Blue Monday

During the night, I dreamed of having to make up activities for students, but everyone kept on repeating themselves and I discovered I was really in a hellish purgatory where everything repeated and I had spent 390 years there before I realised it. Damien spent the night so there was some comfort, but it was a bit of a restless night.

In the background all day I've been feeling low-level anxiety that made it difficult to focus throughout the day and I'm hoping it's just a combination of too much red wine at the weekend coupled with not sleeping very well. What starts now is that I am punishing myself because instead of feeling on it, okay and ready to tackle everything, I waste time by trying to take care of my mental health. The time I most need to get an onward trajectory going with my businesses is the time she has come back to shake me to my core with a vengeance.

I woke up around 8.20am deciding not to exercise as I usually might as Damien was in my bed. I got up, took a shower and felt the coldness of fear inside me... I am reminded of this time last year when I worked at Time Inc. When I was at my lowest point, I spent a Friday night taking MDMA with my friend Ange and stayed up till 7am, but continued to take drugs through to 2pm on the Saturday. It was bitterly, bitterly cold – it dropped to 1 degree overnight and snowed. After a sleep, I saw my friends Dil, Paul, Jill and Harj at the White Bear in Kennington and I told them what had happened. I then went to my friend Craigs, who was having a party, dropped a pill and stayed up till 2am again.

I went to work on the Monday sorely depressed. I spent the whole day close to tears and I knew that I couldn't continue working there, couldn't continue in the situation I was in. I tried not to cry for the whole day, went outside and called my friend Dil and David in tears. I was really, really miserable. Whether it was drug-induced (e.g. Blue Monday) or it was something more, something had to give.

Writing the above paragraph has made me reflect on that excess and how I could have really raised my own frequency to overcome that – to say no. I had the intelligence and the restraint to do it, but somehow I lapsed into it. Drugs give the illusion that things are okay, but quite often make things so much worse in the long run.

That was a long way of explaining I'm feeling some residual PTSD from last year, heightened by the terrible up and down time I had over the weekend. Because of that I mooched around quietly and awkwardly, dressed in blue jeans, a white shirt and a pastel pink blazer and ushered Damien out the house.

It was a slow start to the day. I bought a coffee from Coffee Lounge and took the morning very slowly. I took the DLR to King George V and walked to UEL from there, sipping my coffee and listening to Jen Sincero's 'You're A Badass at Making Money'.

I found the day mostly distracting and even though I should be revising the cluster document and making extensive changes, my mood is making me unfocused. I walked around the corridors trying to find Helena – the head of QA – to talk about the cluster corrections but I couldn't find her. Then I went to get a cup of Earl Grey and a banana to try to settle my nerves. It made me feel slightly better.

I met my colleague Sylvie Prasad and talked to her about the letter from the 'anti-media' cluster. We broadly agreed, saying that it was too little too late and all of their concerns such as lack of resources were foregrounded in the validation document, suggesting they hadn't read it.

After that I had a meeting with Esme, the school manager, and Helena to discuss the cluster documentation. Helena came up with a long list of 'to-dos' for the programme leaders. This, of course, worried me because we already had a letter stating certain programmes would refuse to do this. Conversely, actively refusing a request could lead to a HR disciplinary. To that end, Esme requested that Suzanne, my manager, sent out the list so if colleagues decide not to do it then they are actively refusing a request from their manager.

Straight afterwards was a meeting with my students Paige and Debbie. I asked Paige to accompany me to the canteen and I had a soup and salad. We talked about how well the format for last week went and we decided they would hold an editorial meeting in the same way this week and work towards finishing the magazine.

Then my student Ben came to see me about my two businesses, which I mentioned to him last Wednesday. He is interested in helping out with Creative Wave and the Atelier. I always wanted to get him involved with the projects as he is a talented videographer and editor. He gave me some ideas about providing a studio and space that is not intimidating and people can use to hire equipment and not be afraid to ask for help. This could provide an additional income stream for the Atelier.

