story makes me see her as a real human being rather than just ‘Mother’, which makes me feel weird. She had a whole life before us. She was a young woman with dreams and lovers and troubles. I think everyone sometimes forgets this about their parents. But I was always so aware of it with dad because he was constantly telling us stories about his past. I really know very little about Mother. I doubt this will ever change.
Boxing Day is one of the loneliest days of my life; I spend all day feeling sad and grief-stricken and useless and desperately alone. The next day my sister turns 42 and being around so many people overwhelms me so much that I sit on the kids’ table at lunch. My nephew has become more verbal in recent weeks, which is an extraordinary development. He correctly identifies the colour pink and I cry in the toilets because I’m so proud of him. The Poet headlines a reading event at Five Leaves and once again I feel in total awe of this man, his art, his strength, his vulnerability. It is also lovely to see the ever-charming Jack Barker-Clark. I have enjoyed fangirling over my boyfriend this month; the ones before never did so much worth cheerleading, bless ‘em. Feel so fucking infuriated. I could scream right now. Instead I will drink wine in bed + read Big Swiss. I will be fine. Uncontrollable rage is just another horrible symptom of my disorder. I am just angry right now. This isn’t forever. I don’t have to act on this rage. But if I don’t get it out it just festers inside me. Fucksake. I don’t like myself when I’m angry. Nobody likes me when I’m angry. I don’t want to be angry. But why do people wind me up. Just fuck off. I write a poem about etymology and obsession and Turnpike Lane Bus Station.
Ending 2023, I am exhausted. My body feels like it’s barely hanging on to life. I am absolutely fucking knackered. I have low energy, but I have big, big dreams. There is so much I want to achieve in 2024. I’m an Aries, so I will achieve my goals, I’m just worried that my mental illnesses won’t cooperate with me, that my brain will continue to be so overwhelmed by symptoms and things out of my control that it won’t be able to function at the level I need it to in order to do the work necessary to attain my desired outcomes. It is so hard to live in fear of your own brain. So hard to live at the mercy of the whims of a mind that will randomly veer into psychosis or depression or suicidality or rage or despair at any moment. It is so hard to be scared of yourself.
I am thinking back to that hope I felt earlier in the year — the golden, glimmering hope that outdid all the dark, crippling fear. If there’s one feeling I want to take into next year, it’s that profound presence of hope I felt when London woke up after that hideously bleak winter, and I was healthy and happy and falling in love. ‘Hope’ has not always been an accessible feeling to me. I spent so many years of my life in a state of utter hopelessness, so I was surprised when hope made such a powerful appearance in my brain, my heart, my spirit in 2023. But where there is hope, there is life. And where there is life, there is love, and art, and friendship, and success, and health, and pure unadulterated happiness. I wish all of these things for you during our next trip around the sun.
Thank you for reading my 2023 diaries. Here’s to 2024 xxx
Treacle Heart 