year's end
falling in love in the caribbean, my favourite books of 2024 and intentions for the new year
It’s been a strange year—I began it in Oxford, trying and ultimately failing to remain in that city while PTSD made me increasingly deranged. I spent ten days in a psychiatric ward in Venice and, on returning, gave up my lease and left my DPhil with no forwarding address and no idea what would come next. I wild camped through Scotland on my way to Iona and then lived in a convent in London for three months, unevenly gathering myself together, still too afraid to disclose where I was living and consequently lonely most of the time. I left the country a lot: to Rheims, Venice again, Palermo, Bari, Kefalonia, Mexico, Montreal, Martinique, Dominica, St Lucia. In Playa del Carmen on the Yucatán Peninsula, I met the man I hope to marry and now I live with him and his large Siberian cat, Marcel, in a little maisonette in north London, and I love my life very much. I spent Christmas in Manchester with his family and felt awed at the change in my fortunes. I have, now, what I thought at the beginning of the year could never be mine. Something happy and easy. My belief that there was something permanently and essentially off about me, which would make it impossible ever to live a normal life, seems to have been mistaken.
Going through my archive, so many of the posts on here are miserable—about affliction, hell, masochism, all part of an intellectual project I’d developed to justify the bad choices I’d made which had made my life so horrible. I never even considered that things could be otherwise. The last three months have changed all that. Now, a different future unfurls. In February we’re going to climb Mount Sinai and visit St Catherine’s monastery, the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world, built in the mid-sixth century. None of this would have happened if my life hadn’t fallen apart, if I hadn’t been so lost and desperate that I’d bought a one-way ticket to Mexico. I’m still dealing with the consequences of the mess I made in the last few years, but now it seems easy to bear, and I can’t bring myself to regret anything that led me here.
Before I get into the detail, I’d like to thank you for subscribing and making it possible for me to survive over the last year. I started this Substack over two years ago and never expected it to allow me to write full-time. I’ve only been able to travel this year (and pay over £11,000 in legal fees, which I’m framing as a tax for getting out of an abusive relationship to make it easier to swallow) because of your support. If I hadn’t been able to flee the country regularly I don’t know what I’d have done. I wish I could thank each of you—and I promise to write much more frequently in 2025.