Although meeting Nick has been absolutely fantastic and I'm happier than I've been for a long time; 2015 hasn't been a very good year for me.
Starting in Goa which I hated, I was very pleased to move on to Vietnam. I spent a month in Vietnam traveling by bus from Hanoi to Ho Chi Min City and loved every minute of it - the people and places were by far my favourite (along side Nepal). I then spent a few months in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; but to be honest I should have come back to the UK straight from Vietnam - I was exhausted and fed up of travelling.
I returned to the UK in March with no idea what I was going to do. Since everyone had gone on about Workaway and volunteering on farms I signed up for three weeks on a small holding in Devon - what a mistake, myself and an Australian couple left after less than 24 hours (the father of the family was a bully and i wouldn't be surprised if he was beating his wife and children, I honestly didn't feel comfortable leaving them there but she told me that it was God's plan for her to be there with him!!).
My next Workaway wasn't much better, but it was at least bearable. I ended up in a council flat in Aberdeen with a crazy ex-drug addict unemployed comedian who was trying to write her autobiography and wanted help. She spent most of the days sleeping, and all night writing and watching crap tv. I stayed a month as I had nowhere else to go.
In May Liz had to go for a hysterectomy as they thought she had fibroids, I returned to Sheffield to look after her (she wouldn't be able to drive or do much about the house). However it all turned more nasty than we'd thought as she was diagnosed with cancer; the hysterectomy had hopefully removed it all but radiotherapy was given.
I was living at Niamh and had continued my love affair with her dog, Bubba! Obviously with Liz being ill I wanted to stay in Sheffield, and I also wanted to get my house back. After a bit of work at the university, in August I found a job with a banking communications company, and moved into a shared house in Meersbrook whilst also giving the required two months notice to my tenants.
Both were a massive mistake. The job had been advertised as 'Project Coordinator', but was nothing of the sort! It was basically a data entry job, but with a very very difficult in house system. Fine, but the company had no training programme and the department was over stretched. The woman they assigned to 'train' me was a nasty bully, and we really didn't get on. After three months of crying in the toilet most days and hating every minute of it; of being shouted at and making mistakes as they hadn't bothered to show me what to do properly I walked out - literally, in the middle of the day.
Not the best move, but my mental health is more important than my bank balance.
But around the same time all this nastiness was happening, something rather wonderful happened. Since returning to Sheffield I'd volunteered a few times for a friend's project, The Real Junk Food Project Sheffield. This is a campaign to make sure that food isn't wasted; surplus supermarket food, out of date food that's fit to eat, and other un-used food. We use it to feed anyone who'd like to eat it, on a pay as you feel basis. But that's not the wonderful thing (although that's been good too).
The great thing that's happened has been meeting a man; Nick. I've blogged abut meeting him already, but I can honestly say that he's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time. We've just sort of 'clicked'.
It's early January as I write this and we've decided that I'm going to move in with him and his daughter, probably in the next couple of months (we both need to get rid of a lot of stuff and then I'll need to find a tenant for my house).
Just before Christmas in the space of a week I received two lots of really shit news.
Firstly my dear friend (and ex-colleague), Jon, took his own life. He'd had a really bad year, with problems at work, a failed relationship and money problems, and obviously it all got to much for him. His death brought back a load of shit for me surrounding Martin (it's 20 years ago that he died), and really knocked me sideways.
Then Liz had been feeling really ill for a few weeks and had gone for a scan, the results couldn't have been worse; the cancer had spread and isn't treatable. They haven't given us a timescale but it's not long.
They've offered her chemo, as a palliative measure, hopefully to make her feel better and to give her a bit more time. But it won't cure her and so we have to prepare ourselves.
Losing Jon was bad, but the thought of losing my best friend is really hard. I know it sounds selfish but I'm not sure how I'll cope without her (especially when I've got pmt, she's the only thing that keeps me going some months).
At the moment as I'm unemployed I'm going to appointments with her and spending as much time as possible with her - we're supporting each other I think.
Christmas was good (there's a post about that already), but I can honestly say that I'm not sorry to see the end of 2015.
I know I've got some real challenges to come in 2016, but having Nick in my life makes me feel more able to deal with what's coming.
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