In between meetings, I fantasised about moving into my 'dream Atelier' – a £1950-a-month apartment in Ability Plaza in Dalston. I could feasibly rent out a room on Air BnB or on a long term basis to supplement the part of the Atelier that I cannot fund. However, the way I feel today, it feels like the project is too big. I don't want to go too far down the road of negative thinking.

I decided to go home around 3pm – about 2 hours ago – and the residual anxiety is in my head. I decided to try to lie down, but it didn't work. So then I decided to start writing this journal to make me feel better. I am hoping this is a temporary state of mind. I don't want to retreat into bad thought patterns and lapse into apathy, which feels very easy to do right now. I am trying to hold on to my doctor's appointment on Friday to get their opinion. I hope I manage to resolve this conundrum in my head enough to live my life and achieve happiness.

8.15pm

I ended up getting really upset and phoning CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably) in tears. Rather than having a 'neutral' operator, I had one who had a stern, and probably much-needed, frank talk with me. I said I had been thinking about death and she said, why would you think about death? Are you in ill health? And I said no... I'm a healthy 35 year old man. And she said, "Give life a chance!"... She told me the universe was tapping me on the shoulder and saying 'Listen mate - you've lost your way but I am here'.

She spent a long time on the phone to me and I was actually very glad. Had the universe been trying to give me a signal, it was this. She started talking to me about all the things I've been reading about like wealth consciousness, about how we're all connected to one another. She told me that I had not been living my life from a place of joy, that I was too cerebral and if I started living my life from that place of happiness then good things will happen – I would soon start to see that. She told me to run, to meditate, to find the things that make me happy. She told me to take a break – she even asked if it was possible for me to have two month break from work to go on a retreat and I said I could probably take three weeks to a month off and she said... Do it. She said go to the doctor and get medication if you want but 'I don't think you need it'. Wow. Refreshing.

After the phone call I thought... God. Even if she has just read Jen Sincero's books or was into the same things I was then that was a mighty clear signal. It made me think why have I been racing through life, measuring it in achievements and lists and ticking boxes when in fact I could have thought about me and my happiness. It's unlikely I will die in the near future, so would it be so bad if – even if it was just for two years – I took time to focus on being happy, joyful and unafraid of the not-yet-seen? Am I able to live every moment – to leap in ecstasy? To pump my body full of exercise and life? To try to approach life from a place of joy rather than fear?

These days blurring into one have panicked me into thinking my life is speeding me by when in fact I want the opposite – to be able to live every second and do things joyfully.

I went for a short walk by the river, somewhat refreshed and amazed, and then I bought myself an ice cream and ate it.

I picked up my guitar, which I haven't done in about 10 years, and started to play a song I wrote when I was 20. The lyrics go:

Slipping in, slipping out, slipping through, slip away
The things that fall into my bed never seem to stay 
I masquerade another day that fits into my lie
and when I dream it always seems i have to question why – so why?

Why do I feel this hate?
Will I realise my fate?
Does it lie with someone else?
Or is the answer just within yourself?

How insightful, I thought.

I am running a bath for myself... I'm halfway between taking it easy for the night or trying to accomplish some things for the evening. But thank you, if it is you universe, for giving me a verbal slap in the face.

The first weekend

And so it begins...

I've been having a tough time with anxiety lately and I think it's because I am so so close to breaking through that ceiling and really achieving my goals that my mind is starting to self-sabotage. At the moment, UEL is going through a huge shift in the academic framework and I have been tasked with changing it. So over the past couple of months I have been working very hard and it has been very choppy. The staff are toxic and they sent a letter on Friday to tell management they disagree with all the changes I am proposing to make.

I have little sympathy for them: it has been three months and only know when they realise it's happening have they chirped up – scared that the changes will be made without them.

I spent Thursday night having some red wine and spinning out about death anxiety but spoke to my friend Rachel on Facebook. Her dad is in hospital getting his kidney removed so that grounded me – making me think about the important things in life.

