2023: A Summary

Hello!

How has 2023 been for everyone? Mine has been long, difficult, and very, very exhausting. In a lot of ways, it's been very similar to 2018, which I will freely admit was probably one of the most difficult years of my life. (In case you're wondering, this has mostly been represented to me by my insecurities smacking me in the face repeatedly while screaming, 'Hey! You remember 2018??) So yeah, that's been my year. Not, of course, that there haven't been good times!

January

January 2023 was pretty good. I encountered hurdles towards the end, though. Most of January was just...me focusing on work. I did an online course with a Christian organisation on activism, which was pretty good. The highlight, though, was probably reading my way through Brandon Sanderson's doorstopper Stormlight Archive, which is very, very good! I enjoyed it a lot! 

Lowlight...hard to say exactly, because it's quite personal. Suffice it to say that I did something very reckless, which caused a lot of distress to people around me. Which led to difficulties all round. But it's mostly resolved now, which is good!

Of course, I also missed out on an opportunity to go to Sweden, as I had assignments, which was another lowlight.

A lovely family holiday in Sweden! Which I was not present for.

February

February was very difficult for me. I suffered a very severe slump in my mental health, probably the worst I've ever had. And that's my lowlight for the month. 

The highlight, though, was getting to spend time with my family - Karys came to Reading and we had takeaway pizza on Valentine's Day (the Day of Love is for all types of love, people!) I also spent a very restful reading week at home with my mum. Especially restful because I finished the first draft of my dissertation at the beginning of the week, so we mutually agreed that the rest of the week could be relaxation.

Another highlight: celebrating a friend's birthday at Kaspa's, Reading!

March 

March was a pretty chill month, mostly just working on assignments and hanging out with friends. Well, I say pretty chill. I had about three assignments due throughout that month, so I was pretty stressed!

On the other hand, a highlight was that I was starting to do a lot better after the slumps of January and February. I also came to a few important realisations about myself - the most significant, for me, was reaffirming my faith in God. Over the last few years, I've struggled with my faith a bit, but during the hard times in January and February, I found Him closer than ever before, and when I felt like giving up, He was there, encouraging me to stay strong. (I actually delivered a testimony at CU where I talked about this, and afterwards multiple people came up to me to say how encouraging they found it, which was also very nice!) 

Studying with friends!

April

Where to start with April? First I had Word Alive, which was a great opportunity to spend time with friends. Then I got to spend time with Granny and my great-aunts in Devon, and it was great to see them. I also enjoyed the opportunity to see Tessa, Pippa, and Marvin. Then I submitted my dissertation - woohoo!! Then two of my friends got together - and they're just the absolute cutest couple. (Fun fact: I, along with everyone else, predicted them getting together!) I also got accepted for an MA in Creative Writing at Reading (and Oxford Brookes) In short, April was a month full of highlights!
I guess one lowlight was the assignments I had in April, cause they got super stressful. (I had a 3,000 word essay due for three days after the dissertation. I barely got it done. The entire experience was excruciating.)
Another lowlight of April was that one of my oldest friends got married (on April Fool's, natch) and I couldn't go because it clashed with Word Alive. So that was a pity.

Family picnic on Dartmoor!

May

Now, May was 'fun'. Very 'fun'. By which I mean exams, the bane of any student's existence. Exams were extremely stressful, especially the Cold War one. Perhaps somewhat egotistical of me, but I'm fond of my description of that exam: 'Like, imagine having a concoction of salt water and lemon juice poured into an open wound. Except worse.' About sums it up. The next (and final) exam went a lot better, though!

I'd say the highlight of May was finishing my exams - and with them, officially finishing my undergraduate degree!

Library in sunset...oooh, symbolic!

June

Obviously, the highlight was going to America - and so many highlights just in that! Seeing the Festens, getting to meet Christi's husband and children, exploring Chicago, going to my first baseball game, witnessing first-hand just how big America is! I had an amazing time in America, loved every second! America's a very interesting country, and its sheer size is mind-boggling and fascinating, and I would very much be willing to go again. (Heck, just travelling to America - my first time flying on my own - was an exciting new experience!)

I guess one lowlight of June, though, was that I had initially planned to go to America a full week earlier than the rest of the family. However, other events back in England conspired to cause me to only be able to fly out half a week before. But that's not that big a lowlight, all things considered.

The gathered Murrell-Festen-Prechter gang, plus Miss Becky!

