How I'm Going to Live my 2019.
Edit from 2025: grief is very hard to write about and I didn't do a good job here. However, this is one of my most viewed blogs. So, I thought I'd clarify right at the beginning; my friend D took his own life and on seeing the new year come in, when he couldn't, I felt he needed a blog post.
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I started this piece the night after I got home from seeing D 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 someone holding forth on my premature birth, well not drunk at all because I had my Cycling World Champs in a few weeks..."
At first, I titled this 'Know One Knows' which is chilling, now. The main theme was going to be my staggering ascent to being able to walk after all my surgeries and then racing my trike. After not being predicted to do much at all with my body and not being able to at various points in time my current level of ability often shocks me. The blog was going to be all the usual solipsistic Paralympic mush blah blah blah.
As with many unfinished blogs on my blog account, it stayed there. It stayed there and then, on a Tuesday night in summer, aged 23, D was gone. No one knew he was going to do it; not even the people he lived with who were closest to him. There wasn't a note, there was nothing at all but the train driver who saw him do it. I don't want that to be how I think of D.
See, D had given me the speech he gave to wayward kids in his career advisory role. The speech that had made me write the blog. That unpublished blog sat here like the lump in your throat when you hear the words suicide increase in young men.
"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 someone holding forth on my premature birth, well not drunk at all because I had my Cycling World Champs in a few weeks..."
At first, I titled this 'Know One Knows' which is chilling, now. The main theme was going to be my staggering ascent to being able to walk after all my surgeries and then racing my trike. After not being predicted to do much at all with my body and not being able to at various points in time my current level of ability often shocks me. The blog was going to be all the usual solipsistic Paralympic mush blah blah blah.
As with many unfinished blogs on my blog account, it stayed there. It stayed there and then, on a Tuesday night in summer, aged 23, D was gone. No one knew he was going to do it; not even the people he lived with who were closest to him. There wasn't a note, there was nothing at all but the train driver who saw him do it. I don't want that to be how I think of D.
See, D had given me the speech he gave to wayward kids in his career advisory role. The speech that had made me write the blog. That unpublished blog sat here like the lump in your throat when you hear the words suicide increase in young men.
The thing was, the speech was awful, cringey, sensationalist, littered with disability-cliches 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, D.
That's the quote I start my 2019 with now.
Exit stage left.
(for D.)
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