It wasn't all that far along into this calendar year that I found myself sitting at this desk, on to which I had spilled a fairly large number of pills. I had grouped them in neat little rows, and I was trying to muster--not so much the courage, but the energy--to pick 'em up and start swallowing.

It had taken a great deal of energy just to live over the preceding eight months or so. Too much, really. And I'd expended a great deal more in a ferocious burst of writing over two weeks: not one note, but seven letters, two of them nearly twenty pages long, explaining and absolving. An awful lot of writing to say "it's not you, it's me".

Staring at those pills, thinking of th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, the pangs of despised love and all the rest, it wasn't fear of 'what dreams may come' that stayed my hand. Not really. I hold to the belief that death, like life, is what we make of it; and if ending my life only left me with the same pile of ingredients and no clue what to do with them...minus anyone who could help me make sense of my senselessness...then what, exactly, was the point?

After an unknowable time spent contemplating the neat little rows, I replaced the pills in their bottle and put the bottle away. There was no relief, no sense of pulling back from a precipice. There wasn't really much of anything. But that wasn't a surprise: there hadn't been much of anything since the end of July. If anything, the pills were to serve to make it formal, is all.

A short time later I found myself taking different pills. Pills that rearranged my mental topography: here filling in a deep chasm of pain, there flattening an impossibly steep mountain, and gradually, ever so gradually, restoring blooms to what had been an arid brain-plain.

It's NOT like I'd awoken from a nightmare. It goes much deeper than that. It's as if I came up out of an emotional coma with a case of affective amnesia. I'd forgotten how to feel, and especially how to properly calibrate my feelings. It's been a surprisingly long process, getting that calibration right: learning, sometimes painfully, who to keep at arm's length, and who must be kept beyond; learning once again not to take everything so gods-damned personally; above all,  learning that each emotion informed all the others and that none were unworthy.

(I had help in that last from a most unexpected source: Pixar's Inside Out. Not only the best movie I saw this year, but easily in the top five best movies I've ever seen.)

Thnk Trintellix I belatedly donned armour, because the year got worse, in many ways, from there.

About three weeks before my unemployment was to run out, I got a full time job. At first, out of long habit, I could only focus on the negatives: massive pay cut, horrid night shift schedule that made "sleeping with my wife" a forgotten luxury and alienated me from all that was good and bright in the world, and wasn't I supposed to be getting the hell out of retail? That had been the intention.

Almost the very day I got hired on at Walmart, Eva began deteriorating. The change in her mental state was terrifying to behold, all the more so since at first we had no idea what was causing it.

We know now. The year has been a tedious exercise in adjusting medications, waiting to see what adjustments the adjustments would make necessary, and repeating. All is not perfect in Eva-world, but she has improved considerably over the lows of the summer. She is going back to work soon, riding a wave of support and love.

As I said a couple of blog posts ago, things got decidedly dicey around here financially, before Eva's disability claim was approved. We were only kept afloat by the generosity of family and friends (and how we both hate being charity cases: you have no idea).We have the basics covered now, but not much else; among other things, we've been robbed of anything approaching the kind of Christmas we love to give to each other, and to our family and friends.

"You keep forgetting. But life is not 'for getting', it is 'for giving'. Neale Donald Walsch, CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD, BOOK 3

I couldn't care less whether or not I get stuff, but not being in a position to give stings.

Anyway.

To cap it all off, I lost my mom this year. Every year for at least the last five we've been expecting to lose her, and every year she's been surprising us. That said, our relationship was best characterized as "warmly distant" since it reset eight years ago. The distance, coupled with the long illness, made her death both easier to accept and harder to process, if that makes any sense.

I miss my Mom. Not to belabour the point, but I still feel like I haven't even got a handle on how to grieve her properly.

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You adapt, right? You learn to deal with life before life can deal with you. And to do that, you find the good and you're grateful for it...perhaps more grateful than you'd otherwise be. They say it takes true dark to really appreciate the light.

And so, the good: the stars in the night sky that was 2015 for us.

OUR BUDDING POLYCULE.

I met my metamour for the first time in February. It goes without saying that anyone who loves Eva has my respect, admiration and love...but I have grown to appreciate Mark on his own terms. He's a wise and spiritual man, full of profound insight and irreverent humour. I'm glad he is part of my world.

