When I Think About This Year

 When I think about this year's National Novel Writing Month, I get a bit sad. 

One of the reasons for this is the painfully obvious reason that I was desperate to see my novelling friends who pop out of the woodwork in time for NaNoWriMo and then retreat again to hibernate until next year. Not all of them came along to the virtual write-ins, and even when they did, it's not quite the same. Yes, there were some amazing parts, like being able to say hey to all of our American friends who visited London and then had to return to the USA, but we can be quite a huggy bunch, and by this point in the year, I would say that we were desperate to have a hug from people we didn't live with, and unfortunately, it was not to be. 

Another reason is that, despite knowing that I can be terribly harsh on myself, I was beating myself up a bit, and continue to do so, about how out of sync I felt with the whole thing. I felt like I wasn't being an overly great ML this year (Municipal Liaison - think Regional Coordinator and you're about there) and I felt like I was being a terrible sprint leader. I enjoyed doing both, and I enjoyed the challenge of being an ML in a virtual world, but there were some things that were so difficult about the whole situation, not just NaNoWriMo, but the whole thing of lockdowns, work, shorter days, and longer nights rolling in and a whole pile of other things which made the whole backdrop of the event different and it made it harder. Every year I fall out of November into December with a cold that comes on through exhaustion and a need to sleep for a week to recover, because I run around like a blue arsed fly trying to do everything I need to do. Despite the exhausting nature of it, it's exhilarating. This year kind of wasn't. 

The thing I'm most upset about though is that I had a plan. I had a pretty solid plan and I figured that actually, this year was the time I was most likely to pull it off because my mum makes tea throughout the day, and even when she doesn't bring it to my desk, she puts it half way up the stairs and it's not far for me to go and grab it. I wasn't having to shop for meals or cook them or worry about anything like that. My mum does the laundry - though anyone who knows me knows I own enough clothes to get through most of, if not all, of the month without doing a load of laundry if I really have to, even if it means wearing things which aren't really weather appropriate on the days I'm not leaving the house. In theory, all I had to do was my job and my writing, as well as a bit of human-ing like showering and sleeping. 

What I wanted to do was write a few different projects that I have either had in my head for a while or that I have had a couple of runs at and decided I didn't like in that format. I wanted to just hammer the keyboard throughout the month and think about the editing later, in classic NaNoWriMo style, and more than anything I wanted to sprint to my personal best for NaNoWriMo, get my first 50k done in under five days, and then keep going at said alarming rate to really cement my membership in the overachievers club. 

I did none of the above. 

If I'm being completely honest with myself, I struggled to function as a human being during November. We were in the second set of national restrictions, I wasn't going out for a walk or a run as often as I had in the first national lockdown and my mental health took a dive that looked similar to the path of Oblivion at Alton Towers (a complete nosedive, following a brief pause where you stare down into the waiting abyss.) I finished "early" by most people's standards, but not by mine. I wrote a lot more than the 50k, but not what I was going for and I wrote every day, which is something I haven't done for a long while, even if NaNoWriMo. Despite having a 4thewords account and a streak that is very close to a year, I don't write every day. I think about it almost every day, and when I don't, I pay for it the next day with having to recover my streak. Writing every day, focusing on writing every day, and bringing myself back to the keyboard even when it was the last thing I wanted to do was a bit of an education and it was one that I was glad of. 

As you can see, there are things I am glad of from this year, and perhaps I needed this year to be a bit of a battering so I could knock my idea of myself during NaNoWriMo and this feeling that I can do anything in NaNoWriMo and sod the consequences, right off of its pedestal. I think I needed to remember that the rest of my life does not get suspended for the month, and also remember that I need a lot more tea and a lot more pizza than my parents do, particularly in November. I think that those things have made me develop a new reverence for NaNoWriMo and the dedication it demands, but, after a significant rest and turning my attention to finishing a few projects which are not writing-related and have lain on my desk untouched for too long, I think I finally feel ready to tackle the things I wanted to do in November, but just a little less fiercely and with a bit more time to get them done... 

I'm not expecting anything to get better overnight. The simple fact of the matter is that Brexit is on the horizon, the UK mutation of the virus will not be the only one, and vaccines take time. 2021 will not be a catch-all cure that repairs all that went wrong in 2020, but it is an opportunity, not to start again, but to keep going. 

It's Been a Long...

  It's been a long... 

I feel like here, in twenty twenty, we can fill in the rest of that sentence with any measure of time and it would be pretty accurate. It was a long weekend with the All Night Log On replacing the All Night Lock In on the London calendar of events for NaNoWriMo. Being so close to your bed that no one could actually stop you from just going and getting into it and checking out for the night brings a new measure of difficulty to an event which is already a marathon sprint. It's almost like someone is driving a golf buggy in front of you when you're running a marathon, but instead of just a normal golf buggy, it's one with super plush seats and it's warm enough but cool enough and there are snacks and drinks and cushions and it's lovely, but there is that nagging thing of you would be letting yourself down and no one wants to do that. Unlike on a normal day, well, a normal ANLI, we lost of fifty per cent of the participants overnight as people finished their fifty thousand words, realised that they were keeping partners, parents or pets away or they just started getting headaches and other issues and had to retire for the good of their health, and believe me, the thought of following them was so tempting, especially when I went into the fourth hour of a caffeine headache and my wifi was dropping out despite the laptop being sat directly next to the router, and there being seemingly no issue with the router or the other laptop I was actually writing on - just the one that was hosting the call - though it only booted everyone out on one occasion so that's pretty good going. 

This year NaNoWriMo felt like Such. A. Long. Month. because rather than being able to meet people in person and spend time with them, give them a big squeezey hug as you're leaving each other for the evening and scream I LOVE YOU, DON'T DIE! down London's streets to them followed by a fit of the giggles, we had to resort to online writing events that took us away from our favourite destinations of coffee shops in town and all of the museums, from having a brew and a natter and seeing everyone's lovely faces, to dealing with strange microphone and web cam set ups that don't necessarily inspire a great deal of comfort. Whilst the community survived online, and there are definitely advantages to being able to, or being forced to, host in this way, I can't wait for the day I am able to wrap my arms around my writers again and tell them how much I missed them, because I did. And I missed having loose leaf tea with them in Yum Chaa. I'm praying that Yum Chaa survive this year. 

It's been a long year because there has been a constant bombardment of bad news (EXCEPT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION!) with the pandemic adding further pressures onto businesses that were struggling and causing many to buckle under the weight of new pressures. Once more we are seeing an economic recession which is costing jobs and livelihoods and robbing people of the stability that has, in many cases, been exceedingly hard won. I can't help but watch the news and wonder what will become of the local high street and the city shopping district. Are we moving towards a day where we order everything online, because we can, and then what? How soon does it become that we stop going outside because we don't have to and, those of us who can afford to, just get everything delivered to our doors? It is a horrible thought. 

I've been considered lucky, because being a civil servant gave me the flexibility to work from home from the moment things looked a bit too ropey, and that's exactly what I have done. I've been really lucky because there's three of us and a dog in a house with a spare bedroom. My parents and my brother were all furloughed, so for a long time, there was only me having to work, which was a frustrating and exhausting experience of its own, but also hearing people talk about how difficult furlough was for them, not because of financial issues, has got to the point where it pisses me right off. People are saying they were bored, and I know it can very much be a the grass is always greener situation and if I had been furloughed I might have been bored within a week and wanting to get online to do some work, but I also spent the whole of lock down one doing things like knitting baby blankets (I am nearly finishing my third) and making face masks for friends and family and also selling a few to help me raise some extra cash for Macmillan. I ran for London Landmarks Half Marathon, though on the day I didn't do thirteen miles because of injury. There was so much more I wanted to do as well, but whilst working a full time job and spending time with family, it was a bit of a juggling act. 

I'm really hoping that this start of the twenties is not setting the tone for the whole decade, because that would be a more than difficult pill to swallow. It's long and arduous and in some places people are working together and doing amazing things and in others they are throwing parties and not caring who it hurts, or who it could kill. There are organisations who are penalising their workers for the crime or infraction of not living with the person that they're in a relationship with and that is one of the hardest things imaginable. I once complained to an ex that I was not a f***ing tamagotchi and that's what we have all turned into this year. If lock down rules mean you can't see your significant other, it becomes texts and calls of I love you, I miss you, I want to see you, and strain like that can break relationships, though so can being thrown together too soon and for extended periods of time when we were only allowed out of our homes for an hour. Friends of mine have been quite lucky that they have been ready to move in together and the lock down just became their excuse, but for some people that wasn't feasible, or it might not have been practical. 

It's really hard to imagine that many doctors and nurses or other hospital staff moved out of their homes to try and keep their families safe. It is hard to imagine a lot of the things that people have been through this year, but with the vaccine now on the horizon, it looks as though there might be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it's the light you see as you pass out from your medical stabbing because, like me, you are petrified of needles. That being said, I got myself used to needles enough to be able to give blood so hopefully I will be alright. 

How's Today's NaNo Going, Charlie?

Well, I was working, didn't really take a lunch break, still don't have my head on straight after a few days of feeling like my brain was just causing panic attacks every hour on the hour and a few more as surprises and I just went to copy across my words from my Dana to my PC and I forgot to press the start sprint button because I'm actually a bit of a moron, so all those words were counted for NaNo but not in my current sprint battle with a monster I'm trying to defeat to open a new area. (I love how nerdy 4thewords makes me sound :))

I had fully intended to get up today and be a fully functional human again because I actually managed to get to something that felt a bit more normal yesterday after a very slow start, but unfortunately, I couldn't sleep properly anyway and then Teddy started snoring. I know he can't help it but having a companion animal that doesn't sound like they have aggressive sleep apnoea would be wonderful. I had even put a bottle of Sneak by my bed so I could caffeinate early, but unfortunately, it was not to be.

