How I'm Going to Live my 2019 [trigger warning: suicide]

How I'm Going to Live my 2019.

A wee medical intervention has got me twiddling my thumbs this New Year. I'm now going to try and and twiddle them over my laptop keys in hopes that a blog might happen.

Beginnings and endings are so artificial. It's so rare for a baby to be born exactly 9 months after inception because that's the average of from small population samples. The true variability is huge. Everyone likes a neat little prediction anyway: 9 months, 1st of January. I'm one to talk- I'm a sucker for a clearly defined start line, a finish flag, little orange cones barring me from the roads I shouldn't go down. Really though, beginnings and endings are never so predictable.

I started this piece the night after I got home from seeing them in June:

"I went out with my friends last night and while they got progressively drunker and I stared into my alcohol-free Kopparberg... one of them, on his fourth vodka, had launched into a speech. It began 'no one would have taken the bet on Hannah when she was born' and I immediately tensed because I wasn't drunk enough to hear this, well not drunk at all because I had my Cycling World Champs in a few weeks..."

At first, I titled this 'Know One Knows' and the main theme was going to be my staggering ascent (and I mean staggering in the walking sense) to ambulation and racing... all the usual solipsistic mush blah blah blah.

As with many unfinished blogs on my blog account, it stayed there. It stayed there and then he was gone, all of a sudden on a Tuesday night in summer aged 23. No one knew. I don't think anyone could have known.

It was one who had given me the speech he gives to wayward kids in his career advisory role. The speech that had made me write the blog. It has sat here like the lump in your throat when you hear the words suicide prevention, taboo or talk. 

 The thing was, the speech was awful, cringey, sensationalist, littered with disability-cliches and pity but the final sentence really did tie my future up in a neat bow for me right there, in a small Glasgow pub: 'she doesn't ask people what she wants to do in life, she walks up to them and tells them how she's going to do it'. It was so profound that I rushed home to write your words down.

Exit stage left.

(for D.)