July

One of the biggest lowlights of July was leaving America and saying goodbye to the Festens. I had a great time, and it was sad to leave.

On the other hand, July had some highlights. I graduated, woohoo!! I also attended the wedding of another old friend, which was a lovely ceremony and a wonderful opportunity to celebrate. I also celebrated the birthday of a very dear friend - it was great to spend time with her and with mutual friends!

At Fourth of July fireworks!

August

August was another month of highlights. One of the biggest was getting to attend another friend's wedding, which was amazing! It was so lovely to celebrate my friends and their union! I also travelled to Devon to spend a week with Granny and great-aunt Sally and great-aunt Jenny; it was really nice to catch up and spend time with them! There was also Forum, which was great! I especially enjoyed the opportunity to spend time with other Christians, both in my CU and in other CUs!

On the other hand, a lowlight was that I was struggling with a few personal things throughout that month, which made it a bit difficult at times. (Though that did prompt a highlight of the month, as I talked to Granny about it; talking through it to someone really helped me, and Granny really appreciated that I was willing to share details of my life with her.)

The happy couple!

September

September was a very good month - I started my MA in Creative Writing! I'm enjoying the MA a lot, I really feel it's going well! I also got my first job! It's a job with campus, working on the bars at an on-campus pub called Park House. It's enjoyable, but also very tiring.
I visited Neve and Huw as well, and we went to the zoo, which was wonderful! (I got to feed a giraffe!) At the end of September, a friend organised a big get-together at his house, and we had (indoors) BBQ, which was great!

It's difficult to think of a lowlight for September. One would be that my MA did get off to a bumpy start, and I initially struggled to get my bearings. I guess another would be that I was struggling with my mental health again in September.

The BBQ was a lot of fun!

October

October was...October. It was pretty busy, stressful at times, but also good. One of the highlights, though, was SEBWA! It was lovely to spend time with fellow Christians! I especially enjoyed the fact that SEBWA gave me an opportunity to grow closer to God as well. I've also enjoyed my MA - for one of the modules, I got to visit the University of Reading Special Collections archive and look through manuscript drafts of old poems by the poet Ian Fletcher! It was very interesting, though the work of transcribing the poems for my assessment was deeply tedious. (Especially as I had to transcribe them twice - once onto paper, then creating a digital edition of the transcriptions.) Fun fact: Ian Fletcher is the reason the Special Collections exist - he gathered old manuscripts and letters and such and stored them in an archive!

Enjoying a pumpkin spice latte with Josh!

November

November was a great month! One highlight was having Granny and Sally come to visit for my birthday; I enjoyed the chance to catch up and spend time with them! It was also nice to see Tessa and Pippa, who are as adorable as ever.

I also celebrated with friends - I went out for drinks with a small group of friends on the day of, and then I went to Kaspa's with a larger group of friends a few days later. On the same day, my parents finally made progress on their Thames walk: they walked from Pangbourne to Reading, and I joined them, which was both fun and tiring! They came to Kaspa's as well, so they got to meet several of my friends! Chris and Marina baked me a cake for my birthday as well - very kind of them! 

As for lowlights - 2023 has been a long, tiring year. I spent half of November in a state of stressed exhaustion because of how emotionally tiring this year has been. So that wasn't great.

What a beautiful world we live in!

December

One of the highlights of December is that, emotionally, I've been more stable than I've been since probably July. Adding on to that, it's been absolutely wonderful to relax over Christmas, spending time with family, seeing some friends from home, and just generally slugging on the sofa. (I've been looking forward to that since October!) I especially enjoyed getting to see Neve and Huw on Christmas Day. It was a big gathering - we had Granny as well as me, Karys, and my mum and dad, and then Hel's side of the family came over in the evening. 

We (me, Karys, Granny, and my mum and dad, and one of Karys' friends from work) did an escape room on Wednesday as well, which was fun - we got out in 44 minutes! 

Lowlights of December - one pretty big one. When coming home, I forgot my antidepressants, which meant that I started running low, and I got quite anxious and stressed out, partly by work, partly over friendships. Not that anything majorly bad had happened, my brain's just silly.

The escapees!

