The first weekend

I was lucky to have a friend who dropped everything and came to spend a couple of days with me, because this was a deeply low time for me. I didn’t know what was happening, I felt helpless and things were beginning to look pretty bad.

I spent that weekend mostly in bed. I had a temperature and diarrhoea and felt generally like the world was coming to an end – for me at least. But I didn’t feel especially negative or despairing.

Some years ago I dealt with depression – when I say I dealt with it, the truth is that I had a variety of pills that helped me deal with it, but I started to go through a process of self-discovery, where I figured out what mattered in life, what life meant to me. One of the consequences of that process is that I have no fear of, or concerns about, dying.

It’ll happen, one day, but that’s it. I have no fear of it nor, I suppose I should add, any desire to hasten its arrival. It will happen when it happens.

But that weekend, I really did have a feeling that my world was unravelling. Anyway. I ended the weekend alone and afraid. I was unsure what was wrong, but I knew I had to see a doctor to find out what on earth was going on.

I partly figured out that I had some kind of virus, which was responsible for the temperature and the diarrhoea, but clearly there was more to it than that. It was about this time that I started keeping a diary, partly to record for myself what I felt sure had the makings of something a bit unpleasant, and partly because my memory has always been a little on the random side. Some things I can remember easily, usually trivia, whereas things that might actually be important I forget either the detail or the chronology.

So this is the story of a small part of my life. It may not make a lot of sense to you, but you have to remember that, to you, I’m somebody else – and what goes on in somebody else’s life doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense.