#43. Same. But Different

2021 has become a default point of comparison since it became a thing of my past. Such were the depths and stark is the contrast from now to then that a ‘then and now’ is never far from thought.

So, as I’ve spent a few days at one with a sofa, wiped out at the tail end of this year, it wasn’t too much of a detour to remember a version of myself struggling on a sofa in Palma during the death rattles of ‘21.

Using convalescence as a metric for progress you could argue I’ve made little in those years. That nothing has changed.

But a lot has. It always does. And never more than the past three months.

Whilst I’ll end this year in a vaguely similar state to that one, I do so now as a father. More on that here.

I also end it as a writer and find myself comfortable saying so aloud for the first time. Well, I guess I’ve always been one. I just forgot for a while.

At the beginning of 2024, I set myself the challenge of sending one piece out into the wild each week. The bi-product, I hoped, would be increased confidence with the label ‘writer’ and a forming of a habit.

Though ending the year a little shy of the target on 43, I think both have been achieved — #26 being the first of my pieces published in a magazine that isn’t my own is testament to the former.

Another bi-product I hadn’t considered but happily discovered was the source of inspiration, hiding in plain sight all along; running.

That one passion fuels another feels cosy and refreshingly convenient. So I’ll keep on running, and writing, and so on.

JF