Welcome to a whole new decade! What the next ten years (and indeed the future in general) hold for any of us we’ll never be able to tell¹, except for the inevitable death and taxes², we can know only what we intend to do.

We equally know that intentions don’t quite stand up to the rigours of time; see only the lapse rate in gyms in February and March for confirmation.

The fantastic thing about Beginnings, though, is that they can take take place whenever you’d like. A resolution taken today – 1 January 2020 at the time of writing – is worth no more nor less than a resolution taken in a day, week, month or year.

The oft-dreaded onward march of Father Time is merely misunderstood. For each and every step he takes is another opportunity to Begin.

Our seconds feed into our minutes into our hours into our days into our months into our years into our decades and within each of those seconds comes the chance of a Beginning that wants only for the will to make it happen.

We should make our resolutions then not because of the pressure of the day, but because we want to Begin.

What we choose to start, of course, is something else besides.

It’s been more than a year since I last wrote here, and it’s been a turbulent twelve months at that. During the entire time I’ve tried to come back and write, to capture thoughts, to reconnect with my love of words and I haven’t made it happen.

It’s been a long time since I kept any kind of blog up-to-date and chances are I’m not going to be able to this time, either, but just in case – in case this time is different – I’m stepping out of the shadows once again to begin the process from scratch.

Not quite from scratch, clearly, because there’s a giant archive and a book, but this isn’t likely to be a lot like those things. I don’t know what it’s going to be like, I just know I need to start something creative, something that forces me to think a little, and to chase myself to get things down on paper, even if it’s just a log of my day.

We’ll see if this lasts, but I hope it does.

“In the end, we cannot become who we need to be by remaining who we are.“

Max De Pree, Leadership is an Art

I’ve had the most amazing reaction to my Instagram / blog post about my recent battle with depression. People have been incredibly kind and loving. A few have mentioned how ‘brave’ it is for me to share. But I don’t see that at all.

My whole career has been built around storytelling, and telling people how important it is to tell stories. I believe in them so strongly because of their power to create change. But that change only happens when the stories ring true.

It’s not easy to be vulnerable and talk about these things when you don’t know what the impact might be, but the stories we tell when we are brave enough are the catalysts for change. Before anything can happen people have to understand why change is needed.

I’m blessed to have a loving family, a caring and considerate employer, and the support of medical professionals who have helped me through a rough time. I have everything that many people struggling with mental health issues don’t have, which makes me feel bound to tell my own story from such a safe place.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.” Anon ((Often attributed to Gandhi, this quote actually has no reliable documentary evidence. Gandhi’s closest was from a 1913 publication saying, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.” Arleen Lorrance’s 1974 book The Love Project is closest to ‘authorship’ with “Be the change you want to see happen.”))

I want to see a world where people talk freely about mental health, and their struggles, without fear of what that may mean for friendships, relationships or employment. I want people not to wait until it’s too late, but to speak up early, to seek help and to recover quickly and fully.

Sharing pretty Insta-quotes and platitudes is all well and good, but how can I expect all those things to happen if I’m not willing do the same myself?

I originally shared the text below on my Instagram account, a place where for some reason I find it easier to be honest and open than other places, even if the authoring experience is a little trickier than other places. Reviewing it (and the comments) this morning, I realised I needed to share it more widely because it’s important. More on that below.

---

Let’s just put it out there: the first four months of 2018 have been — almost without exception — spectacularly unkind and unhelpful.

Physical illness, accidents, stress, anxiety, mental health problems and depressive diagnoses have combined for the worst run of form in all the time my wife and I have known each other. Usually we play off each other pretty well, see-sawing through life’s difficulties, helping to pull the other up when they’re down and let the other lift us when we’re struggling.

These last four months the universe seems to have knocked us down at the same time with the full force of both barrels. For me, it culminated in being off work for almost two months and being medicated for depression for the first time since my transplant.

But today is May Day. It’s the day I choose to embrace optimism again (thanks, cystic fibrosis), the day I take back the driver’s seat (thanks, mindfulness), the day I break free of the mental shackles that I’ve been in (thanks, Prozac) and see the light of life and not the dark (thanks, erm… light).

I know I can only do this with the right support, so I’m also giving cry to the international call for help: m’aidez. I need your help. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week or next month, but on this journey forward from this one single step, I will falter, I will fail and I will fall. And I may need more than one hand to lift me back up.

Today is the day I become a warrior against mental health issues. For myself, because I believed I was ‘better’ and it humbled me again. For my friends and colleagues, because stigma should never cost friendships or jobs. For others, because everyone needs to know it’s ok to not be ok.

May Day is my reset button. Let’s do this.

---

This post is important not just because I failed to recognise the situation I had slipped into, but because I did it while spending a lot of time preaching about how important it was to de-stigmatise and recoognise mental health issues, particularly in the workplace.

There’s more to come on this, but for now it just felt important to get this out there as a statement of intent. This is not the end of my fight, and it shouldn’t be the end of ours.

I often struggle with expectations. I want things to be different than they are.

Take this blog, for example. I want it to be read by loads of people, but it’s not (yet). There are many reasons for this, not least that I’m not making enough of an effort at the moment to get it read because I’m still trying to form the habit.

When I started it again, I wanted to be posting every day: I saw myself waking up at 6am every morning, hammering out a tight, concise, witty, powerful post and putting it out for the world to see. Since I’ve really started to focus on it and carve out the time to write posts in the early morning I’ve still not managed to put out a post every single day. But I’m still trying.

Take exercise: it’s the same every time for me. I make a resolution to get back in the gym and I dive in head-first, going all out in my first session back and being almost unable to walk or lift my arms over my head, so I give up.

Take grief: whenever you lose someone, you think you’ll get passed it, but it creeps up on you every now and again and takes you completely by surprise. Or, conversely, you can hear of the death of a friend and feel almost numbed by it, without the kind of histrionics that you expect.

Expecting things to be different will never work. There are plenty of mindfulness teachers and practitioners who will tell you to completely let go of expectations, but unless you’re ‘full zen’ that’s almost impossible to do.

More useful, I find, is to recognise when something doesn’t meet your expectations, and look calmly at your own reaction to it. When I don’t manage to hit my target of publishing a post every single day, I feel bad about it, then note the things that made me miss my slef-appointed target: last week, for example, I was quite ill on Thursday and Friday and wasn’t able to spare the brain power to do both my job and this blog, so the job came first, and when I wasn’t working I had to let my brain swich off.

Similarly when grief hits, I try to see when I’m not reacting the way I ‘expected’ to react, and understand that whatever my reaction, that’s OK. Because we all react differently to things, all the time.

So the next time you catch yourself in a situation where you expectations haven’t been met, ask yourself if those expectations really matter, and look carefully at your reaction to the situation. There is no right or wrong to any of this, but clinging to expecations after the fact will only dampen or spoil an experience.