Emotionally exhausted from the week, I decided to take it easy on Friday but bad sleeping and residual anxiety got me spinning out again. I tried to sleep several times during the day, but I was left exhausted. I left the house to try to get my eyebrows done, but running late I missed my appointment and turned right back round. On the DLR train back, I got the email for the 'Anti-Media Cluster'. My manager Suzanne rang me to ask if I was okay. I laughed it off. Really, it is quite funny. Good for them, I think. They think their letter will make a difference but I sense it will just mean disciplinaries.

I of course forwarded the email to my colleague Julia Dane and to my old manager Stephen Maddison for laughs. Julia range me and we discussed how 'Game of Thrones' the whole situation is – and how we hope that this letter will flush them all out. Imagine putting your name to a letter in which you are conducting gross misconduct by refusing a request. Good for them – I'm proud of them for having their little say, but being that I am in such a strong position it's going to be difficult for them to have any power or influence.

I decided to do my make up in a black and white smokey style to calm me down. I put on some black kitten heel boots and a black and white blazer to match. My friend Craig coincidentally texted me and asked if I wanted to go to the Chateau in Camberwell – a new gay pop-up bar in the area. I took a cab to Craig's in Peckham and decided to leave my make up on and in the cab over the taxi driver started talking about how one day humans would not be needed and it would all be done by robots. Wrong conversation. I started spinning out again in the back of the cab. When I got to Craig's I was pacing around his living room and drinking vodka and diet Coke, trying to relay to him all the feelings I've been having recently.


Craig is a schizophrenic, so all my talking was doing him no good. He started to tell me he believed that he might be a robot in a medical trial or that everyone else was not a real human. He then took some ketamine. Bad idea... I could tell he was about to get to a K hole, but we got in a cab and went to the club anyway.

I actually enjoyed it at the Chateau. I had a couple of vodka and diet cokes and danced with some people. Everyone was much younger, but it was good to feel confident, better... Like an evolved version of oneself.

I was so super-tired from the week I went took a cab home at 12.30, but not before some weird girl came onto me and Craig. She started grinding up against us and we went and hid. While she looked for us we slid out for an Uber. I dropped Craig back at his house, probably before the worst of his K-Hole happened and I went back to my place in Woolwich. I finally drifted off around 2am.

Saturday

I woke up around 5am after just a few hours sleep and it was really bad. I was over-thinking death and I started having panic attacks. I went back to sleep, woke up at 10am but then it was pretty hellish from then on. After spinning out, I cried for a bit. Went to the eyebrow appointment at 10.50, had my eyebrows done and felt weepy on the DLR back to my house. I then got home and cried quite a bit. I tried to ring my best friend Andy but no answer. Asked if he would come round. Then I spoke to my friend David who was visiting his sister for lunch. He was very light touch, but it was good to speak to someone. Andy then rang me and spoke to me, which really calmed me down, but I resolved to go see the doctor. I've booked an appointment for Friday (I have previously booked two and cancelled them).

I tried to sleep several times as undoubtedly lack of sleep had gotten to me, but to no avail. So my Saturday was mainly spent trying not to feel so panicky and to try to get some shuteye. I decided to head to David's for the evening. On the tube over, I kept thinking is all we are just 'biomass' – just organic material for nature to use as she sees fit. Everyone on that tube was going to die, including me... Are we all just cattle?

I met David at the Duke of Devonshire pub but I was grouchy because I hadn't slept. I drank a Diet Coke, David a pint of pale ale, but I got him to finish quickly because the noise and people were too much after such a stressful morning. When we got to David's I tried to go for a sleep around 6.30, but I couldn't do it and so we sat down to watch season 11 episode 1 of RuPaul's Drag Race.
I started crying again, relaying to David how I now realise I've neglected parts of my life like my love and social life, and I don't want to have an unproductive life or not get to where I am going. David understood. He said there was probably a lot in my life I hadn't dealt with, like my absent biological father, like the instances of violence and neglect in my childhood and the deep-rooted guilt and shame we both felt about our sexualities. We are only just over-coming those things.

It does feel like for a majority of my life I have had some kind of sub-clinical depression that I am only just getting out of. And in some respects I'm mourning what could have been in the previous 35 years that I now have to make time on. Amazing sex, daring hairdos, adventures all over the world, crazy jobs etc...