That being said, I should still be able to break the 30K barrier today and I realised this morning, thanks to Facebook memories, that the record I was trying to break, I actually did it last year, so my all-time PB is actually already five days and that was the best I was hoping for this year after the first day didn't quite go to plan.

What I am really thankful for this year as opposed to last is that the verbal abuse, or written abuse, that was hurled at Overachievers has died down. I get that people struggle to understand how the likes of the Overachievers do what they do at the speed that they do it, but that isn't a reason to be sour about it. Granted, I'm not sure if there are more people accepting that that's the way it is because people have decided to be a bit more compassionate or because they know a lot of people have ended up at home that would not have chosen to be there and that additional time on your hands can really help, even if the additional stresses don't. I think we all might be a bit slower than usual as well because the pandemic stress is touching all of us. That may just be my perception of it though. Either way, I'm really glad, because it is thoroughly disheartening in an otherwise exceedingly inclusive competition. 

Something else I found really encouraging recently was Grant Faulkener's admission that he had not been writing for a few days because of the election. Sometimes it is difficult to accept that external forces will have that impact on u. Whether it makes you more jittery or unable to focus, or you're just so busy with other things, it isn't necessarily a bad thing and it doesn't mean that it's over. No one has to make up three days word count at once, no one has to be writing every day, and no one should feel ashamed if the world outside their front door is a little bit scary and it makes you feel a bit neurotic. We're still only in the first week. We have plenty of time.

Something Happened and Now I'm Typing Really Slowly,

 No, it's not an injury and no, I don't think it's anything sinister, but I was hoping to be further ahead of NaNoWriMo par by now and I'm on 25k. I was hoping to beat my record of 6 days, set last year, but being 7k behind what I had planned on the first day didn't start me off too well and yesterday was less than great, so I feel as though something happened and now my typing speak has dropped. 

To be fair, I think it's more of a focus thing. The last couple of days I have been really out of it, or so it feels when it comes to trying to focus on anything and it just slips off into the ether. I was considering typing the rest of this from the bath before I realised I needed a bit of a brain break from writing for twenty minutes. 

Maybe I could actually do with taking a few days off of writing, but this is November, so that is not happening. 

This Is Really F*ing Troubling,

Okay, so I've written a couple of things recently which have been anti-FGM. The reason I have written them is because I am completely anti-FGM. I'm against the medicalisation of the cultural practises, I'm against the ritualised traditions that occur in specially constructed huts at the end of a garden as described in Cut and I am deeply disturbed that there are plastic surgeons who offer surgeries to "correct" or alter the look of a person's labia. I understand that this will not always be a cosmetic procedure and there will potentially be cases where women medically require such interventions, and I get that, but holy F it makes me uncomfortable to think of it, because so many of us hate the way our vaginas look and this type of "treatment" being available doesn't help. 

Over the past couple of days my Twitter has been pretty loud with the debate as to whether Male Genital Mutilation (MGM) and FGM should be on the same platform, and in some ways, I really agree with that, but the problem with that stance is the expectation that campaigners who are worked to stop FGM as part of a wider issue of violence against women and girls and the inequality that exists in the world have been feeling forced to adopt such a platform that is not theirs and not the one which they have devoted their time to, and it seems that some are keen to continue pushing for this to happen. 

Now, the reason I am rehashing this here is that I've seen some of the responses to my comments and also the people supporting my view that FGM and MGM are separate issues within this space (i.e. when they're being talking about in a broader campaign regarding violence against women and girls like forced marriage and honour-based violence, or we are talking about equality) and a lot of them are either self-defining as TERFs or displaying a lot of media to support J.K.Rowling and the comments which she made which have lead people to term her as a TERF. I say it in that way because I accept that some see TERF as a derogatory word, but also because I've never seen her self-define as a TERF. For those not aware of the term, or where it came from, it's a shortening of the term Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist and was originally created by a person inside of said subgroup of feminists in order to differentiate between Radical Feminists and TERFs. 

I'm going to state this as simply as I can - I am not a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. 

I am a very big believer that the rights of transwomen are women's rights issues. I'm also a big believer in bodily autonomy, particularly when it comes down to genital autonomy, so I don't believe in circumcision without specific medical necessity and only then by a qualified professional, and only if it was a situation where the child cannot wait until they are old enough to make that decision for themselves. I believe the same when it comes to the genital/bodily autonomy of someone who is intersex. It is not for a parent or a doctor to make a decision as to whether that person should be assigned male or female. Obviously, there is sometimes a medical need for some form of "corrective" surgery, but it is my understanding that very often surgery is performed to try and "normalise" the appearance of the genitals as opposed to being due to a reason of function. 

I legitimately can't believe I'm having to sit here and say this, but it is something which is exceedingly important to me. 

Day 2

 Why do I never learn my lesson? 

Every single year, I lose words. It's inevitable really, except that it's not. When you're on edge and you are trying to write as much as you can in just a month, I swear that it is so possible and so probable to do something either just a little bit silly or fully stupid. 

A few years ago I was completely devastated when the ridiculous mistake that I made meant that I lost a full novel's worth of writing and it took me a long while to recover from that, but this year, all I did was press enter on a website, thinking that I was actually clicking it on the address in order to refresh the page, instead saving over the last few thousand words I have spent the last few hours working on. It's not like it was the greatest writing I've ever done, or anything that was worth sending to an editor or anything, but it was something I was pretty happy with as a first draft and some of it was making me cry, because I like the characters. So yeah, I'm in a bad mood now. This is why I like hand writing, even when it makes my hands cramp. 

I guess it will teach me to be more flipping careful. 

Day 1

 We are now over twelve hours into National Novel Writing Month in the UK, and honestly, it still does not feel normal. I was too tired last night really and it honestly felt like the world was conspiring against the whole of the competition as other people talked about coffee machines breaking and I realised that I had bought a hot chocolate that tasted like drinking a full mug of melted chocolate. It was far too rich and even the attempt to make it into a mocha so that I could get some caffeine and stay awake was all in vein. Not meeting in person was always going to be hard. Having to plan what I am doing around my parents' lives as well was always going to be hard, especially given that I have to think about meal times and what in the kitchen will not make too much noise and too much mess, and the volumes of particular keyboards as opposed to just which ones are most beneficial to my writing speed. (That would be the loud ones, apparently!!)

Where it all started going wrong last night though was the lack of a nap and the changing of the pizza. 

I have a routine for October 31st and it works. I go and buy Hallowe'en candy with no intention of sharing it, I get a cheap hot chocolate stick that will not be too sickly and I have my pizza that is cooked in twelve minutes because that works. I have said before that it does not taste great, but it fits into the routine and it works. Last night, my pizza was supposed to be in the oven for about twenty five minutes, so I had to adjust my nap time, I could not get myself to nap and then I was far too tired to write for the same midnight to three in the morning shift which has helped me to get to more than a couple of twenty thousand word days and honestly, it sucked. I was also writing at the dinning table, no external keyboard and just clicking away on the Pixel's keyboard and having to hit the backspace button constantly, because for some reason, I make so many more typos on this keyboard than my gaming keyboard and I do not know why. 

Trying to nap was hard as well, because I was obsessed with the fact that last year I overslept my alarm by about half an hour and it really threw me off. I know it might not look like that when I then still bashed my way through twenty thousand words on the first day, but it was honestly less than ideal circumstances. The last day definitely came in at twenty thousand a lot easier, because of planning and preparation of everything but what I was going to write. 

Anyway, that was the lengthy babble about how it is going and, as with everything else in November, it is unedited, so it might  be a load of crap. 

This Was Going to be a Tweet,

But I am a member of The Overachievers in National Novel Writing Month which doesn't exactly lend itself to brievity of expression and Twitter character limits are still too low for me to put this together properly. The briefest way that I can express it is this: 

I am pig sick of being told that there is a hierarchy when it comes to supporting causes or charities. 

Many people will tell you that it's a fallacy to believe that such a hierarchy exists, but then others will, when you express support for one charity or cause, question why you don't support something else which is tentatively connected or, in their mind, more important. One big example of this is during Hibo Wadere's campagin against FGM. 

To my knowledge, she has never said something along the lines of FGM is awful, but MGM is fine. (To clarify, not the movie studio, but Male Genital Mutilation). As far as I am aware, the best characterisation of her viewpoint is to say, yes, MGM is also bad, but that's not my fight. 

Her story is a very personal one. In one of the chapters in Cut which I was reading last night, she specifically states she was talking about her vagina. She talks about her culture, of course, but a lot of the conversation regarding the trials of women following FGM are her own story. It's her talking about recurrent infections, about the illnesses she saw her female family members experience and her perceptions of these and how long it took her to go for a wee after her mutilation. She is the perfect activist in the FGM space because she has experienced the trauma she is fighting against, and she has the lived experience of being in a culture that tells a girl that this is her lot in life, and she still said no. 

I'm not doubting that MGM, i.e. male circumcision for non-medical reasons, can have terrible side effects. I'm not even doubting that, particularly depending on the age a boy is when he undergoes this procedure, it can lead to the same level of trauma as Hibo experienced in her own story, but it very much isn't her fight, and it shouldn't be. She's no better placed than I am to tell someone what should or shouldn't happen to their penis, or how it felt when her penis was cut. If men and boys feel that it is a trauma and are angry in the way that Hibo was, they too can choose to break the stigma and talk about it, and they can choose to share their experiences. That's where Hibo's activism started. That is where the best kinds of activism start, because it's not about these traditional roles of "white saviours" walking in and "Westernising" the cultures of other countries. 