So, 2023 is at an end. It's been a long, exhausting year. I'm glad it's over, frankly - now onto new horizons! From the start, this year has been symbolic for me - exactly five years on from 2018. I hoped, at the beginning of the year, that it would be a better year than 2018 was. I don't really think it has been - but neither has it been worse than 2018. If anything, I'd describe it as more intense than 2018. My struggles this year have felt far more difficult than anything I had to deal with in 2018 (excepting Nana's death, as I luckily did not lose anyone this year!) But the good stuff in my life this year has been better than in 2018. In 2018, I made new friends - the first I'd made since the bullying started. In 2023, I learned - repeatedly - how important I am to my friends. One thing that stands out to me is at Forum, during social time, I wandered off on my own feeling all lonely. And one of my friends in second year, she followed me, all the way from our section of the campsite, to check I was OK. That meant, and means, a lot to me - especially because I didn't realise until that moment that she actively considers me a very good friend, even though we're two years apart.

I'm also delighted to have borne witness to my friends making big steps into the adult world - graduating, getting jobs, getting married. I get to be an active part in the lives of these amazing, clever, lovely people that I am privileged to call my friends, and I get to see them excel. That's...worlds away from the lonely, isolated, out-of-the-loop Robert of 2018.

I've spent a fair bit of the year dwelling on the negatives of this year - even though there have been loads of highlights. Writing this blog, I've found it just as easy to see the highlights as I found it easy to see the negatives earlier in the year. I think there's something in that - it can be easy to focus on the negatives of life, but also surprisingly easy to focus on the positives. You will be warm again - and the very act of remembering that you will be warm can help. Or, to put it another way, 'Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the lights.' Personally, I've always disagreed somewhat with that statement, because the whole point of mental illness is that it can make you incapable of switching on that light, so to speak. But I finally understand - even in the darkest times, focusing on the good things will work wonders. It won't solve everything - but it will help. Sometimes we just need help, that's all - whether that help comes from friends and family, from God, from medicine, or even from movie adaptations of a children's book series.

Something else that I've thought about is the progress I've made this year in terms of my mental health...or lack of progress, as it feels sometimes. I still suffer from massive insecurity regarding friendships. And it's something that still plagues me. There's stuff that happened earlier this year that still bugs me, months and months later, and it annoys me so much, because I'm supposed to have let it go by now. But I drew comfort from - where else - Doctor Who. Because the Doctor is an immensely traumatised individual, to absolutely nobody's surprise. And, minor spoiler alert, the 2023 specials end with the Doctor essentially retiring for a bit to live a normal life and recover from all his trauma, and the Christmas special jumps forwards to a point in the Doctor's personal timeline when he's no longer as burdened by everything he's been through. But, and here's the thing: the Fifteenth Doctor is still burdened. The things he's gone through haven't stopped affecting him, he's just...better able to cope with them. I guess I can see the similarities to my situation - I'm not inferior or stupid for still being affected by what happened in 2018, or for the fact that events in 2023 have so easily reminded me of 2018. It'll take time, and even when it has taken time, the scars will still be there, and that's natural. Moral of this blog for all you peeps out there struggling with mental health issues: you are not bad for not completely letting go of your trauma, because it's something that stay with you regardless, whatever form that takes. And all the scars show is that you survived. You took the hardest things life's thrown at you, and you stayed strong, and now you're rising beyond them, step by step. You've chosen life over death and strength over weakness, and even though progress might seem slow - it's the journey that matters, not the destination. And know that I am proud of you, wherever you are, and that we have an almighty Father who is infinitely proud of us, infinitely loving, and He cradles us in His hands, even when it might feel like we've been abandoned. He walks beside us, and when we can't walk any more, He carries us, and He will never, ever forsake us.

Random thoughts:

-2023, in the MCU, is when the final battle against Thanos occurred, closing out the Infinity Saga. Fun times!

-Assignments completed: two, more or less. Woohoo!

-Dogs walked over Christmas: Just two, sadly.

-New Years Resolutions:

    -I will take responsibility for my actions, and if I must fall, I will rise each time a better man.

    -I will be there for my friends if and when I am needed.

    -I will try to work past my insecurities.

-One thing I'm looking forward to in 2024: Finishing uni. And another two of my friends are getting married in June, so that's super exciting!

-I am also looking forward to more counselling!

-Games of MarioKart won: Exactly one.

-Christmas dinners consumed: Two. (We had one with roast beef at Will and Hel's, then another with traditional turkey on Boxing Day.)

-Current books read: Have once again just finished Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. I've also finished The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt, which is pretty good, but not, I would say, as good as her other two books.

I leave you with this wisdom from one of the wisest, kindest men I know: 'Not more, more, more, but better, better, better.' What's something that you hope for in 2024? What do you hope will be better?