I'm still dealing with people who fixate on the perceived "imbalance" in my relationship, as if love was about keeping score. I think it's fair to say I had a whole hell of a lot of self-work to do before I could even think of searching out new partners. There's no time limit here: it took me 28 years to find Eva, after all. That said, I'm about ready to take a more active role in augmenting the love in my life.

Don't expect the polyamory advocacy to end, either. That's one of the things I have learned, or am learning, to calibrate properly: not too strident, not too minimized. The idea is to show that while polyamory may not be quite 'normal' yet, it is completely natural and nothing to be alarmed or judgmental about.

WALLY WORLD.

Yes, I still hate the shift and I've made it my life's mission in 2016 to get the hell off it and back to some kind of sane sleeping schedule. But.
One thing I never lost track of even in the worst of my depression is that a job is not about the work you do, it's about the people you do it with. And there are some great people here, people I look forward to seeing every night. To Carolyn, Kathleen, Garry, Renée, and all the rest of you fine Walmartians...thank you. Special note of thanks to Glitch (you can take the man out of the Walmart...) I don't make friends easily and I feel like I have several times over.

OUR HEALTH, such as it is...Eva still has some pretty rough days, but they have declined greatly in frequency and somewhat in severity: now it's all about learning to adapt to her new normal. Things could be a great deal worse. An aunt of mine has spent the last six weeks or so in hospital after a routine operation went haywire. A friend of my dad's is awaiting surgery and living with intolerable amounts of pain. To say nothing of the 'normal' run of pain and indignity many of our friends call "living".

Speaking of which:
.
FRIENDS.  Credit Trintellix that I'm no longer amazed anybody's willing to be my friend. But damnit, I'm overjoyed to have kith that may as well be kin. I'd like to single some of you out while I'm feeling this suffusion of love for you:

--CRAIG. For the music; for living with us for three weeks without shooting us; for being a person I hold in the highest regard and esteem. Love you, man.

--JASON, whom we just saw today for the first time in a couple of years. Jason is and always will be my one-word answer to those people who need to validate themselves by listing the successes of their friends. I knew him before he became a wealthy globetrotter, and the strongest compliment I can give the man is that success hasn't changed him.

--LAUREL AND STEVE. I first 'met' Laurel, "the avid horror fan', in 1992, in the USENET newsgroup alt.horror; we bonded over a shared love of Stephen King, even as she was dating and marrying her own Steve. We fell out of contact for a while, but Facebook brought us back in touch...and this past summer, she and her husband met my wife and I for real in Toronto. It was a lovely, too-short time, one I hope to repeat. Just think, Steve: if our dollar keeps tanking, eventually things will be affordable here. *smile*

--SUE. For all you are, for all you do. I'm in awe of you. Thank you for always being there to slap the silly out of my head. Between you and Eva, it's been much easier to do that whole calibration thing than it might otherwise have been.

--SUSANNAH. For being that rarest of treasures: a dear friend who disagrees with me on virtually everything. You enrich my life in so many ways, not least through your stunning art (link to Facebook group). I never had the slightest appreciation for abstract art until I saw yours. Behind behind the beautiful art, there beats a beautiful heart. Thank you for coming to my mom's memorial. It meant so much to me to have an ally in there.

--AMY. Someday I will meet you, Amy, and when I do I will feel as if I have always known you. Thank you for your love and support over the past year. It's returned threefold.

--GORD. Not too many people get to reconnect with their grade five teacher as adults. Fewer still had a grade five teacher half as inspirational and unforgettable.  Thank you for your unending support and your horrid puns, which have NOT mellowed with age.


MY NIECES, Alexa and Lily. Three and one. Both growing like weeds. Both mature for their ages, in profoundly different ways. In Alexa I sense a kindred spirit: I think she's going to grow up to be a nurturer of some kind, and boy will she make an impact on the world. Lilly's going to do the same in some more tactile way. "Uncle Ken" loves you both.

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SONG OF THE YEAR (because there had to be one, right?)

I can listen -- I have listened -- to this song over and over...it's a chronicle of my 2015, and the chorus activates my  knee-drummer every...single...time.




Who do you love? I love you.

I love you.

Happy 2016, everyone. Onwards and upwards.