We drank a lot of red wine and I got very drunk. I let myself do it because a) I wanted a good sleep and b) I needed some relief. At about 11pm, we went to bed and I slept in David's mezzanine bedroom, relieved to get some rest.

Sunday

Initially I woke up at 7am, messaging two guys on Recon – sockperv and bilon23. Because they are both into feet and sock kinks, I decided for once in my life to be sex-positive about the stuff I like and engage them in conversation.

I went back to sleep for a couple of hours, where I had a dream that I was about to go into a board room, but some guy tried to stop me because he called me a drag queen. I was wearing my kitten heels and a bright pink blazer with no makeup. Miley Cyrus was in the boardroom and I told her about the incident in hopes they would make an announcement about homophobia but it didn't happen. We were set the task of doing a test, but I decided to clean my desk as the first task to prove that organisation was one of my strengths, but I looked at the test and realised I couldn't do any of the questions.

I woke up again at 10am and David made me an espresso and I had a carton of orange juice. We watched the Andrew Marr show that was inevitably about Brexit, and after having some leftover pizza from last night and another Nespresso and orange juice, I left around 11.30am and walked up to Clapham South tube station. On my walk, I thought to myself that nature is a time-honoured system and who am I as one advanced monkey to change a billion year old process? I had to accept that I was powerless to it and I had to go through it.

I took the tube to Westfield Stratford where I bought a pair of aviator sunglasses from River Island that have a stunning gradient from blue to yellow and some products from Lush including some bath oils and two bubble bars – Girl power and Blue and Fluffy White Clouds.

I got home at 1.50pm and I started writing the prologue of this journal. It feels grounding to document my life – maybe it will be of use to someone in years to come. Around 3pm Damien Noyse, an opera tenor who lives nearby, started to message me. We had sex last week and I can tell he likes me a lot, but I just enjoy the company. I told him to come round at 4.20, so I bought some wine, olives, cheese and crackers from Lidl, douched and he arrived around 4.40pm. The first thing we did was have sex. He fingered me and entered me at first, but then I fucked him and came inside him a little. He then rode on top of me and I asked him to masturbate and cum all over me. I then masturbated to finish myself off.

We talked more and I told him about my projects – the Atelier and my planned social enterprise Creative Wave. He discussed various opera projects he had been working on and instances where people had plagiarised his work or asked him to stand in for various roles at the last minute. We then talked about our families – he told me his brother died four and a half years ago, his pentecostal sister he doesn't get on with, and his mother his in the throes of grief.

We then watched some videos on Youtube like Klaus Nomi and talked about music we liked, and technique of singing (he started talking about fake folds and thin pieces of skin in our throat). We ordered Chinese (quarter crispy duck, chicken chow mein, stir fry broccoli and beef and black bean) and had a bottle of red wine, and watched The Bitch in Apartment 23 – it's the third time for me. We kept hugging and lying on the sofa, before I insisted on finishing this journal entry. He's still here at the moment, watching The Bitch.

I'm glad he is here... I need some comfort. Anything to reduce my anxiety and make me feel like I am alive...

Internally I am thinking about transformation. I want to get a high fade and dye my hair black - including facial hair. I want to go for full on porn star bod and I am going to book a hair appointment for 12 April to work towards that transformation. This gives me time to up my exercise game and start feeling great about myself. So while I am taking this evening off, tomorrow I resolve to make every day a step towards living my dream. Every day.

Prologue

Day One. It's a grey Sunday afternoon in London and in the distance I can hear a blackbird tweeting. Wherever I am, I try to listen for the sound of birdsong, because when I hear the birds it reminds me that I am not alone. All around us, there are these flying, winged creatures tweeting happily who have no care for time, money, smartphones, Kim Kardashian, climate change, Donald Trump, Brexit or plastic consumption. Birds allow themselves to just 'be' and enjoy the wind in their wings, the gift of flight and their mellifluous voices that they let ring out – even in the busiest cities in the world.

I hear you, Mr. Bird.