If there is something you are passionate about, learn about it, speak about it, raise awareness, raise money - you do you - but there's no legitimate reason to try and take a crap on someone else about causes that they're not acitively seen to be supporting. We only get a certain amount of time, and there is only a certain amount that we can do. You conserve your energy or your spoons for the things you feel the need to address. 

Personally, I think Hibo Wadere is an absolute rock star in the best sense of the phrase. 

This Doesn't Feel Right,

This year has been a bit of a weird one, to say the least, and coming up to NaNoWriMo is no different. It was a number of weeks/months ago now that Hq announced we weren't sanctioning in-person events and that was fine because it was logical and equal and it seemed like things might be a bit better, but not normal, here in the UK. Obviously, that's now not the case. 

When I made the decision to move back to Manchester, it wasn't a decision I took lightly. It was an upheaval of my entire life, and though there were good reasons for it, it has been a trauma, not least because of the logistics of getting everything here, but living half out of a storage locker is challenging to say the least, and all the while I have been wanting to make sure I'm not putting my life on hold. 

With NaNoWriMo upon us, part of me is wishing I could have build a small shed with a portable heater at the bottom of the garden where I could retreat to, and where midnight writing sessions wouldn't disrupt my parents sleeping upstairs, because I like to talk to myself when I write and I like big, loud, clanky keyboards that are not really the best when your "office" space is meters away from other people's bedrooms. My second thought was to look for a cheapish Airbnb to rent for a couple of days/weekends so that I had something like a bolthole to go and stay in whilst I was taking part in the most antisocial of the writing sessions, though I think that the whole talk of national lockdown might have killed that dream, as well. 

The whole thing feels weird and the idea of being stuck in the house twenty-four-seven (because I have no desire to run in this weather) is not appealing in the slightest. My desk is also buried gone, not that there would be floor space for it, since I thought it was buried in the furniture pile at the back of my storage unit. I can't even clamber in there for a bit of peace and writing time. 

This probably reads as a really moany thing; it certainly feels it! I don't want to be whiny about it because I fully understand why the lockdown stuff is happening, but I just find it so hard, and there are certain people I would really rather not be away from whilst all of this is going on. 

I will try and brighten up a little as the month goes on. 

Why does mindfulness colouring work?

Okay, I'm not putting this up for debate. What I'm saying right now is that mindfulness colouring does work to reduce stress levels and make you feel calmer. Now, it's not going to appeal to everyone and it's not going to be something which is enough to reduce some people's stress enough to make you feel "better" but it is a stress-busting method. That's not to say that there are no problems with it, but it does work.

One of the reasons it works is because it's self-soothing. One of the great things about something self-soothing is that it doesn't matter where you are or who you are with, it's possible to reduce your stress levels. That's really important at the moment, given that COVID has made people more isolated than they have been previously. It won't stop you from feeling isolated, but it will be a soothing exercise which will be able to reduce your stress levels. 

One of my favourite things about it though is that it's pretty cheap. It upsets me that because it became such a trend and some of these colouring books were becoming really expensive. Considering the stress that finances cause us, I find that really difficult to accept, but if money is a problem then it is possible to get a children's colouring book pretty cheaply and either crayons, coloured pencils or felt tips from places like the pound shop or Wilko which make it more accessible. I appreciate that it still might be outside of some people's budgets though. 

One of the main reasons that mindfulness colouring works is because it gives us something else to focus upon than all of the stressors in our lives. If all you have to think about for a few minutes is what colour you want to make a certain part of the picture, that's good, because that's not something that should cause us stress. 

When you get to the end of the picture, there's a sense of achievement that should make you feel good. I say should, because there are some issues with this. The sense of achievement at having finished it can be marked with other things. The achievement is good, and you might be really impressed that you don't feel very creative or artistic, but this is a thing that you've created and this is something artistic. If you've planned it, you might have got something that you want to be artwork on your wall, or for your children or for a gift for someone else. Maybe that influenced your colour choices when you were making them! It's great to have that, but it's also not completely necessary. I know of people who have coloured in their pictures and then they either rip them up, as another little stress buster or they put them in the recycling. If you know that you have used none toxic colours, you can shred the paper and use it for things like hedgehog or rabbit bedding. It might be possible to donate long paper shreddings (not out of a cross-cutting machine) to your local wildlife sanctuary for them to make use of. 

Some of us though, and I say us because I'm definitely in this group!, are hypercritical of everything we do and that extended to our self-soothing exercises. There's a little voice in your head like a mental woodpecker and rather than making a tapping noise as it's drilling into a tree, it sits there saying things like, you're not flexible enough for yoga, you're terrible at this, you're making a tit of yourself. When you're in talking cure therapy, it might be saying something like 'the therapist has heard all this before' 'you're just moaning' 'there are people with real problems in the world'. When you've done your mindfulness colouring, it might be saying that you've coloured over the lines in places, chosen the wrong colour in others and that you've wasted a whole lot of time colouring when you could have been dealing with the things that are making you stressed. It might also make you question whether to give someone the piece that you were thinking of giving them, because 'why would they want that?' 'you're not a child; they're not going to put your artwork on the fridge now you're x years old.' We are quite vicious with ourselves sometimes. 

When you speak to yourself like that, try and catch yourself.  Try and remind yourself that if you said that to anyone else, you'd think you were mean, so don't speak to yourself like that! You are not your own punching bag. It takes practice and it sometimes takes energy that we don't think we have, but it's worth saying, I'm not an artist, but I'm proud of what I have done. I was struggling so, at the time when I was colouring, I needed to do something self-soothing, because, after that, I went off and did... whatever is on your to-do list. You can't operate in a constant state of panic for very long. You don't function well in that environment, so giving yourself the time and space to calm down, even just a little, means you can recalibrate and then do things effectively afterwards. 

It's also worth remembering when you colour outside of the lines, you're not using mindfulness colouring to try and get a piece of artwork into the Tate or any other gallery; it's a tool to help you to have a minute and calm yourself. Gifts don't need to be the best pieces of artwork either - you just want them to be thoughtful and you want them to know you've spent your time on something for them. Nothing is more valuable than your time. 

There's something else you can try as well though when you're colouring. It's not supposed to be a high level, highly focused activity, but when you are colouring, try to control your breathing. Try to meditate at the same time, but not the way that we normally see people meditating of sat cross-legged and eyes closed. Think about your breathing, and focus on a good breath in through the nose and then a longer breath out through the mouth. It might seem a little odd, because how can you breathe out more than you breathe in, but it's more, holding your breath and controlling the release of it. You want to try and get away from the ideas of ragged breathing or hyperventilating that you can get into when you're anxious or your scared or you are pushing yourself into that panicked breathing. It doesn't have to be the whole time that you are colouring, but a couple of minutes, or even a minute - an actual, full minute, sixty seconds of commitment - is enough. And it, like a lot of things, will become easier with practice. If your brain tells you that you look or sound like 'a tit' remember that it doesn't matter what you look like in this moment, or what your sound like. You need a minute and you can have a minute. You can do it with your children or with others, and the quiet companionship of it is actually another great assistance. 

It's possible to look at other options as well, like apps for mindfulness colouring. It's something whether you can be looking at your phone - though I would remind you that doing this just before bed won't help you sleep as well as the paper version because of the blue light on screens  - or an iPad or other device which you can get the apps on. I would suggest putting on a 'Do Not Disturb' function or similar, so Facebook, Twitter or whatever else is trying to suck your attention away from it. The great thing about it is it colours in the lines for you and some of them even tell you what colour goes where. You can still pair it with mindfulness breathing exercises and it will still have an effect, though I believe there have been studies which show that the effect of putting pen (or pencil, or crayon) to paper has a different effect to when we're using our phones or typing on a laptop. 

You might be wondering why on Earth I'm talking, or er, writing, about this at the moment, but the reason is that COVID has eaten into the resilience that a lot of people have, and it has stolen some of our coping mechanisms. It has stripped people of friendship networks and human connections that we need and forced on us a solitude which has made many people severely uncomfortable. Sat here in my office in Manchester, I'm trying to tell myself not to worry about what looks like the second wave sweeping over Europe and reports of third waves in other places. I'm doing what I can to look after myself with all the hand washing and mask-wearing, and I'm making masks for the people around me to try and make the people I love safe, but I also know that if a second wave hits, my medication is sorted, mostly, and I'm in a good, well goodish, place mentally. I'm with my parents and my dog, so not lost and lonely in my little flat in London, and I have a few good coping mechanisms that are making me feel better, but I worry about the people around me, and also people that I don't know. Self-control and self-care are good ways to increase your resilience and make you better able to cope with the stress and trauma that we're trying to deal with in our lives at the moment. I talk about mental health a lot, so it seems like a logical extension of that. :) 

Part Three: Let's Talk About the Move

I think it's pretty common knowledge by now that I made the decision to move back to Manchester for financial reasons. I want to own a flat in London before too long, and as things were, it was going to be a long time until I could afford the kind of deposit I need to get the kind of flat that I want to have - something bigger than a shoebox. If I'm not having to spend a lot of money on rent, council tax and a bunch of other things, I'll be able to save a lot more cash towards that deposit. Since everyone's working from home anyway, now seems like the sensible time to do it.

