Retrospective – nav edition

The original Retrospective can be found here.

Six years and four months of writing
On September the 11th 2000, I started my first diary, first called anakha, a name created by David Eddings in the Tamuli series for Sparhawk. Anakha means ‘the man without a destiny’ or other some such amounting to the same thing, and the gods fear him because they can’t predict what he’s going to do on a daily basis. As an 18 year old I liked that sense of freedom and independence, and that kind of empowering sense of control that’s suggested in having no pre-destination. I haven’t hunted through the diary to find exactly when I changed the name, but I eventually changed it to vroenis, a name I created for myself. As for what it means, well, you’ll have to spend the rest of your life with me to find out.

Three years and counting with two diaries
In August of 2003, this diary was born. At that point I had already began to focus more on strictly writing creative pieces only in vroenis, plus at the time the reliability of Open Diary was shaky. I’d been into Open Diary for a long time already and didn’t want to abandon the community, but it was becoming frustrating having issues every time one tried to use the site. I created nav primarily because I couldn’t save new entries into vroenis, but for some strange reason I had more reliability with the new diary, probably because it was being stored on a separate server. As anakha/vroenis is an A diary (see the URL above), and nav is a B diary, I assumed this was the case. Early-on, nav was a piss-taker (joker) and remained so for quite some time. Much of the time I was also bitter and angry, and loved making scathing jibes at things constantly. At times I feel now that not much has changed, but at least I can articulate better. The truth of-course is that so many things in my life have indeed changed now, and generally I have a much more positive outlook on life, as will be evident in the end of this piece.

Two years of illness
From 2000 to 2002 I suffered from dysthemia (I hope I’ve spelled that correctly and have named the correct form), a form of severe depression. My entire life underwent violent upheaval, and though the worst of it was over after six months, it was still a very long and arduous journey through life until I regarded myself truly well again. During the first year I did a course of antidepressants and thorough counseling through a service provided by the State Government. The most difficult aspect of that 18 months though is that much of the time I looked fine from the outside, as I established a whole range of coping strategies to get moving through life. I’m proud of how far I’ve come and what my life is now. Depression has been the most difficult and frightening experience of my life, with the greatest challenges I’ve ever faced, however I wouldn’t have forgone it for a second. Very early on I understood that this was a very real and important part of my life that wasn’t going to go away, more-so that I had what has now become the best opportunity of my life to learn a whole lot of things at once, which indeed I did.

Six months of severe illness
These would be the first six months of my depression, and they were the most exhausting times in the lives of myself and my parents who cared for me during this time. There is so much of this period that I don’t remember now, with so many holes in my memory, a particular challenge as I’ve always had and still have and maintain a very strong and accurate memory. This six months would establish a sleeping lifestyle that stayed with me for five years, where I could rarely sleep for more than 6 hours a night without feeling horrible all through the next day, and could often go without sleep, even two or three nights in a row. Roughly every six to eight weeks, I would need to sleep for ten hours for two nights, after which I would return to my cycle.

Three months of hell
Again the first three months of the two years mentioned above, and the first half of the six months. I would have to ask my mother or father, and unfortunately I’m writing this at my sister’s place on her laptop, but mum or dad would know when I had my first seizure or psychotic fit. My guess is that it would be some-time between February and April of 2000 – there may well be an entry in vroenis when I was diagnosed, so I could check it, but I’m in the zone now in my writing so I’ll leave it at that for now. The three months that followed were the very worst of my life; worst meaning that they were full of fits and seizures, memory blanks, losing weight rapidly, not sleeping at all and losing contact with reality for long periods of time, sometimes for days on end. This would probably be the most our family has ever been tested, and the most we fragmented and decayed, the most our love for one-another was strained. As I was saying to one of my best friends Jack and his cousin Jocea last night, many things helped my recovery, but one of the strongest influences was the support of my parents. After what has been the most horrific experience of all of our lives, we’re now infinitely closer to one-another, more than we’ve ever been and continuing to love each-other more and more every day, learning about one another and enjoying each-other to the fullest.
I’m a totally different person now after having depression, and though many things have changed in ways that will never revert back to how they were, I don’t regret a single moment, and am now more proud, and more happy than I ever thought was imaginable.

One relapse
This happened within the two years mentioned above, I had a brief two-month relapse in 2001. It was less severe than my first round of seizures, but I did have some frightening fits and memory-blanks, sometimes more frightening than the first ones as I had assumed that I was much healthier. I would think that I was having a normal day, then I’d ‘wake up’ in a time or place that was disorienting as some time had passed. These were shorter, but scarier as I was a lot more aware of them happening after they’d happen. It really did scare me, and for years afterwards I thought I would suffer these black-outs for the rest of my life. They were however psychological, and after a second round of therapy and a bit of time and support from my girlfriend at the time and my family, I recovered enough to stop the fits from happening.

