I know that only a few days ago I was writing about what a celebratory mood I was in, so this blog entry is probably going to strike you as somewhat irrational. I can't argue with that. Right now, I still feel more positive about my life than I've done for many years. But I know I can't just wish away the fallout from trauma as if it never happened. Its effects have stayed with me for my entire life. Drop being Autistic into the mix as well, and who knows how complicated all this can get? Becoming more enlightened about what's going on inside my head and why it's happening has been an incredible help, but that knowledge isn't going to fix things. The brutal fact of the matter is that a lot of what's wrong with me can't ever be fixed; instead, I have to learn better ways to cope with what's happened to me, accept who I've become as a result, and work at living the best life that I can within those parameters.

This week is always a challenging one for me. The Christmas decorations have been packed away, the visits to friends and family are over, and the cold, dark days of January seem to stretch out forever. Yesterday, I felt like I might be sliding into another bout of full-on depression. My mood was definitely much lower than usual and I couldn't even work up enough enthusiasm to stay awake for an entire day at a stretch. On Monday night the temperature dropped even lower than it had at the weekend, falling to -9°C (16°F) and after that I just couldn't get warm. Even after retreating under the duvet with a book for most of the afternoon on Tuesday, I felt cold and out of sorts. I spent almost all of Wednesday asleep.

But how I'm feeling right now is likely to have a lot to do with catching COVID at Christmas. My recovery is taking me a lot longer than I'd expected, and it has taken me until this week to realise that I'd been brushing it off as being a lot less scary than it actually was. Physically collapsing, a pulse that had plummeted to 37 bpm and losing consciousness isn't just "feeling a bit flu-ish." I'd been seriously ill, in proper "nearly ended up being carted off in an ambulance" terms. It's bound to have knocked me for six; why would I think otherwise? The sensible response to all of this is that I need to take things easy for quite a while yet. My body has obviously already figured this out, but hooray for mindfulness in helping my brain catch up as well.

One thing I've had to learn over the last seven months or so is that I'm nowhere near as resilient or hardy as I told myself I was, and I have a very limited capacity for coping with day-to-day life these days. After keeping a much closer eye on how I'm feeling (and that has been nowhere near as straightforward as it sounds, as I'll explain in a moment), I've realised that I get overwhelmed very easily, and I think that's probably also part of what's going on at present. Given the news at the moment, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me that you were feeling the same way. But I'm being overwhelmed by all the emotions being stirred up as I put a lot of my c-PTSD, Autism and ADHD puzzle pieces together. I might have made a breakthrough over the past year in finding out so much about what is wrong with me, but that hasn't changed the fact that I'm still a mess. And trying to deal with it all has left me feeling exhausted all the time, because the implications of everything have been hitting me at random, at all hours of the day and night. So I can't see how everything that I'm going through emotionally at the moment wouldn't also be having a significant effect on my physical wellbeing.

But there's another problem (there always is). Keeping track of how I'm feeling ought to be a ludicrously simple task, but it turns out that it's a real challenge for me. When I read the comedian Pierre Novellie's book about being Autistic last month and discovered what alexithymia was, I recognised the condition instantly. I have always had difficulty in identifying and processing the emotions I'm feeling until well after the event. For someone who is experiencing trauma, I can see how that might actually be beneficial, and I know that it's also very common for Autistic people to have it. Some events hit me immediately, because the consequences are right there in front of me and unavoidable; but I think you would be genuinely shocked by the number of things that happened to me in my life that literally took years to affect me. It must have been incredibly hard on Heather to live with me when I wasn't reacting to things which should have left me upset or raging. I also now realise both how much some people took advantage of that, and also how much I suffered from not being able to feel things at the relevant time or process them in the correct context. Remember how I said I felt strangely calm after I'd discovered I was Autistic, all the way back in July last year? Now that I know about the condition, I'm certain that the inappropriate calmness was the alexithymia taking the pain away until I was in a better state to deal with it. Some of the feelings which I've been experiencing this week feel like they ought to be ones that have finally surfaced from last summer. Staying with family gave me a safe place to process them without putting myself at risk, even if those feelings didn't bubble up until after I'd got back home.