I have a heck of a lot of books that needed to be packed and that made me sad. I had a lot of dresses to pack which made me feel pretty depressed. I had to pack all of my cake-making things and that made me feel pretty bored. All of the packing was pretty difficult, whether it was because of the emotion of packing away certain things and the emotion of getting rid of certain things. Whether it was having to think about getting rid of something because I didn't want to keep the emotional baggage that came with it, or just putting other things that I love and that feel like a part of my home away for the next year. 

The whole process of moving was always going to be sucky, but I seem to have been packing for months and then all of a sudden my parents were picking up the van in Manchester, driving down to London in it and the next morning we had a group of three moving men turn up to help get everything out of the building. Thankfully one of my friends also dived in to help on the logistics side of things, because the building I was moving out of was a bit of a crazy one.

One of the moving men was one of the guys who helped me to move into the flat three years ago. He came in, asked what was going and then just got stuck in. One of them was this young lad who was really sweet and quite timid, but a really good hard worker and the last one was more interested in talking than working and kept asking questions I wasn't really comfortable with. He was arrogant and he was clumsy and if I book in with them again to help me move into a new place when I get it, I'm going to ask that he isn't a part of the team. He did stupid things like packing fragile boxes which said 'DO NOT SQUASH' under other things, knocked things over by walking into them and dropped a few things as well. He was asking my mum if I was single, and if I was interested in men from other countries with this look on his face, and thankfully my mum knows me pretty well, so she told him I wasn't, even though it's not something which crosses my mind, but I wasn't interested in him, I wasn't interested in thinking about meeting anyone, and I was drugged up to my eyeballs with anti-depressants to try and cope with the stress of moving. He made me feel nothing but uncomfortable anyway. 

I had been worrying that everything wouldn't fit into the van, but thankfully, we managed to get rid of a few furniture bits to a neighbour the night before which really helped, because they were things I would have wanted to get rid of anyway, and thankfully my dad is a world-class Tetris master, so he was able to pack everything in and only use about half of the space in the van which was good. It did make me think I could have spent less on a smaller van, but these things happen and it's always better to overestimate than underestimate. I was just really glad I didn't spring for the Luton because we really wouldn't have needed it. 

I'm not going to say it all went smoothly. There was a touch of traffic on the way back and the M6 toll services seemed to be getting further and further away at just the point where we needed to pull in for petrol, then when we did pull in for petrol, Dad came back to the van with a coffee for himself and told us they had Teapigs, then Mum dropped her peppermint tea on the floor when we got just three steps out of the door because her mask flew off and it just threw her completely, but the garage was nice enough to replace it for her and the rest of the drive wasn't too bad. Even getting everything off the van and into the storage unit wasn't too traumatic, though I have no idea where anything is now, so a job for another day will be organising it all a bit more, but there we go. It happened, we got back in one piece and Teddy was over the moon to see us when I went to pick him up, so we can't really complain too much about that. I'm going to have to look at options for how to do the move back down south though because I'm not sure any of us are really up to that drive again. 

Late one for the end of camp,

Striking The Tents

Camp is over, and part of me is really glad. 

Yesterday was the first time after thirty one days I wasn't trying to fit posting a blog at the optimum time into my life and honestly, it was great. Weird, but pretty freeing. I was still writing, because I still have my just after New Year's resolution of writing every day to keep up and I still have 4 the words challenges to do, plus digitising a whole bunch of drafts and false starts in case I want them at some point, but it doesn't really matter if I do that past ten at night when everyone in the house has gone to sleep. It doesn't really matter if there are typos or words missing, because that's not a one and done draft with only Grammarly to check it over. Thankfully, no one is going to read that, or not any time soon anyway. Yesterday was a pretty good day because it gave me some mental breathing room where I didn't need to think about what to write, when to write it and whether it was coming across in my "usual style". 

Surprisingly, Camp has also been tough because of a loss of community. Now, that's not me saying that without in person events I don't feel like NaNoWriMo has a community, because we do. We kind of have several. There's the ML crowd, the Facebook crowd, the sprint leads crowd, the Twitter crowd, the forum crowd and the friends you met whilst travelling to a different group crowd, as well, and I'm probably missing a whole bunch of others, but particularly for London, I feel like our community values the events that we run and values the time we spend together in the basement of Pret on Hanover Square and I would be lying if I said I wasn't missing them. I miss getting a filter coffee and a breakfast sandwich, sitting with my friends, debating whether the music was at the wrong volume and moaning about the wifi and whether the plugs work. I miss us rearranging some of the basement to make us fit a bit better or to be able to be more sociable. 

I talk about NaNo at work so people know that when I'm busy, it's not just work busy, it's life busy. I also want them to know if I'm tired, it might not just be a lack of sleep, but also writing can be quite taxing on my brain, so it can take me longer to think things through. The pressure of NaNoWriMo and the competition of it, even if it is only competing against yourself, gives me a solid kick up the bum to get writing, but it's also a long, exhausting trek and I'm always glad of a bit of a rest afterwards. It's also really nice to keep writing because I want to as opposed to being because I have to. This month was the second time we went through a competition in the pandemic, and I'm really glad for it, because both have kind of acted like practice runs for November. Having a dry run at it has been really useful, because it's given us time to think about what we need before November and see how restrictions might be. For some, that might have scared the pants off of them for what this November will look like, but for me, the practice actually makes me feel calmer and more confident that, whilst it isn't what we would choose and it's not what we asked for, we can get through this and it won't suck. Or it won't completely suck. 

Everything is changing so quickly at the moment that I have no idea what November will look like, but if it looks anything close to what camp has, I'm not worried. Everything is a whole new experience at the moment, so if it means more time on Zoom calls, Skype and Facebook rooms or whatever, so be it. If we have to be together wearing masks, then that's how it will be. What I'm personally starting to doubt though is the return to  normalcy we might have been expecting as this call began in March. 

I know that this is going to bring unexpected challenges for some and unexpected delights for others. I know that we'll miss out on things like our favourite drinks in certain venues, the pumpkin ravioli in The Mad Hatter Hotel - I will never get over how beautiful that was, and how it made me realise that chestnuts are one of the most beautiful foods in the world - or sipping mulled wine together in Soho or Angel. It's more than just the food and the booze, of course, because there are some of our people that we only see in November and not seeing them for two years was not what we bargained for when we hugged or waved goodbye last November, but whatever happens, we will bare it the very best that we can, because it is what we have to do. 

Man's Not Hot

No, I'm not going to quote the song any further, I promise, but it seemed like an appropriate title for this blog. 

When I started Camp NaNoWriMo this month, I was planning on writing thirty-one blogs about writing over the course of the month, but then this blog has always been a bit of a blend between my life, my writing and mental health issues, so it seemed natural to veer off into that, but this particular blog is about writing and it's about characters. I'm going to specifically talk about characters we write to inspire attraction in the reader. 

Inevitably, the kind of people we are attracted to is probably going to translate into a novel even if we try and avoid it, though writers in historic fiction will research and look at what was attractive at the time, common hairstyles, how people were built and how they dressed. It would be illogical to write a female character in the Victorian era who was upper class and extremely chaste, then have the Love Interest (LI) or MMC (Male Main Character) be most attracted to her ankles or something which wouldn't be on display because of the clothing that chaste Victorian women wore. Whilst there is diversity within attraction, it's possible to borrow from the Peter Kay joke about Manfred Mann's song Do Wah Diddy Diddy, a girl snapping her fingers and shuffling her feet looking good, and that not seeming to make any sense. 

Some things are timeless classics. The tall, dark and handsome thing seems to have stood the test of time pretty well, even if the understanding of it has changed a little over time. Mr Darcy has always been a good MMC for the tall, dark and handsome thing, but more modern audiences struggle to connect with the idea of his pride and arrogance, and it can be difficult to forgive that, despite it being a product of the time and social context that he lived in. 

There are characters now where we think in the book, yeah, he sounds beautiful, and then they are lost when translated to screen, such as Edward Cullen. I was disappointed at best when Robert Pattinson was cast in that role, even though I like him in other things he's been in. Maybe it was just everything else that was wrong with those movies that didn't help, but I've even seen descriptions where I question what the author was thinking making someone a love interest in a story because I don't and can't relate to the main character (MC) for finding them as irresistible as they do. It's as though someone wrote Joe Exotic as an MMC in a romance novel; I just wouldn't get it. Anything with a mullet and that's me done though, I guess. 

Then again, that can be a difference in culture - perhaps in the Deep South in America, he's seen as a hot option - and also to do with time periods. When you say tall, dark and handsome to women of some generations, or even just different women, they might think of someone with rippling large muscles and body hair as thick as a gorilla's, whereas I might think toned, solid shoulders and tone down the hairiness a lot of degrees. 

We have to accept that readers are going to have a different image of our characters in their heads to what is in ours, and that's okay. We have to accept that the MMC or LI character is not going to be considered an attractive description by everyone, but it's why looser descriptions aren't always a bad thing. If the reader can flesh out some of the details themselves, that can be helpful in some ways. 

Of course, there's no right answer though. There was a time when a ginger character, like Annie, would have been seen as the most undesirable orphan, and yet now people love ginger hair. I'm a bottle ginger because it suits my skin tone better than the flat chestnut brown I am naturally, but also there are people like Prince Harry and Ed Sheeran, whose ginger hair is seen as a massive asset. Things will change, people's tastes are different and if not, well the world just wouldn't work, would it, but it's something to think about as you paint a picture in the head of your dear reader about the different characters in your novel. It's also okay to write about a character as the LI who wouldn't be considered physically attractive, because physical attraction is only a part of what makes us fall in love, and it doesn't have to be a very important part. In the Netflix film Tall Girl, the Main Female Character has a very specific idea in her head of what she wants, physically, and yet the *SPOILER ALERT* ending shows that she sees that as far less important. 

