New year, new me. Although I’m still the same. Well, the same as I was some time ago. The only constant is change, the only thing that stays the same; is chaos. I know for sure that I am the same homosexual that I was when I ended therapy for the second time. December has been a maelstrom; strange, weird, destructive, and sad. But that’s life sometimes. It is disastrous, terrifying, and terrible. But also, a happy place. Life can be bright, magnificent and colourful.

I didn’t congratulate the Happy New Year to many people. I have left many messages unanswered. I have become a hermit; I have learned to value my company so much that I must think long and hard about whether I want to share myself with someone else or not.

Becoming my own therapist has become an amazing thing, but also a pain in the ass. Rarely am I wrong, rarely does anything happen other than what I think is going to happen, and rarely do my predictions not come true. I began to believe in magic, I began to believe that witches were simply people with emotional intelligence and that the priests of ancient Egypt just gave guidance with obviopus evidence, while those who didn’t want to pay attention to their surroundings were surprised by their capacity for analysis and divination. How nice to fall foolishly into the same mistakes, into the same idiotic traps that reality sets for us. How nice to fall into the ego.

There is a question that has been on my mind lately (it has been on my mind for months), an omen, a decadent romanticism: Am I crazy?

Crazy in the most banal sense of the word, like in the forties or fifties, when queers were crazy, artists were crazy and women who didn’t masturbate were crazy too. I love to believe that I am something else, that I am different, that I will get the Hogwarts letter, that I will take the one ring to the volcano, that I will come out from under the bed with horns for not arriving on time like in Little Monsters, that I will save the princess (the prince!), that I am an exception, that I am crazy, mad as hell. The more I think about it, the more I realise that being very sane and being crazy look quite similar.

It is true that I’m still a loudmouth (for the third year running one of my resolutions for the year is to listen more), but I see myself saying less, although I assure you that everything that leaves my lips is true to me every time. I am less interested in what others think, but I am trying to give more space to what they say. I want to learn; I want to know more. I always want more.

And I can say with certainty that I am not at all interested in what other people think of me. I broke those chains a long time ago. Big, old, ugly chains. Chains that crumbled into dusty rust as soon as I tried to get rid of them. They were an illusion. People are never happy. They love the muddy mud. If I fall short, they get mad, and if i exceed, they get mad as well. Not matching the expectations macerated in sick minds and baked into a deafening capitalist system bores me. It id not my problem. If this is true, why do I still cling like a teenager to the idea of being special? Why, in my cruel state of stagnant stoic happiness, do I crave madness so much?

Mark Twain said: write what you know. I know about a job that I mildly hate and the commute. On the bike from home to my workplace, and then back again. I am tired and burnt out and I always feel like I’m juggling one too many balls. My humour gets a little bit drier than usual sometimes, and I joke about suicide far more than I should and with people that I shouldn’t. At all. I feel on edge as if I was grasping the last bits of sanity with just the tips of my fingers. Often, people act as if I am the unhinged one. It always has been like that. I used to believe them. I am not that sure anymore.

Months ago, I fell on the bike. Every cyclist in London knows this unwritten rule:

Every six or eight months, something will happen to you or your bike. You will either have a crash, your bike will be stolen (or the bike seat, or just a wheel, sometimes the geezers are merciful) or you will fall.

In this case, it was all my fault. I was having a terrible day, so I was going WITHOUT A HELMET (I know) WITH HEADPHONES (I know, yeah), and I was feeling myself slightly too much. When I ride, I perform the cyclist counterpart of the imaginary homosexual catwalk. And Charli XCX just released Speed Drive at the time, so you can imagine. It turns out that the main road that goes from London Bridge to Liverpool Street is not gay-cycling friendly, so I fell. And yes, a lot of people came to ask me if I was okay, and I am grateful for that. I collected all my belongings, scattered around in a contemporary still-life presentation, I took my bruised bleeding body and my broken metal mount, and I left.

These things only happen to me when I’m broke, when I’m sad and when I feel humiliated. These things also happen exclusively during rush hour, when the overground security people get very serious about not letting any bikes in. Not even broken ones. I know it very well, I tried.

‘Bikes not allowed during rush hour’ he said.
‘I fell’ I said showing my bruises and wounds with my best cute puppy face ‘Otherwise I would need to walk all the way home’.
‘The poster is there If you…’
‘No, I don’t want to read it’ I said, as I turned around muttering the word twat.
Security people at TFL stations and club bouncers are made of the same dough: self-conscious high school dropouts who own a very big car.

I walked all the way home. From Shoreditch to Finsbury Park. I don’t know the distance, but I it took an hour and a half, a lot of my spirit and two not-very-good episodes of a random podcast. The broken pieces of the brakes hung by my side, clink – clanking all along. I know I am meant to be in balance, relaxed, calm, and ready to receive whatever the universe shall provide, but in the meantime, a little voice whispers: Fuck you.