I think that in part, those feelings might also explain the extreme reaction that I had to the book by Stephanie Foo which I finished this week. It certainly gave me lots to think about. I'm just not the sort of person who does things like suddenly bursting into tears; it's not an aspect of my personality I recognise, so when it happened a few days ago it really shocked me. Having said that, my reactions are also entirely understandable in the context of the book; Stephanie's story is full of descriptions of things which happened to her that are guaranteed to trigger flashbacks of similarly unpleasant things (severe illness, emotional neglect, and protracted physical and psychological childhood abuse) which happened to me. Even getting COVID at Christmas turns out to have been a trigger.

So that's been my week, and this is the narrative I've come up with in order to make sense of why I've been feeling drained; maudlin, and more than a little bit lost. I now recognise that as being my default, c-PTSD state. I know that the healing process won't happen unless I let all of these emotions come to the surface and deal with them instead of keeping them buried, but it's a completely alien experience for me. And it's also proving to be a very painful one. Am I oversharing with all of this? Of course I am; I freely admit that. But I doing it anyway because I need to get all of this written down. Seeing all of this expressed as text detaches it from most of its emotional impact and that makes it easier to deal with.

As for finding a way forward, Ms. Foo writes about the benefits of reparenting and how it was integral to her healing, but I have not been finding it an easy process, no matter how sensible it seems or how effective it proved for her. In fact, my Autistic brain seems to have rejected it altogether, judging it as a form of play-acting; to me it feels like a way of generating an intentional but very watered-down version of Dissociative Identity Disorder (which is not to denigrate it; both processes happen in order to protect a person who is suffering from an unpleasant or intolerable situation). There's just something about the technique which makes my subconscious yell "False! Make-believe! Not true!" and I'm well aware that this sounds completely irrational, because it is.

It might sound incredibly cheesy (the book manages to avoid descending into schmaltz) but the central message of What My Bones Know is that true healing can only happen through the power of love, and I'm sad to say that that's something which continues to be in very short supply for me. The reparenting approach would be to tell myself that I deserve to be loved, but that rather skips over the problem of where that love is supposed to come from. So right now, I'm focusing on getting lots of rest because that's definitely something that is available to me.

But if you bump in to me socially over the next couple of weeks, please be kind; I'm doing the best that I can to cope, but I'm dealing with a lot of stuff right now.

After the weekend cold snap and snow, Tuesday night brought rain and a gradual thaw, with temperatures back above freezing on Wednesday. But there's a yellow weather warning in place here for tonight and an amber one just to the north of me as Storm Goretti is expected to bring what the Met Office are calling "multiple hazards" to most of the country until noon tomorrow. The warning was updated at lunchtime on Wednesday to include the prospect of heavy snow, so I'm really not that inclined to go outside at all for the next day or so.

Right now, it's just overcast and grey outside. That matches my mood perfectly.

Netbeans 28 was released back in November but I've only just installed it. To be fair, I've had a lot on my plate since then, but I must be feeling a little bit better if I'm back to doing nerdy stuff. At least I didn't end up skipping a release this time, as Netbeans 29 isn't expected to become available until some time after February 15th.

The installation was pretty much a repeat of last time but without the irritation of having to edit the registry to remove previous versions; this update just replaced the existing install (and noticed it was there, so it asked me if I wanted to import my existing plugins, which of course I did). And yes, I updated Notepad++ at the same time so that I could edit netbeans.conf properly. All good.

Depending on how you count things, Twelfth Night is either today or tomorrow, but I've decided that once I've finished updating the blog I'm going to take my decorations down and put everything back in the loft.