As I type, I am coming down from some severe panic attacks I had both on Friday and Saturday. For the ultimate fear has come again to haunt me – the fear of death. My own mortality. It is a cruel joke of life that the one thing we can be certain of is death. Everything else is a gamble, everything else is right time, right place. It's a craps shoot, but death – you can rely on that. And no one can change the rules – the clock is set and so it goes.

I think of the birds, who have no care for this. They fly around and live until they die with no thought of their own egos or self. It is a matter of course for them and they can be fully present for the few years they are here, accomplishing their goal of nesting or breeding, or vainly trying to escape the hands of domestic cats.

Recently, I have begun meditating every day and to try to clear my mind I listen for the birds. They remind me that life is all around us and life is a shared experience between many organisms. If only somehow we could connect with one another and share the fragility and preciousness of it all. If there was a way to comprehend the sense and the senselessness, the purpose and the purposelessness.

In an attempt to rationalise what is, in my opinion, a completely rational fear, I have come up with a few reasons as to why I am blindly panicking about death. The first is that I am now 35 years old – soon to be 36 in the next two and a half months – and I have lived my life somewhat deterministically, thinking that fate or destiny would somehow blow me in the right direction and guide me. This has left me with something I am not entirely happy with. Reflecting on my 20s and early part of my 30s, I feel very sad and very sorry for who I used to be: I worked my way through a series of jobs in media for 12 years. Starting off at The Sun Online, I worked 7 day nights on a 10 day work pattern that cut through my social and love life for almost two years. Then I went on to a bar and restaurant magazine called Theme for 2 years as Web Editor and Staff Writer. I basically did nothing but procrastinate all day – I would stare at a computer screen and browse eBay and various shopping sites until 5.30 came and I would clock off. For 2 years. The most productive part of that two years was my masters degree in Contemporary Performance – that is a whole other story. Then I spent two years as a feature writer for a magazine called Area – produced for an estate agent, it was empty work. Writing things all day that no one cared about or looked at. I decided to leave that job after another two years and spent 6 months unemployed, where I had 'zen-like' insights that I will attach as an appendix when I print these journal entries in book form.

To cut a long story short I then spent 5 and a half years doing my PhD, during which I got a part-time job as a feature writer at Immediate Media writing advertorials for a range of nationwide magazines, then I became a lecturer at UEL teaching advertising – which isn't even my home discipline – for 2 years (more background on this in other journals). My last stint in industry was as Head of Content at Time Inc UK, where I was in charge of a team of six copywriters, but emotionally I was a wreck. During that time I had my viva for my PhD and received major corrections, which was a shock to my whole supervision team, and I also decided to come off of antidepressants. I started taking those because the crippling anxiety of my PhD could lock me in my bed, staring at my ceiling frozen in fear about what to do with the day. This continued for about a year – from November 2015 through to September 2017 when I finally handed in my PhD. Which I half-assed by the way so that it was 'good enough' for examination.

When the chance came to be made redundant at Time Inc, I exited gracefully. I was terrible at my job: I was very angry and emotive all the time and in such a corporate setting, it was not welcome. I, of course, thought I was bolshy and sticking up for my team. Some days, I would go to the Tate Modern, which was opposite the Blue Fin Building where Time Inc was based and I would stand in the Turbine Hall and cry for my whole lunch hour. I was an emotional wreck.

So from March 2018 to September 2018, I basically stayed on my couch all day every day, watching true crime programmes and not really doing much except picking up my unemployment cheque every two weeks and applying to jobs in a cursory manner. I did manage to finish my PhD corrections, though, and my shitty examiners allowed me to have my PhD the day before my 35th birthday – 25th May 2018. When I finished my PhD, I resolved to myself that I would never put myself in a position where someone could give me something or have the ability to take it away – for example, my PhD could be conferred or removed by those examiners. But more than that our happiness can be taken away by lovers when they leave us, by employers when they sack us or by friends when they deceive us. I resolved I would never allow myself to be at the mercy of someone else's whims.