I just finished a degree while working full-time. I will not romanticise this time of my life in the future, and I will never forget it. The abyss of changing careers from hospitality to anything else is deep and bleak. I know I am meant to meditate and keep myself in balance, but;

How can I find time if I need to be on top of Linkedin and exercise (thing that I am wildly inconsistent at) and eat healthily and all those other things? Can I not just

A month passed. I was in one of the carriages that go down south from Archway to Oval. I didn’t have my headphones with me, and I was reminding myself about how I should really (like really) stop being so detached from the world. I always had a terrible problem with wearing headphones all the time – I still kind of do. Although once upon a time, not having functioning headphones available was unthinkable for me. It was a necessity, something I could not exist without. My headphones running out of battery in the middle of nowhere made me angry. Listening to the motorbikes, car sounds and busy streets made me upset. Listening to the absurd conversations the people had around me made me angry. I needed to be shielded from the world. I did not see it back then, but I do see clearly now.

I am not like that anymore. While on the tube, I was trapped in between someone playing hardcore Candy Crush and a person methodically sliding their thumb in between WhatsApp, email and Instagram, unaware, perhaps, that the small icon on the corner indicated that there was no service. I didn’t have my headphones on me, and I was doing okay, alone with my thoughts, only interrupted by the smashing noise of the train when scratching the tracks. In front of me, a family of tourists exchanged short sentences loudly. No one else cared. Perhaps because they were Spanish, and not a lot of people were understanding what they were saying. But I was. And it was not pissing me off. It was not entertaining me either. At each stop, they would discuss the number of stops towards the one they needed to stop at.
Descriptive conversations of nothing. Conversations that used to make me mad. Every time I remember these things, every time I write them down, I feel proud of myself. I feel proud of how I have changed.

I feel proud that I am no longer that little boy who was afraid of never being loved.
I’m proud that I’m not that self-conscious teenager.
I’m proud that I’m no longer that lost faggot, not knowing how to do anything in life. Not sure if what I felt was real, not sure if I should have followed my intuition. It doesn’t even matter.
I am proud to have finished a career while having a full-time job at the same time. I am proud that I can have my own complex and incomprehensible value system that helps me navigate reality. I am proud to have gone to therapy, and to have understood that therapy never ends, that it is not a turning point or a vital state, but the way things are understood. Just like being happy.

My humour will never stop being cynical, I will never stop sounding pedantic to some people, and I will never stop putting on the most colourful jacket and spouting the first nonsense that comes to mind. I don’t know what it is. The rebel in me always wants to challenge whatever rule might be in place. It may be the lost adolescence of a queer human being in a small town. Parents that try their best and yet don’t do it entirely right. Broken souls bleed into their sons and daughters, branches and roots of an ancient tree that stands tall on the cornerstone of life, away from the abyss.

We are all amalgamations of failures. Life is a cruel Tetris game; success disappears in a magical stardust explosion while failures are the bricks that form the very path of reality. There is one difference – a crucial one – life is not about beating the game, instead, is about accumulating so many mistakes that somehow, the playground eternally elongates vertically upwards.

Trying to understand everything and trying to learn from everything is great, but I’m exhausted. I’ve had enough of pretending that everything depends on me and that I can make the most of anything. Shocker.

I want to embrace stoicism. I want to pretend that I understand that therapy has to do with how I perceive things, that it’s not a magic key to becoming a successful and lucky person. Whatever that might look like.

Now that I’m trying to jump into a job that will dignify me (LOL), it’s not up to me. It’s going to be hard, and I’m going to be ready, but in the meantime, no matter how many times I try to look on the bright side, my day-to-day life is still one of terrible mediocrity. My greatest fear. Drowning in mediocrity. Laundries, coffees being served, tables and toilets being cleaned. I tell myself that it won’t be forever. I lie to myself, repeating silly white girl mantras, telling to myself that I know for sure that my luck will change soon.

In the meantime, I hide from mediocrity.
I hide dressing up and going out dancing. I hide by listening to techno and pop.
I hide with my friends, in our bright little world we have created.
I hide from mediocrity by watching the same films repeatedly and going for the umpteenth time to see the Turners they have at Tate Britain.
I hide in this fake dimension I have built for myself.
I hide from mediocrity with my humour. I hide by writing and redefining what’s right and wrong. I’m fascinated by investigating the extent to which the unexpected is art. How uncomfortable people get when you present the truth right under their noses.
I hide from mediocrity by reading.
I hide in magic, like the Basque witches and ancient priests. I read the Kabbalah and choose to use it or believe it as it suits me. I read the cyclical theory of the Indian yugas and obsess over Wiccan rituals and tarot cards.

And the more I think about it, the less crazy I think I am. And as much as I would love to be special, I think I am just as special as everyone else, and the more I live, the more I see that being crazy and being extremely sane, look very much alike.

2024, here I come. Crazier than ever.