What with getting COVID and everything I didn't really get the Christmas that I'd hoped for, but I'm starting this year feeling more positive about my future than I have in a very long time. I think that this is down to what Plato meant about knowing your soul; over the last year I've learned an immense amount about who I am and how my childhood experiences, particularly multiple episodes of deep and prolonged trauma from which I couldn't escape, continue to affect me in ways that I was completely unaware of just twelve months ago. As I wrote in my review of Pierre's book, I used to think that I had unusual and possibly unique patterns of thought (I always knew that they were nothing like those of any of my friends, after all) but now I realise that they are the results of what happened to me and the way my brain is wired. It's not just that the way my mind works isn't even remotely original; my brain's behaviour is so common in people affected by c-PTSD and Autism that it's been described in clinical textbooks. The hoops my mind jumps through even have specific medical names. Most of those patterns of thought are counterproductive. Some of them do a lot of damage.

A big learning point happened for me this Christmas, and it came from reading Stephanie Foo's extraordinary book: it's the realisation that I can't heal myself on my own. I've been trying and failing to do that for more than thirty years, and it hasn't worked. Instead, I need the help of my family and my friends and I feel that at last I have the courage (or at least the confidence) to start asking for that help. I have a lot of work to do if I'm going to escape the feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy that have haunted me for my whole life, but I've finally realised in a meaningful way that I don't deserve the misery I've been wallowing in since I was a child. I don't want that any more. I want something better. I need something better.

I think I've finally recovered from getting sick at Christmas. Last night I stuffed my face with a plate full of pigs in blankets, roast potatoes, and a huge pile of boiled vegetables covered in gravy. It was the largest meal I've eaten in more than a week, and it seems to have done the trick: I had another decent night's sleep and today I feel much more like my old self.

I continue to be very pleased with myself for buying an electric blanket when I did, because the temperature in the back garden dropped down to -8°C (18°F) overnight on Saturday night and it did it again last night. According to my records that's the coldest it's been here since December 2022 when it dropped down to -11°C (12°F). But while the back lawn stayed covered in frost for the whole day on Sunday, that wasn't the case this morning. Instead, when I opened the curtains, things looked rather different outside:

My trail cam picked up next door's tuxedo cat picking its way through the snow at 03:00 last night, but those were the only tracks on the lawn this morning. I suspect everything else was trying to keep warm as best they could. Snow has become a rare occurrence here these days but provided that I don't have to go out in it, it's still a lovely sight. And I have absolutely no intention of going out in it today, thank you very much.

Well, 2026 already seems to be shaping up as one of those years so if you need me, I'll be hunkered down in my studio.

I have really been enjoying the electric blanket which I bought after Christmas and it's been put to plenty of use. Given that the solar panels on my roof are currently exporting more than 2 kW back to the grid, I haven't hesitated to use it, either.

Yesterday when I got up, I picked up my weights for the first time in nearly a month and did a gentle workout with them. After breakfast, I actually had enough energy left over to tackle the pile of ironing that has been sitting on the chair in the living room since I got back home. Getting that out of the way made me feel a lot better. Last night, my watch gave me the highest sleep score that it's recorded since the 10th of December and this morning I walked down to the Co-op and back without any problems at all. I think I might finally be recovering from the illness which has knocked me flat for the last ten days or so.

It's about time. I've been sleeping fourteen to sixteen hours a day and feeling like crap. That exercise might not seem like much to you, but the endorphins it released really made a difference for me.

The Christmas break is nearly over. It's been a time of contemplation and reflection and I've decided that I've got a lot of work to do this year when it comes to figuring out who I want to be in future and how I'm going to get there. If I'm feeling well enough next week, I intend making a start on doing that.

I already know that being a musician will continue to be at the core of who I am. I haven't made any new music for nearly a month and as the countdown to February Album Writing Month intensifies, I need to do something about that.

Writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days is enough of a challenge as it is without going in to things out of practice and completely cold, so the comment about hiding in my studio I made just now isn't just rhetoric; I need to regain my focus on creative work because even if it wasn't my fault, I've really let things slide recently. Last night in Scott Lawlor's latest listening party, someone asked me if I'd started work on the next album from ICH, and I haven't. I really need to get that under way, too.

I picked up a couple of expansion packs for Superior Drummer during the Christmas sales and those always give me a burst of extra inspiration when I want to write songs in a more "traditional" format. But as last year drew to a close, I found myself particularly enjoying working on ambient music and I think that's what I'm going to focus on over the next few days. My Eventide H90 just got a firmware update that adds four new effect algorithms based on granular synthesis which I need to play with to find out how I can use them to shape my sound. And the Hologram Electronics Microcosm continues to mangle whatever I feed into it in pleasant and surprising ways—and I haven't even started on playing with its microlooper functions yet.

I love making music. The creative process lets me drop into hyperfocus for hours at a stretch, the sounds soothe me, the technology fascinates me and getting it all to do what I want it to do is intensely satisfying; and afterwards I get a real kick out of how hearing how professional-sounding the music I make has become these days. Why wouldn't I want to do this as much as I can physically manage?

Farewell, 2025. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. And hello, 2026. Nice to meet you. What sort of year are you going to be, I wonder? More of the same? Even worse? Or, perhaps—just perhaps—you might find it in your heart to be the year where things start to get better once again? Look at us all: we could really do with a year or two like that, and you know we could. How about it, huh?

I can't say that I have any expectations of the next twelve months at all, let alone any resolutions to make. Even though last year took some truly astonishing twists and turns both good and bad, by the end of it I barely knew who I was any more. 2026 for me is going to be a year of reconstruction and adjustment as I learn more about the authentic self which had been buried for the whole of my adult life as I pretended to be the average, neurotypical guy I thought I was. Now, I finally know that I wasn't kidding anyone other than myself in doing that; what a waste of energy it all was.

I don't think I'm being hyperbolic at all by saying that it felt like I came rather closer to dying on Christmas Day than I'm happy about. Collapsing on the sofa with a pulse of 37 bpm is not the sort of thing you want on your Christmas list, believe me. That has made me take a hard look at the sort of person that I want to be this year. I suspect you're going to see me flying my freak flag rather more openly, although I have no idea at all how that's going to manifest just yet. But if I had to sum up the core belief I want to drive my behaviour, I don't think I could put it any more succinctly than Kurt Vonnegut does in his novel God Bless You, Mr Rosewater when he writes, "Goddammit, you've got to be kind."

But we can get to all that later. For the time being, I have another column started on my blog archive page, and looking at the number of different banner graphics I've got stacked up these days (as I've just done) is intimidating. That is a lot of ink, right there. And I'm on my third scanner since I started drawing graphics for this site, way back in the last century.

As the banner at the top of this page promises, I don't intend to stop writing the blog just yet. And not dying would be good too, obviously.

On the last day of 2024 I'd had a busy and very late night, so my New Year's Day in 2025 was rather muted. This year I still feel very subdued, but the vibe is different.

Just as I'd predicted, by the time 2026 arrived I was fast asleep in bed. I did have a couple of glasses of wine yesterday afternoon and that was the first alcohol I've touched in a week, but I was still very much wiped out from COVID (I'd had a nap after lunch) and to be honest I really didn't feel like celebrating much. 2025 was such a weird and chaotic year and I suspect that 2026 is going to be just as crazy. So I took a couple of long-acting painkillers, fired up the electric blanket while I had a bath, and then toddled off to bed.

...where I was woken up by someone's rather excessive firework display at midnight. Was that really necessary?

I might not have been skiing for many years, and I can't really describe this as a skiing website any more given that the majority of its content is blog entries and pages about music and reading, but I still keep a fond eye on the skiing community.

So the news coming out of Crans-Montana today breaks my heart. I sincerely hope that the injured are able to heal quickly and that the death toll doesn't rise any higher.