So, this is my last blog from Camp NaNoWriMo and must be the first time I have ever achieved my Camp NaNoWriMo goal, so I'm really proud of that. I'm also really thrilled with the number of people who have been reading my blog as this month is currently my second highest readership ever, and it's on track to be the first by the end of today. I'm crossing my fingers a bit because that would also feel like a pretty huge achievement, so we'll see. 

I've made changes throughout the month, like remembering that a lot of people who read what I write don't actually hang out on Twitter, so whilst it's become my favourite spot, I need to remember that Facebook is still a thing and share links across the both of them. I've also realised that posting late at night just to make sure I get the blog for the day posted doesn't really work out so well, so I've been making an effort to write and post at more civilised times of the day. 

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to keep up posting one blog a day, especially as there have been times this month where I have stared at the blank screen and wondered what the hell I was going to write, but I am committed to making more of an effort to continue writing on the blog and hopefully also launching the charlieswrite.co.uk website soon, though that will depend on how well I get through every other thing on my To-Do list as well.

It's been a really interesting month because making time for writing isn't always easy and having the capacity to write is not always easy, but actually, it's okay to hold your hands up and say I can't do this right now, and I have done that once this month. Most of us don't have the luxury of being able to give up our full-time jobs to solely focus upon writing, not that I think I would if I had the option, so fitting it in around every other thing in life is always going to be a struggle, but what has been really valuable to me this month is I have found that I can do it. I can find the time, I can find the energy, most of the time anyway, and I can make my writing a priority, even in the middle of a house move, work chaos, life chaos and a mental health lapse that is still not completely resolved. It is possible, it's not painful and it's good for me, so I'm going to take that lesson going forward and hopefully remember it in November as well so I know I don't have to do things like twenty-four hour marathon sprints on the first day to write as much as I can whilst aiming for finishing in less than my previous personal best. I'm not saying I won't do that, but I am saying I don't have to. 

A lot could change over the next few months, but what is extremely exciting to me at the moment is having the time to figure that out, think of a plan and exactly three months from today will be a Saturday, getting ready for one of the weirdest NaNoWriMo's ever. I'm going to have to educate my mum on Annual Pizza Day. 

Reasons Not to Wear a Mask

Okay, so we're not even a week into the mandatory mask rule and I know that some people are finding it difficult, some people are complaining and some people think they are geniuses for wearing masks made either of netting or that look like they were made out of a string vest because they're complying with the rules, apparently, without actually paying due care and attention to why the rules are in place. No, this isn't a list of reasons you shouldn't be wearing a mask, nor is it going to be a rant of insults about people who don't wear them. I'm sorry if either of those things disappoints you, but read on and it should make some sense. 

When COVID first happened, unlike fetch, masks were in short supply, such that even care homes staff couldn't get their hands on the vital pieces of Personal Protective Equipment. Non-medical members of NHS staff were entering hospitals and working in them without the proper attire to protect themselves and those close to them, and there was a general discouragement of wearing masks which, as I understand it, was for two reasons. One of those reasons was a supply and demand issue. There simply weren't enough to go around, and it is why we saw the prices of PPE and sanitiser skyrocket. Everyone wanted it, so what little there was could be charged sky-high prices to get hold of. The other reason is probably a lot more simple though. The more flexibility people have been given, the more that they have pushed it. If the government had stated: Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives, but if you must go out, wear a mask, a lot of people who stayed home would have donned a face covering and gone out even when the virus was killing hundreds of people per day and we would probably have been in a more severe phase of the lockdown than we are now. 

As things have moved on, supply chains have sorted themselves out a lot more and it's possible to get reusable masks and sanitiser more widely and more cheaply, but also, more and more people are being prompted to resume life as close to normal as they can do. Now that we're piling people back into pubs, bars, restaurants etc, even with social distancing, there needs to be some other form of prophylactic course of action. Masks and face coverings are that option. 

There's a meme going around about having to wear glasses and a face mask and being entitled to condensation, and it's true, they can steam your glasses up. Most people are using their masks incorrectly, as well, but actually, even the improper use of a mask is going to cut infection rates, so surely it's better to have a lot of people do something badly rather than a small percentage do it well. Some of the examples of the wrong I have personally seen are touching the outside of the mask whilst wearing it, pulling it on top of the head or under the chin when it's not needed, keeping it in a pocket without any form of the bag (probably right next to a germy phone) or wearing a mask so that it covers only the mouth and not the nose. I've also seen one that covered the nose and top lip, but not the bottom and that did not look comfortable. There are also times when you should change your mask and people don't. If you've worn it for more than a few hours - I believe the current view is about four - have coughed or sneezed into the mask or have touched your face through the mask, you should change it. This is what I mean about having them in a bag. 

Women who use reusable Cloth Sanitary Protection will be used to the idea of carrying a wet bag, but even something like a scrub bag - a cloth bag that you can throw into the washing machine with everything inside of it - or a plastic sandwich bag would do. You keep a bag for used things, in this case, masks, and keep your new, fresh, unworn items in another, preferably airtight. If you need to cough or sneeze, try to do so somewhere where you're not going to spread droplets onto other people and cover your nose and mouth with a tissue. You know the whole phrase of catch it, bin it, kill it? It was literally made for viruses which are transmissible in this way. If you're at home, or somewhere you don't need to wear a mask, cough or sneeze into your elbow instead of your hands, because you're less likely to then transfer that liquid onto another surface, and you can still use sanitiser on your elbow, even if it makes you feel like a weirdo, and of course, wash your hands - and elbow - as soon as you can with warm soapy water. Coughing fits can come on unexpectedly, as can sneezes and sometimes, people spray spittle when they speak - this is what masks are trying to stop, but if you have just been on a five-minute coughing spree, your mask is likely saturated with vapour/ droplets of sputum, saliva or whatever. You want that out of the way as soon as you can. 

I'm a relatively lucky spud, because whilst I have mild asthma and haven't been running anything like as much as I should have been, I have been able to get away with wearing a mask without problems, but my granddad has COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder). It's not something I'm an expert in, so I won't pretend to be, but I can say this, he can be out of breath getting up from his chair, his breathing sounds laboured all of the time and his hands are very often a blue-y purple that means that they're not getting enough oxygen. He tried to wear a mask. He tried to get along with wearing them. He is a very stubborn man, but he tried, and he can't. Some people cannot cope with the feel of them, some feel they cannot breathe in them. It's not a simple case of not wanting to wear them, and I can't say it's something I can explain, but whether these reasons are physical or psychological, some people are simply unable to wear a mask. Some people are trying their best to come up with different solutions, some people are trying forms of exposure therapy to lessen the panic that they feel in masks, so they can wear them. This means there is no right answer and no one size fits all. That annoying ass hat you've seen not wearing a mask might not simply be flouting the rules, but may have a genuine reason not to wear one, and that's kind of none of everyone else's business, so maybe just try and be kind and understanding in case?

Granted, there is a limit to that. If someone is not wearing a mask, walking too close to you and coughing in your face, that's obviously an issue, but some of the issues which people have with masks might not be visible or audible. If you stood near my granddad, you'd hear him rasping and it might be obvious to most people that he has long term issues with his chest, but you can't tell by looking at someone that they're autistic and triggered by things touching their face, or any of the other perfectly valid reasons that someone cannot wear them. Whilst I appreciate the frustration with the crowds who are making lace masks that miss the point completely, or the angry mob of 'I know my rights' - thankfully more of an American issue that one we face here - there has been a tendency, both online and with the average Joe or Joanne in the street to assume that anyone whose mouth and nose are on display falls into one of those two categories and it is simply not that simple. 

TL;DR - Wear a mask if you can, don't if you can't and accept that not everyone is the same. Also, if you can wear a fun mask, do it. Treat it like an accessory for your face and it makes it a lot more fun. 

Oooh, let's call this the epilogue, ha... One issue I have found with having to wear masks frequently, particularly when they make you a little bit red-faced and sweating like a pig left alone with David Cameron, is that they can easily cause breakouts of spots, which is so annoying. I mean, sure, if we are heading for a stage where it's all masks all the time, whatever, but I don't think they are, and I don't want to show my face in public when my jawline is underlined in red, so I've found that carrying handy wipes or a small packet of baby wipes can be good to have a bit of a refresh when I take a face covering off and it seems to have done the trick for the moment. And that, gents, is why ladies have to carry large handbags; we have to be prepared for everything. And with that, I'm done talking about masks. For today anyway. I'm sure I'll be back to talking about them when I get back to making them in the next couple of days. 

Part Two

Before I lived in my flat in Sutton, I had previously lived alone in a little studio around the corner in a place called Hackbridge and I realised that living in a studio did not work for me. 

As studios went, it was a decent size, but the kitchen was really small and the backroom was really small, and ridiculous because someone put the wrong pump into the shower when they fitted it, so to get it to run, you had to take the showerhead off of the wall and hold it low in the shower tray until it came on. There was a decent amount of storage for such a little place and I had my own parking space, but the idea of the sofa also being your bed didn't work for me, because I'm only just okay with the thing of making my bed each morning before leaving the house, never mind having to make it back into a sofa each morning and then remake the bed each night. I moved out of there because the landlady was making my life hell on earth for a few weeks, and I figured it was a good time to look for something cheaper and save towards a deposit on my own place... This was about five years ago, so it tells you how well that went. 

