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I would have to write down 2022 as both the quickest and weirdest year of my life. The speed with which it has passed me by alone perplexes me. But the strangeness: that has been something else.

Earlier, I spent some time looking back on what I was writing a year ago. But in truth, this time last year I was mostly writing offline, working on a brand new novel. A sequel to an earlier novel I really thought I would publish this year — an intention which of course has foundered.

If I have achieved anything this year, it was nothing I had anticipated. A positive: I restarted long-neglected treatments, freeing me from the worst of the heavy melancholy and lethargy that weighed down on me last winter.

Another: I have walked five miles with a trusted friend nearly every weekend all year long, pausing only during the summer. After a long period keeping only the company of my family, I have finally reemerged into the world, enjoying coffee in comfortable surroundings weekly.

While my fiction-writing seems to have reached a natural hiatus, this has been the year of my resurgent blog, with me often publishing several times a day. So many reflections have come flowing out of me the past few months, though as expected I unpublished the most personal of it days later.

I don’t know why or where this all came from, other than the intense conversation with myself, attempting to make sense of the past. Which brings me to what has occupied me most: finally reflecting on and looking into the impact on my life of a nearly twenty-year-old diagnosis.

I have also learnt this year what it really means to forgive. A series of seriously inexplicable coincidences have granted me a truer faith. My supplications have increased in number and earnestness this year, as I have taken to asking on behalf of people I never thought I’d think anything good of at all.

I end the year finally feeling a little more confident to pursue new opportunities. What the new year holds, nobody knows, but I will try to emerge more positive and optimistic, more ambitious in my spheres of influence, if the Most Merciful wills.

If anything I have written or done over the past year, or indeed at any point in my life, has offended or upset you, please forgive me. May we be united on a good and truthful path, overlooking of one another’s mistakes.

Happy new year one and all.