One Year After, and it's been a long year.
One year after what, you say? Last year I came back from the BornHack hacker camp in Denmark, to find that my family were making me homeless out of the blue. In the middle of the second wave of a global pandemic, and going into the UK's second lockdown.
I never knew how unpleasant my family could be until last year. It's difficult to write about, because I have no frame of reference. Sure, some family members have their moments, but to have them all conspiring to be as nasty as they were through those few weeks last autumn is something else.
So with the help of some friends I got my stuff together in a storage unit, and disappeared. Since then I've been functionally homeless, without a permanent place to live until now when I'm pleased to say I have something lined up. I slept on a friend's sofa for a few weeks while I sorted out what I was going to do, since then I've rented some spare rooms of other friends. I've now found a nice town to live in, and I'll put down some roots. I am very worried that my family will still try to come after me so I'm not going to reveal where, suffice to say that I've put a reasonable distance between myself and Oxfordshire.
Sadly there are some effects that will not be fixable in the same way. With a diagnosis of complex PTSD and severe depression along with severe insomnia, I'm a wreck. Maintaining my work has been a struggle, and I am very lucky to have secured appropriate therapy. Getting out of this will be a long road.
I'm left wondering what the hell happened. I realise that living as I was prepared to be around for my dad in his final years they've probably relieved me of the huge amount of stress that would have caused, but it's hardly something to take pleasure in. Even though he signed all the papers that ruined my life I don't think he was the instigator of the worst things that happened to me, and that I realise I am unlikely to see him again is hard. I'm probably disinherited and whatever other legal crap they can dream up - they had a serious case of power tripping because they could get a lawyer to write lots of letters I never bothered to read - and the thought of not seeing the rest of my family again is not a problem at all, but still, I've lost a lot more than the place I called home.
So it's a mixed bag, really. In one sense I'm having a second childhood, no ties, no family, able to do what I want without having to take anyone else into account. I've travelled this summer to hacker community events in Denmark and Belgium, staying with some of my friends in the Netherlands on the way, I've gone wild swimming, danced under the moon in a forest bathed in laser light through the mist, cycled halfway across the country, and hung out in a load of interesting hackerspaces along the way.
But behind all that I'm a mental health wreck, relying on medication to sleep properly and perpetually stressed at trying to keep up with my life. I've lost everything and survive as a solderer of fortune on the London Underground, and sadly there's no A team to swoop in to help. I am lucky enough to be able to support myself, but I can see climbing out of this is going to be difficult.
There's nothing like a crisis to move you on from transition woes and get you working on life, is there.