After a "false start" of a move that still gives me palpitations thinking about it, I moved in with two blokes in their thirties who were professionals and mostly everything ticked along just fine. I say mostly - the landlord, who was one of the blokes, and I butted heads a few times over a few different things, but the biggest thing was his refusal to call me by the name that I asked him to, Charlie, and his insistence on using my full name. He argued it was about respect, and I argued it was anything butt. He also had a thing about putting his face right near anything I was cooking if he thought that it smelt good and that just upsets me. I don't like people's faces near my food. After a year of living there, I realised that having housemates just doesn't really suit me, and the hour and a half plus commute to my new job was a killer as well, so I decided it was time to move again. 

When I found the flat in Sutton, I was being given the run around by the people who were organising the viewings, but thankfully they listed it with another estate agent who wasn't requiring block bookings when I was in work and took me to see my flat and the flat opposite one evening. I'd been to see the building before when I was looking for my first studio, though that was in the private section of the building, and surprisingly I would have paid more per month for that studio than I have ever paid for my one-bedroom flat. 

They were getting new carpets in and painting done and it was all going to be, I thought, quite lovely. I was looking forward to having the bigger of the two flats, but I had a strict timeline. It was September, so my parents were going to Greece for two weeks and I had my little man Teddy to look after, so the move had to happen at a very specific time, or it wouldn't be happening at all. Unfortunately, the dates didn't work out for me to have the bigger flat, but in some ways, that's been a blessing. 

In 'Part One' of this blog, I mentioned the light in the flat. It's amazing. Granted, at five in the morning during the summer it makes me wish I had blackout blinds and a sleep mask, but it's great to be able to throw open the blinds and have the sun pouring in, and it seems to have been sunny pretty often whilst I've lived there. I've crashed out on the living room floor treating it like a balcony with the huge windows open, enjoying the sun and the sounds and the breeze, I've sat in my armchair by the open windows and read Pride and Prejudice cover to cover. I have loved a lot of the time in that flat because I have been able to spend some good time by myself.

A couple of NaNoWriMos ago, I put my big wooden chopping board on top of the cooker, propped my laptop up on there and had a wireless mouse and a gaming keyboard on the breakfast bar. It was right next to the kettle and I kept tea making things by my right side, biscuits and snacks by my left and there I was comfortable enough to crack through my first every twenty thousand word day (writing twenty thousand words in twenty-four hours). The last NaNoWriMo, I had my coffee machine sat next to me, with the hot plate keeping my filter coffee warm in the jug as I wrote. I was in my element. 

I felt safe there because there was an intercom for the door and several flights of stairs up to my place. That being said, I have struggled with my anxiety because I've been too isolated because central London and my friends are so far away and because of how noisy the high street can be at night, but that could happen anywhere. The space I had there meant I was able to have people come and stay and I loved that. 

I've loved having a wardrobe full of Lindy Bop dresses, wearing lipstick that some people consider far too red and having a cupboard full of twenty different kinds of tea, all of which are open at once because I love them all and like to decide what I want like I'm in a coffee shop. I love having many 'favourite' mugs which make me happy for all sorts of reasons, and I love that I can shut the blinds, put my headphones in and dance around in my underwear because it's my place and no one has a key to be able to let themselves in. I've loved being able to be my happy ridiculous self without having anyone to explain it to, and it's something I will miss. I'm going to miss choosing my JJs (pyjamas) based solely on what I'm going to be comfortable in and not who might run into my on a midnight loo run, who might come into my room to wake me up (I ignore alarm clocks with alarming frequency) or how long I'm sitting downstairs in the living room with my dad, and whether one of the neighbours might come around to borrow something from Dad's garage and I might have to answer the door. Being able to do whatever you want, within reason, is really freeing. 

The flat has also been good because of its location. Whilst Sutton is a very hilly high street, it has three large supermarkets, a big Waterstone's a library, several gyms, Greggs, coffee shops - both chains and independents - a massive TK Maxx and so much more. It has been incredible to have all of that almost literally on my doorstep. If I need something to make dinner, I can stop at Morrisson's on my way home; I walk past it to get from the train station to the flat. If I want to go for a pint with a friend, there are about seven or eight pubs and a couple of bars between the train station and my flat, and if I need almost anything, Wilko is around the other side of the building. I was home for six days whilst I cleaned, packed and patched up the paintwork on some of the walls and I was in Wilko every day picking up food for Teddy because it's the cheapest place that stocks his food (half the price of Waitrose and two thirds what Tesco charges. Given it's a four-box pack and he eats up to three boxes a day, that means getting it at the best price is a serious thing). We ended up having to pack twenty-two boxes of dog food into the van to come home with, but it was worth it. Also, compared to everything else that was in there, that wasn't really so bad. 

I've loved the area, loved the people and if it were possible, it would probably be pretty high on my list of where to move to when it comes time to go back to London, but I'm trying to be realistic and that means Sutton is likely to be out of my price range considering what I want and being on a Civil Service salary, but I'm glad to have lived there. I'm really glad to have had the experiences of living there and it makes me look at other properties differently. Previously the lack of a lift wouldn't have phased me, because I was two floors up in Hackbridge and that never really seemed to bother me, but here the stairs have been exhausting. Sometimes, that's been a good thing, because when it was raining, I did some stair running to build my fitness and that really worked, but as a day to day thing, I could do without it. 

I've also realised though, I am too content by myself to consider buying something bigger and making myself need to rent out a 'spare room' as I know other people have done. Although you have the opportunity to vet people and make sure that you're setting the house rules, I think it's a level of stress that I just don't need, so I'm going to be really conscious about the costs of running a flat or property and if I would need to think about a lodger, it's just not going to be worth it, in my eyes. 

Anyway, the only thing left to do now is pop down, finish the painting, throw a few things into the rubbish that didn't make it yesterday because we just wanted to get on the road and grab a coat, a blow-up mattress and a blanket, then hand the keys back to the landlords and come home. For most intents and purposes, I no longer have an address in London, and after so long, that's really weird, but here's to a new start and going home soon. 

The Very Last Thing I Want To Be Doing Right Now,

Is writing a blog, but I made a commitment to myself that this Camp NaNo I was going to stick to it and achieve my goal, so I am writing every day and I am posting a blog every day if it kills me, and today I think it might. 

I knew that I would struggle to sleep last night, but I decided I didn't need a sleeping tablet or Valium before I went to bed, and by the time I realised how terribly the attempting sleep thing was going, it was too late for a medication based intervention, because by that point I would not have got up on time if I took it, so I fell asleep somewhere around three to half-past three this morning, after having finishing packing most of the flat, taking some stuff downstairs and getting rid of some furniture to my neighbour's son. When my alarm went off at seven-thirty this morning, the furthest thing from what I wanted to do would have been to get up and get my life moved out of my flat, but the van was downstairs and there were moving guys coming to help and it was an expensive undertaking to get that far, so there was no going back on it by then, so I was just really glad that my mum made me a mug of tea and brought it to me whilst I came around. When we called my dad - there wasn't enough space for us all to stay at the flat - to suggest he get coffee from McDonald's, he also picked up egg McMuffins and that made functioning a bit easier, but then I could feel a panic attack coming on and that did not make anything easier, so it was another day for Diazepam. I warned the movers I was on medication and might be a bit dopey, and they were cool and within three hours, most of everything was downstairs and on the van. We had been dreading it for weeks and it was still a mammoth task and a really long day, but getting everything out was the biggest hurdle in my head and all of that went well. 

The next hurdle, which I was marginally less worried about, was my dad driving the van full of my stuff out of London and all the way back up to Manchester. The motorways were pretty clear except one section of the A something something where there was an accident, but even that wasn't too bad and we were clear of it quickly, and we made it back to Manchester in pretty good time. 

Hurdle number three, which could have been a nightmare, was getting everything off the van and into my storage unit. Well, aside from the things I needed to bring back to the house. At first, it looked like there were no trolleys to be able to move everything, then we found one, and then my mum managed to find someone going into the other bit of the building and brought a second. With a little system of me sorting what was storage and what wasn't, Mum packing and pushing a trolley to the unit and then my dad emptying the trolley into the unit, we did pretty well actually. and everything was unloaded in a bit less than forty-five minutes, so we could head home, pick up the puppy (he's not a puppy, he's six, but he's our puppy), snuggle him and love him and tell him we missed him whilst he wriggled and barked at us and licked my face, have cheese on toast for dinner and finally shower down. 

The building I used to live in is hot and pretty airless, and we've been doing a lot all day. Even sitting in the van is a bit trying, because three adults with elbows doesn't go smoothly and something about the seats was making my hips and knees ache, or maybe I was tense in the same position for too long... but either way, it was a long old day and I am so glad I'm back in Manchester, in my jjs (I call PJs jjs, get over it) and just getting ready to tuck myself into bed because I am beat. Also, my phone was basically dead on the way because my dad needed Waze to get out of London and find the M25, so I couldn't write from the van like I tried. Tomorrow, I'll write part two and the reasons I will miss the flat. 

Part One

Tonight is likely going to be the last night I will spend in my flat in Sutton. Part of me is really sad about that and I'll be writing about that tomorrow, likely whilst we're in the van driving back to Manchester and hoping to avoid the traffic, but part of me isn't actually all that sad, so today I am going to write about that, because I need to remind myself that leaving tomorrow is actually a good thing, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like it right at this moment. 