Two long-term relationships
Just before I became ill I joined with my first girlfriend with whom I stayed with for five years. There were so many things about her which I truly loved, but as I continued to recover and grow, we no-longer were able to relate to one-another in the ways that we needed. I’m not sure of how aware she was or is of what she needed, but I have always been one for in-depth conversation and much intimacy, and it grew more and more difficult for us to talk and learn about one-another.
In 2005, two months after I’d finally broken up, I joined with a young woman I’d known for seven years prior on and off, predominantly during my life at church before I became ill and left, and then only in extremely raremeetings. When we were doing well, we had the most wonderful time together, however when we struggled, I feel she failed to understand her role in solving issues. No-one is perfect, and people are going to make mistakes, guaranteed. She made her fair share of mistakes, but aside from what ultimately tore us apart, I never felt she made any more mistakes in a day than any normal, imperfect, beautiful human-being. She’s someone who lacks much confidence in herself, and who is over-conscious of the opinions of others, particularly those who don’t exhibit respectful behaviour towards her; indeed some of which exhibit strongly negative and unsupportive behaviour towards her.
It’s been six months now since we broke up for the final time, and I haven’t spoken to her since. The six months have been quite trying; I was confidently and proudly committed to marrying her, and it left an enormous hole in my spirit when we parted ways.
There are still so many ways in which I still love these two amazing women, and in my very pragmatic and active mind, so many ways in which I can still see that we could have a life together, but I move forward in life with confidence and without regrets; I neither regret joining with them nor separating from them, and neither experience will prevent me from loving anyone else by any measure – the joys and pains I’ve experienced will only make me love others with infinitely more affection and spirit when the opportunities arise.

Three shifts in friendship circles
The first may well have happened long before I started writing, but I still had fleeting contact with my ex-acquaintances from the church in which I was raised. After becoming ill and totally cutting myself off from the church-crowd to leave them behind, I hung around a few cool people who were friends of my first girlfriend, a group that included my brother – he eventually went on to marry one of the group, Zoe, and on occasion I now spend a little time with them, though the group now is much modified. I realise that the last sentence there is absolutely unwieldy, and that more than a few spelling errors will get through the keeper in this one, but I don’t have my lazy spell-check in Firefox and I’m rushing ahead and writing as things come to me, so I’ll have to proof-read this once I get home tomorrow.
The third shift would be to my current circle which on the fringes includes of-course my brother and his wife, and my sister and her husband – someone I’ve always been close to (we’re going to Japan together in March), but pretty much only consists of my two best friends, Rocke and Jack. Rocke and Jack are the two most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life, and whenever we spend time together, I always fully enjoy myself. It doesn’t matter what we do, be it watching a film, talking for hours and hours or just messing around on the net, I treasure every moment with them as precious, and I love them as dearly as any of my family.
My other close friends are Kate and her brother Lewis, two wonderful friends who I’ve kept from that second friendship circle, Kal, a friend of Lewis’ who is a brilliant thinker and fellow cyberpunk reader and watcher – my Ghost in the Shell companion, and Asha, a woman who my brother and I have always called our sister as she’s like an affectionately adopted sibling. Asha is one of the very few Christian friends that I’ve retained since leaving the church and never returning.
Other very recent friends would be Alex and Jocea, cousins of Jack with whom I’m growing to know more and more these days. They’re wonderful people and it’s good to interact with intelligent, interesting people.

Two new best friends
These would be Rocke and Jack – you guys already got a good write up in the last section, so no more attention for you! I should at least reiterate that these two people are the two most loving, brilliant, clever, imaginative, intelligent, supportive and encouraging people in the world. Add any other positive adjective you like.

Three new rings
It’s been a well-known fact among those who’ve spent any time with me that I’m a minimalist who is rarely given to fashion-flare. Recently I purchased three new rings, all in the wake of breaking up with my second girlfriend. There’s an entry in this diary a few weeks back if you can be bothered hunting for it – actually I’ll just lazylink it. These are very telling of my character, I love silver and black, and every one of these rings is perfectly suited to my moods and modes and dress-codes. My god that rhymes – fashion truly does have the ability to turn your brains to mush.

Four jobs
Retail, warehousing, retail/administration and now administration. Strictly speaking I did do quite a bit of studio work, but as that didn’t pay anything I don’t really count it as a job. I did get a lot of experience out of it and enjoyed most of it, but yeah – no tax paid, not a job really. The first job was a retail traineeship in a dead-beat homewares store; the second was a manual labour job which was low-paying but that I actually really enjoyed – I was doing my Audio Engineering course at the time; the third was the first job I got after completing the course and realising the working in Audio doesn’t pay enough soon enough, where I easily got a job up in the office after only a few months on the showroom floor; and my office job now working at the corporate headquarters of a premium manufacturer in the automotive industry – not cars, but a part for cars. Don’t want to say too much, though we don’t have NDIs and such, it’s just not a good idea to talk about the nature of corporate intricacies in the public domain. I provide key administrative support for dealers and our sales staff in Western Australia and New Zealand across a number of different product-lines. For the most part I enjoy it, and it pays well.

One ever-expanding and ever-changing perspective
All of my experiences continue to contribute to the way I see and understand life – experiences positive, negative and everything in-between.

And the best days of my life, growing in number every day.
What can I say, I simply couldn’t be happier. No matter what I feel, including and particularly times when I feel challenged and/or down, I celebrate my life – the fact that I’m now able to take it all in – something I’m ever grateful for, and the fact that life is always rich with experience that always, always – without fail, leaves me with more happiness, more perspective, and an ever growing, dynamic, evolving and free-form experience of life.