The rest of the time, I was too emotionally exhausted from the toll of my PhD and the dismal failure of returning to the media industry and so I checked out. I checked out of my life and I let it go by, because I was too exhausted to do anything else. I would drink a bottle of wine five times a week and although I tried to exercise (running 8k 4 times a week) I wasn't losing weight because of the disproportionate amount of booze I was drinking.

One important thing that did happen during that hot summer of 2018 in between the countless true crime documentaries I watched and seasons one through seven of American Horror Story (and many many many many many many more pointless TV shows and films) is that I had an idea. At first, it started out as a very simple idea, which I provisionally called 'The Atelier'. Now, the Atelier was initially supposed to be a live-work space for me so I could start taking photographs and making videos for social media. I think during July in one of my more energetic spurts I tried – and failed – to put a makeshift studio space in my bedroom and bathroom, and I didn't want to say goodbye to my creative work entirely, but it was getting harder to make creative projects.

So I toyed around with this idea, looked online at a couple of spaces that could work, excitedly told lots of people about it and then – because I was unemployed – I parked it and went back to Netflix and focused my efforts on another opportunity. The possibility of going back to UEL came up, which I was eternally grateful for because I felt very comfortable in that role and I needed time to relax and plan a new direction and a new course of action. So I pursued that with full force from July through to September, until I got a contract on the 17th September 2018 – Dr. Allan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of East London.

What's even more funny is that the jobs that I was so apathetic about and half-assed for 12 years had become the avenues through which I would make my way into academia. My home discipline is actually performance and visual culture, but because I had not pursued my performance career with full force, because I had resigned myself to 'making a living' with a 'proper career' that ultimately had me living in a sub-depressive state for over a decade of my life, that is what I had become. A 'media practitioner'. A former feature writer.

Returning to UEL, I fell into old habits. Old habits being throwing myself at things full force and wavering in and out of states of stress and anxiety that ultimately made me unhappy. It was in November 2018 when something hit the light-switch in my brain, illuminating something I had never considered before. It was a particularly stressful week at work and I was behaving in an erratic and emotional way, staring into the abyss of anxiety when I took a step back. None of it matters. I could lose my job – it wouldn't matter. I'd figure it out somehow. I don't have to bow to this pressure. This job is not a matter of life and death. It does not matter. Paying the rent does not matter. Having the latest iPhone does not particularly matter.

But this is more than a realisation about materialism. I realised the only person I have is me. And I'd treated myself pretty badly over the years. I'd punished myself, I'd criticised myself and I'd hated myself. I'd worried and worried and worried until it chewed me up and paralysed me, and the only consistent, reliable way I'd found of dealing with it was to drink. And by drinking, I could continue to treat myself badly while supplying my body and brain with a chemical that would make me feel temporarily 'okay'.

I realised that I matter. What I want matters. My dreams matter. The people I love matter. Creating connections with other human beings – that matters. But somehow the narrative in my head was that I was egotistical and selfish, that I didn't want to love anyone or be in a relationship because I deserved to be alone, that I needed to run away from my family and friends because they could not understand me or the burden I have. But now I see that my love and desire should have driven every choice and decision I've ever made, not fear or worry.

Suddenly I was sad. Not just because I had failed to enjoy so many different relationships, experiences and moments, but because I had lived my life as someone who was very scared, very anxious. And the only way I could stop being scared was to project myself as the effervescent party boy, full of life and confidence.

Anyone who has been in a relationship with me knows that façade slips very quickly as you start to get to know me. I had thrown out blame to other people and the world. Why me? Why did it have to be me?

Now I realise that it was me because I am one of very few people who could have endured so much and survived. I recognise that my intelligence is a great power that not everyone has and it needs to be channelled into a force for the greater good. I can see that I am not tortured – I have been a prisoner of my own mind.

As soon as this ball started to roll, I knew I had been doing myself a great injustice. But rather than punishing myself for what I was not doing, I decided to change my thinking:

I love my body because it is fully functioning. I can lose weight if I choose to – my body is a constant work in progress!

When I'm feeling anxious, it's because I need to do something about a certain situation. What choices can I make today that will make me feel I have done my part to make this situation right?