For the past few years, I've lived in a flat on the high street of a town called Sutton. It's a tower block opposite a park with a high street on the other side of the building. I wanted the flat across the corridor, which was slightly more expensive, but slightly bigger, had a bathtub and a space I could have turned into a reading nook and it overlooked the park. I got the smaller, cheaper flat with the shower and the view over the high street, but it does get good sunlight, even if the view of the car park is a bit rubbish. The building is nice enough, but I'm in the section which was designated for 'Affordable Housing' which is separated from the rest of the block because this is owned by a housing association. I'm on the Intermediate Market Rent scheme to save money for a deposit for my own place.

Being in this section of the building means you're not allowed to access the car park, the gym (even if you paid the same additional fee that the 'private' section pay) or the bin store where you can separate out recycling and our lift starts at Floor 1, but the entrance is on Lower Ground, so it's a hike up two floors worth of stairs every time you enter the building. I get that we rent flats in this building by choice, but it's 20% cheaper than the market value of the area (the point of IMR) and you don't realise how knackering it's going to be after a hard day at work, with all of your shopping bags, or even for things like getting a new freezer delivered, because everything has to go up and down that one flight of stairs... Previously, the owners of the 'private' side of the building have allowed some access to the lifts on the other side of the building, which go straight to reception, but even that is no longer permitted, because of accusations of damage being caused to the lifts by residents from this side of the building. Part of me would love to point out to them that if they can pinpoint that its residents from this side, they must know who it is and should penalise that person accordingly as opposed to everyone in this section of the building. It wouldn't even by so annoying if the guy wasn't in this side of the building, the car park didn't attach to this side of the building and the buildings weren't actually, oh wait! one building... This whole thing is tedious, annoying and pretty bogus because it's only affecting those on affordable housing schemes. There was a mum with twin toddlers who was threatened with a call to the police if she kept using the "other" lifts to get her kids and their stroller downstairs safely. 

That aside, this building is WARM. It's a big concrete structure so it absorbs heat and it can feel pretty stuffy and airless in here, but as I mentioned, I'm on the high street side of the building. Sutton hasn't really got any clubs anymore, but it has bars and those bars are busy and they get loud and then the people coming out of them get loud. Every. Night. Of. The. Week. I'm all for a good time, especially at the weekend, but I don't like listening to out of tune happy birthday on a Sunday night at midnight or the two in the morning calls of 'FOOTBOLLS COM-IN OMMM' as people drunkenly stagger to the bus stops at the opposite end of the high street after getting bladdered on a Tuesday night. I especially despise that the route between my building and the high street is down a relatively large street which hosts the disabled parking bays for the area, but which seems to offer enough privacy for, sorry, I can't call them gentlemen, blokes to relieve themselves up the wall so that it smells like a urinal in the morning. It's also occasionally a game of dodge the vomit pile and that's just more than I can bear in the morning. Again, all for a good time, but one where bodily fluids of any variety are not left publicly displayed is much more preferable. 

My least favourite thing about Sutton is the hill. I hate that hill. Given how much I loved San Francisco, you might expect that I would love that long and steep hill down the high street, especially because I'm most of the way up it, so getting to the train station each more is not as hideous as if I lived at the bottom of the hill, nor do I need to hike it every day, but the McDonald's, and the ASDA and the Sainsbury's are all at the bottom of the hill, and Morrisson's just doesn't stock everything. 

Actually, the above is only my second least favourite thing. My current least favourite thing is proximity to my ex-partner's parents' house and the fact that his mother and sister work in an office building close to here, so I've seen them a couple of times. I also ran into him a couple of times in the Morrisson's pre-March so being back here gives me an unwelcome sense of discomfort that he might pop up somewhere. It shouldn't make me uncomfortable, because this is my home and I know that, but at the same time, a bit of distance from it is welcome. 

There are probably plenty of other things I could moan about on here, like how my sofa drove me insane (but that's now gone!) and the window being as vast as it is in the living room made planning the room difficult, but my final moan is about the kitchen. I bake, I cook and I like to make things in batches and then freeze them. The kitchen is tiny. I stored caking things along the top of the wall units, in one of the few cupboards, on the breakfast bar and had another unit to pack them into as well, and it still was not enough. When I did the food shopping, I had to be careful not to buy too much or it might not fit in the fridge or the cupboard doors might not close properly. It drove me insane. The washer-dryer is built in where there should be a cupboard as is the fridge, so once you factor in pans, plates and all that, there wasn't a great amount of space left for anything else and I like having a decent supply of staple foods, so that made it quite tricky. 

I feel like that is enough moaning about the flat though. It's not been awful. It was the right price and it was close to work and it's been home for three years, so I have to be really glad of that, and I am, but now is a good time to be moving out. 

Pixie Wasn't Well

Today was a bit terrifying.

Around two years ago, whilst in San Francisco for The Night of Writing Dangerously, I invested in the second most expensive piece of computer kit I have ever bought myself, otherwise known as buying myself a new laptop. It was a Pixelbook and I named it Pixie, because everything in my life gets a name. I name dresses pretentious things, name typewriters after Greek gods and goddesses and I name my computers after their models - except the Toshibas I've had. They've been Craptop one and Craptop 2: Return of the Craptop. So, I have Pixie, Prodigy and Pie (iPad). 

Pixie is a bit of an extension of myself by this point, because I'm either watching films or TV series, scrolling through Twitter or writing with her, or a mixture of all three. Pie occasionally steps in, but the external keyboard of the iPad feels much the same as Pixie's keyboard so it's not even like I can switch between them to change things up. Prodigy has been in London for the last few months, so I haven't really used it, but that's going to change in the next few days because it's moving to Manchester and I'm going to have to organise the office and sewing room a little bit better. Thankfully I'm not expecting to keep Kronus (20th Century Imperial called The Empire), Hermes (my first typewrite - a 1960s Olympia which inspired the Greek name), Aphrodite (Sharps Font Writer and the Sister of Hermes), Apollo (Brother Electric Typewriter) and Hephaestus (Brother Electric Typewriter) in the office as well, because otherwise it might all get a bit cramped... Yes, I'm really weird, and I know it. 

Anyway, weird names for things aside, when I woke up this morning I tried to turn Pixie's screen on to look at Facebook marketplace since I listed a bunch of furniture, and she wouldn't come on. I was watching Lucifer last night and then she wasn't charging overnight, so I figured she was just out of juice. Twelve hours later and I'm reading every instruction on the Google Help Page just to try and figure out what's wrong with her and, most importantly, how I fix her. There were a lot of suggestions of press this for 60 seconds and then unplug and plug back in laptop first then into the wall and wait thirty minutes and honestly, it started to feel like the sort of old wives tales your nana tells (or that might just have been my nana. And my grandma thinking about it...) because surely there wasn't something timing how long I was clicking different buttons and because I waited twenty nine minutes not thirty it was having a grump and saying no. Thankfully I realised that in my distracted state of thinking my most used and very much loved piece of computer kit was done, finito, bye bye, I wasn't reading one of the instructions properly. It was press and hold one button whilst tapping the power button. Did that, and the little colourful G popped onto the screen and was thanking God. I've had to use my phone to Google everything today and it's annoying. 

I realise that it's a very 'first world problems' kind of problem and I know I'm extremely privileged/ spoilt to have access to the computers that I do, the space to keep them and ability to run them etc. I appreciate that I'm a certified (or certifiable) member of the geek squad because I am obsessed with them, but today did scare the hell out of me thinking I might have lost Pixie. I'm so used to writing with her and 4thewords and I'm not a big fan of change, so I was kind of worried that not having her would make writing really difficult, or impossible until I got home to Manchester where Craptop 2 is being used as a TV. 

Anyway, that's my self indulgent moan of the day out there and over with, particularly because the fear has passed and I think it was actually more to do with an update that I should have downloaded than any real hardwear problems or anything like that, so I'll just have to remind myself to keep an eye on that and not keep letting her battery die completely, which also means I probably need to order another new charger, though that's, thankfully, cheaper than buying a whole new laptop. 

Today Was a Day When Writing Got Difficult,

Because I had no idea of what to write about and I had no idea when I was going to get time to write either. 

Currently, there are a lot of boxes across my flat and some things which still need to be packed. I've been pottering about trying to get as much done as I could, but I didn't get a lot of sleep last night so focusing on anything for more than a few minutes has been a bit difficult. 

I'm going to head to sleep in the hope that I can write something interesting tomorrow. 

This Stung A Little To Write

I've started a couple of blogs recently with 'I cannot believe I'm writing this' or 'I don't want to be writing this' and I have put a lot of things into this that I never expected to. Sometimes, writing this blog feels cathartic, because it's like finding a value to my stress container and just letting it all come out, and others, well other times it feels like drawing a knife across my skin and letting all the of my stress out, but it's painful. It's not just a moment of pain either, it's all the time afterwards feeling raw. Maybe a knife is a wrong metaphor; maybe it's more like coarse sandpaper. It hurts letting it out, and then it hurts as it's healing, but it does heal. I will just say that I've not been cutting myself or hurting myself with sandpaper. I have spent the last few weeks with cuts and scraps up my arms but that's because we've been doing work in the garden and the plants aren't so fond of being deadheaded or chopped back so they don't look like a jungle, so they scratch the heck out of my arms and legs. 

Anyway, there was one thing that, when it happened, I pretty much thought I would never write about, but I'm thinking about writing about it, so I thought, why not just write it and then if you don't want to post it, that's okay. We'll see what tomorrow brings as to whether this blog sees the light of day. 

