I reflect on the year and look ahead to 2023
I’m back on antidepressants. This is a good thing. They got me out of a hole aged 17 and I‘m hoping they do the same again 20 years later.
I trotted off to the doctor yesterday lunchtime, and by 4pm I had a month’s supply of Citalopram, popping my first pill this morning. An hour later I was nauseous. I recalled the early side effects I experienced the first time around – sexual dysfunction and vivid, gruesome nightmares. A moment of anxiety – and ‘perhaps I should have started these after Christmas’ – and then I clocked the probable cause of the nausea – an essential oil diffuser puffing away in the corner. It was dutifully filling the air with little clouds of orange and geranium, lifting my spirits but gently poisoning me. Easy to do if you put too much oil in. Big pharma 1, hippy rubbish 0.
My mood has been dropping steadily for a few months. I’ve had depression for twenty years. Mild to moderate – and please God don’t upgrade me, I don’t want the severe version. I’ve had a relatively good handle on it recently with lifestyle factors and habits. An exercise routine here, a gratitude journal there – congratulations, you’re now only 20 years from good self-esteem! Jokes aside, I’ve done pretty well. But certain events have caught up with me. Recent years have been characterised by exploration, healing and growth; they’ve also been quite rocky. I expect seasonal factors have compounded things – the short, dark days of British winter, Christmas too. People with difficult family relationships often find this a hard time and I am no exception. Oh, and the world is hideous and terrifying.
My love life has taken a back seat lately. Returning to London in the summer after three months in Italy, I found myself battling serious dating fatigue and decided to hang up my dating boots for a while. Today I realised it has been five months. Whoops!
I haven’t been totally inactive. A girl’s gotta eat, and I believe in making hay while the sun shines, enjoying ourselves while we’re young (ish) with soft skin and hard… you get the idea. I’ve avoided pursuing serious romantic partnerships, however. I went on a couple of first dates in October, then explained my logic to a friend, who swiftly rubbished my idea that I should ‘keep my hand in’.
‘You’re not going to forget how to talk to people, Vicky’. Good point. I pride myself on being a rational person but clearly I have my off days.
Revalidated in my need for a break, I put the apps down again. And now Suddenly it is late December. It snowed and the snow melted. Work is winding down. It’s Christmas on Sunday. I’ve avoided cramming each week with activity, allowing myself much-needed time to cocoon and reflect. I am letting the year come to a gentle conclusion, making small, manageable social plans and forgetting, or trying to forget, about big goals.
Looking at back my love life, it would be easy to be negative about 2022. I’ve seen it all this year. Sex pests, misogynists – both the obvious ones and the undercover ones you’ll find carrying a copy of the Guardian and wearing a ‘this is what a feminist looks like’ t-shirt, friends with benefits (FWBs) who forget to do the friends bit, the ones who popped out of the ether to declare their love while still married or partnered. The ghost, the flake, the love bomber. The emotional abuser I had a little brush with.
Ridiculous events of the last couple of weeks alone include a particularly flakey FWB adding me as a friend on a sex club social platform, ignoring the fact he dropped off the face off the earth in summer. Over on Instagram, I spot an old friend (of the ‘it’s complicated’ kind) celebrating a year with his girlfriend. A girlfriend he didn’t mention in June when he messaged me saying ‘I always come back to you – you’re like home’.
I am like home. My home. Get the fuck out.
The situations and happenings vary but I am more or less consistently disappointed in how men conduct themselves. All I want is what I see as base levels of communication and emotional skills, a bit of self-awareness, integrity. This seems harder to come by than tickets to ice skate at Somerset House. I’m left asking ‘is this it – is this the state of the dating pool?’ and, occasionally, wondering if I should lower my standards on these fronts. I don’t wonder for long. I know I would be frustrated, lonely, and probably slip into coaching. And that is not what I want for myself.
All of this considered, it was a good year too. I am not so depressed that I can’t, on either a good day or a bay day, conjure up a few positives – a good skill for anyone to have, not just the heavy-hearted among us. I ‘put myself out there’ to use a cliché. I hit the apps hard, getting my first date in on the second January (or attempting to). I dated in a different country, launching myself enthusiastically into a sea of Marcos, Mircos and Vincenzos, but heeding the advice and warnings of local women. I called out bad behaviour more often and without flinching and asked for what I want in the streets and the sheets. I matched, blocked, and culled, I asked people out in real life. In an act of unparalleled bravery, I went back to the gaslighting hairdresser who stood me up in January. A friend coached me on my poker face. I had a mantra. I successfully pretended that everything was normal. The things you have to do to get a decent haircut when you have curly hair.
Sometimes my life is like porn. Sometimes the silence of my apartment is deafening. Occasionally I find some intimacy, or what I think is intimacy, and it isn’t always and it hurts. My life is all of these things.
As the year ends, I’m thinking about how to approach this area of my life. How much focus and energy do I direct here? How do I stay positive faced dating in a patriarchal world? What do I want to take forward into 2023 – and what do I want to leave behind?
Thinking the things I’ve done and experienced I can see a couple of things. I’m trying. And I’m learning. A* for effort. Better not to ask about the attainment part of the grade.