I am not a bad person. When people react to me in a certain way they are responsible for their own behaviour and cannot expect me to behave in the way they want. If I believe what I have done is right, I do not have to pander to their expectations

On Saturday 10th November 2018, I decided to stop drinking for 3 months. I spent Christmas sober and NYE of 2018 was one of the hardest days – trying to navigate my way back home through London. But I did it and I lost quite a bit of weight without exercising.

In late November, a live-work space came up in Forest Hill. I was so excited to see it. "This is it!" I thought... The Atelier. I went home at night and I started to dream about what the Atelier could be. What if I did interviews with artists on a chaise longue? What if those artists came to show small work-in-progress showings? What if it was an experiential and digital space? So many exciting possibilities – I started to think about how I might work on this project in the evening, how it might be branded, doing social media, the videos I would produce for it.

I remember the day I went to see the space and... It was not what I wanted. Too small. But what happened was that the idea of the Atelier was reinvigorated. It became 'the thing' that I wanted to work towards. It became 'the plan'. It seemed to flawlessly bring together everything about me: being the exuberant and audacious host of a contemporary arts space in London, the things I had learned about content strategy and branded content from my time in the media industry, the lessons in advertising I had learned from lecturing it at UEL.

The more I thought about it, the more perfect it was. I had created a job for myself. I had created a role in this world for myself. Instead of thinking I am an outsider who does not belong and can never belong in this world, my narrative changed to I am creating a place that is not just for me but for everyone. I am inviting people into my atelier, and the atelier is my world and something I have made for myself. If the world has not made a place for me, I will make it and people can be in my world. I open up my world to everyone else.

By December, I was galvanised – I had my image, my brand. I had the idea – I had, for once in my whole entire life, a plan. A plan about what I wanted to happen that I had decided for myself and I felt incredibly empowered. I had direction!

I started listening to You're A Badass by Jen Sincero and relating to all of it. It was time for me to show up in my own life and participate rather than wavering rather deterministically and asking for things to be given to me at the mercy of others

Then, of course, January came and I crumbled. The pressure of the new year fell in on me and I expected myself to 'deliver' in all regards. I wanted to be a genderqueer superhero and when I fell short of that (e.g. going to work without heels and make up on), I felt like I was failing to deliver on my 'brand promise'. Old anxieties returned and I crumpled – who did I think I was? There's no business model here? Why? But more than that, my old friend had returned. Thanataphobia – or fear of death. The one thing about this particular fear is it is the one thing we can rely on, making it all the more scary.

Over the past few weeks I've been having fairly severe panic attacks in which I want to scratch myself till I bleed, think about how the world will exist in a million years time and I won't be here to see it, fearing going to sleep because it makes me think of what death will be like etc etc...

Now, I thought these were rational and sane until the past few weeks where I have been phoning friends crying and distressed after falling into one of these black holes. Yesterday was the worst where I called two friends in floods of tears, not knowing what to do, spinning out of all control and feeling like I was actually cracking up and would have to go to a mental institution. That plus lack of sleep was sending me round the bend.

It hasn't all been merry hell though. In between I have been meditating, focusing on the Atelier, moving towards wealth-consciousness and thinking this could be my big breakthrough.

I think that before I break through, Anxiety is coming to give me one last shake down to the core to see if I can withstand the ultimate test. If there's a timeline on this baby, then I am coming back bigger, braver and bolder. Let's, for once, grab life and say actually I'm going to tell you what I want and I am going to make it work.

One way I am trying to cope is by writing this journal, so I can cling to all those thoughts and feelings. Maybe one day these journals will help someone else. Maybe they will become something I can refer back to and embed my memories. Either way, it brings the focus right back to what I'm doing right now and how I can get from one moment to the next moment without having the shadow of death anxiety hanging over me.

And so, as I write, I listen for the birds who tell me that they are alive, that they are in this journey with me too and that we have to enter the flow of life, this process. And then, when the keys stop for a short time, I hear them. Thank you, Oh universe, nature, creator of everything – whether you are scientific or miraculous in nature – thank you for the gift of those birds.