A few years ago I was in a relationship. At the time, I thought it was amazing, but looking back on it, it was pretty rocky. We were both pretty volatile, probably pretty bad at communicating and really, we were both young. We did a lot together and I have a lot of memories with him and up until recently, they were memories I could still look back on and smile because we were over the worst of the post-breakup stuff and we were doing well at being friends. Complicated friends, yes, but friends all the same. 

I'd gone past the stage of being like J.D. in Scrubs when he tells Turk that he misses him so much it hurt sometimes, though it still came out a bit when I was drunk because I was lonely and when I was with him when things were good, I wasn't lonely. I feel like I have been lonely for the past few years now and that is not a comfortable position to be in. Over the past few years we managed to settle back into a relationship where I could tell him anything and, I thought, he could tell me anything, or we could just go somewhere and do something and if there were moments or periods of silence, hell, that was fine. He cared about when I was struggling mentally. He was happy for me when I got the job I had been wanting for years, and I was happy for him when he bought his new house. We were weird, but we were getting there. Where exactly 'there' was, I didn't know, but still, we were talking and we were friendly and we were there to help each other when we needed it, and things were good. Or that was my perception of events anyway. 

When we had split, he and his whole family deleted me off of all of their social media platforms. I've seen his mother in the town that I live in and she either doesn't recognise me or she just ignores me. I don't think she even knew we were back to talking, but it was hard, because he lived with his parents when we were together, so I was involved with them. I had a relationship with them and his sister and the rest of his family. When we split, I felt like I was losing the whole family. Granted, we didn't all get along famously, but I got along pretty well with a few of them and that was really hard. Losing all of them at once was really, really hard, but it was what it was. The reason I mention the social media thing is because the things that I knew about him and his life were what he chose to tell me. I knew what he wanted me to know, and nothing more, but I trusted him still, so why would I have needed to worry that he was lying to me? He was asking me to go away with him to Paris and Prague for work trips because I needed a break and I loved to travel and the company wasn't a bad thing for him either. I met him after-work drinks and stayed up in town because being away from my flat and with someone else is quite nice sometimes. He would come over to mine, he invited me over to his, he brought his new puppy to meet me; I had no reason to suspect anything. Except...

One morning in March, before the lockdown started, I woke up and I was just, something inside of me was just nagging. My heart was racing and it was like there was this buzz inside of my brain and in my chest. It wasn't words, but it was a feeling, though it was a feeling that seemed very directed. That feeling nagged at me or buzzed at me or raced inside of me until I found myself on Facebook looking through my memories and thinking something, somewhere, somehow, someone for some reason is trying to tell me something and I don't know the who, the what, the why, or the where, but I knew the when was now for some reason. I don't know whether it was because I was finally back on antidepressants to help my anxiety to calm down a bit, or whether it was just coincidence, but it was loud and consuming and annoying and I needed it to stop, so I followed where the feeling took me and I saw a photo of him that looked like a wedding. I sat there telling myself that there was no way it could be his wedding, but I think I already knew then that it was, so I found his profile and what little I could see of it and I saw that this wedding wasn't recent. This wedding has happened eight months ago, so the story that he told me about going on a stag do and getting stitched up by a mate because he wasn't the stag, well, turns out, massive lie. The trip he told me about that was work, work and then a holiday because he just needed to relax, lie. It was his honeymoon. The stories he told me about the little place that he went to relax where he drank the whole place out of a specific type of rum he liked, it was all lies. He would take his wedding ring off when I saw him, he never mentioned it at all. When I had been at his place a few months before the wedding and asked him point-blank if he was seeing anyone, he told me that there wasn't anyone because he didn't have the time. It was a big wedding; there's no way he wasn't engaged to his wife by then. Realising how much he had lied could have destroyed me. Saying I was hurt does not cut it. I felt like the ground fell out from beneath, not because I was holding a candle for him and thinking that one day we would figure it out, but because the last person I had ever thought that he would be was a cheater, and yet he was worse; he was an adulterer. He is an adulterer. And a liar. And it got me wondering about all the times he told me I was paranoid when he went out with his female friends. Was I paranoid, or was I just being gaslighted? I've had to accept the fact that I will probably never know. 

The last message I sent to him was to say that if he had just told me he was married, I would have been happy for him, and I genuinely meant it. Had he told me he was with someone, the last few years would have looked very different for us for sure, but I like to think we would still have been friends. I might not have tit-ishly sent him a message when I was drunk - which I found out was the night before his wedding, if you're thinking the timing didn't already sound too ridiculous - apologising for messing us up because I had been on a really bad date and drank too much gin to try and make it at least mildly interesting. At this point, if I think of him, I can only think that there is no going back. There will never be a point where I could trust him again, not as a friend, not as a lover, not as anything. My parents have gone so far as to say they wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire, which I get because we were together a long time. We went on holiday with my parents and they loved us together. The split was hard on them as well, and not just because they knew I was hurting. 

I know there are probably people reading this thinking, 'the person I have most sympathy for is his wife'. Believe me, I have a lot of sympathy for her, too. I wrote her a message over Facebook and sent her screenshots of conversations that made his intentions and actions as well as the dates (after they were married) obvious, because yes, there are people with open marriages and everything, and I know nothing about her or their circumstances, but I would have hated someone to not tell me if they knew it was happening. I would hate to think that someone knew that the person I loved and the person I trusted was breaking that trust if that was what they were doing, and they didn't think I had a right to know that. Whether she read it or not, I don't know, but giving her the option of knowing felt like the right thing to do. 

Lockdown came around at the right time for me. I wasn't sure what was going on with COVID and I had really struggled to go onto the medication I'm currently taking. I was a bit of a mess and that just floored me and I couldn't process it, so I spoke to work and I went back to my mum's place. I thought I would be there for a week's R&R then back to London. I was there for a week, and then with lockdown being what it was, my dad drove me back to London to get what I needed for three months. That three months turned into four, and then we talked about the money I was saving, how much I spend on the flat, how long it would be before I was back in the office and whether it made sense to just move everything into storage for a year and live with my parents to save the money I spend on a flat I'm not living in towards a deposit for a flat where I'm paying my own mortgage and not someone else's. As I've been packing up the flat I've found bits and pieces of things which are reminders of him. Most of them have ended up in the bin, and actually, I'm really glad about that. 

One of the great things about leaving this flat, despite all of the packing trauma and trying to get rid of a lot of things and pack so many things and the trauma of actually getting it all out of a building where the lift doesn't run to the ground floor is that my next place, wherever it is, isn't a place where he's been. It's not a place where I've called 'Text me when you're home safe,' down the corridor after him as he's left or where the bookshelf that he gave me from his grandmother is sitting in the kitchen. My new place will have a sofa he's never sat on - not just one where the cushion doesn't have a mind of its own and tip you onto the floor. The wardrobe he built the first time in the first flat I lived alone in is going to the tip. If it wasn't chipboard, I would take it back to Manchester, chop it into pieces and burn it, because I'm still angry, but cleansing myself of the things which he was a part of is helping. Getting rid of things that feel like they're connected to him is really helping. Though there are some things which either he gave me or he was around for that I won't be getting rid of, like my gaming PC or the black and gold vases my Valentine's roses came in one year, but that's because I didn't just love them just because he gave them to me. I loved them as was. 

This is making me question my opinion of Ginger Dave the certifiable hamster though. He might have been a little weirdo that dragged his boy bits across my friend's palm so she realised that Pets at Home told me he was a girl when he was actually a boy (I probably gave the poor sod an identity crisis) but the only person he ever pooped on was my ex-partner. Maybe he was trying to tell me something. 

Whilst I'm thinking about it and talking/ writing about it, I should probably point out that when I found that photo, I was ashamed. I'm not the one who was married, but I felt horrific. I was in tears on the phone to one of the ladies from work and she was asking whether there was anyone I could talk to, and what was going through my head was that the people I could call or the people I could pop around and visit were married and this was going to change their opinion of me. It wouldn't matter that I didn't know, because somehow I should have. I was horrifically embarrassed. I was hurting inside out, I wasn't my self, I felt ill because of it, but I didn't feel like I could talk to anyone because I was terrified that they would judge me and I was just so ashamed of myself. I have had to go over it time and time again in my head that it was not my fault. I have spoken to a couple of the ladies from work who struggle with anxiety and who would know where I was coming from and even that was so hard because I didn't want them to have a changed opinion of me, but they were amazing. They were supportive and they helped me to get through it. One of them called him a rat; a love rat and reminded me that I couldn't have known. That line that I would never cross, I crossed it blindfolded with him leading the way. If things had been different, if I had known about his wife, it's not a line I would have gone across, because, to me, marriage is important. Taking a vow of forsaking all others is really important. I used to think I would never get married because I wanted to be a lot like my great aunt and travel and be myself and, well, now I worry that it will never happen because every date I've been on for a while has been horrific, and things just don't seem to stick, but maybe it's like spaghetti. You know spaghetti is cooked to ready when it sticks to the wall. Maybe my spaghetti is just not ready yet, so it's not sticking. If I found the right person, making that commitment wouldn't be a difficult decision, I don't think. Keeping my promise, keeping my vow to forsake all others wouldn't be difficult, I don't believe, because it means a lot to me. It's something that means a lot in my family, so I refuse to feel guilty and I refuse to feel ashamed about something that wasn't my fault and it wasn't my error. I'm not some sort of homewrecker. He's a man who lied to everyone around him and chose to cheat on his wife, and that is not my fault, so I won't take on that guilt.