how do you measure a year?

As we say goodbye to 2014, I want to share some of the moments from this year that have stuck with me. I want to remember the hurt, the pain, the weird, the wonderful because it all meant something. I want to spend this last day of the year reflecting and remembering what I can of what 2014 gave me. It's been the worst but the best year of my life and throughout the year, I had a note open on my phone where whenever I remembered, I wrote down something that happened.  Now I am going to share these for the first time ever...

January 2014. It's the 2nd day of this new year and I am sat on a train, audibly sobbing to a train of people pretending they can't hear me. My destination is a private London hospital where I have been admitted to and I am feeling a fear I could never have comprehended before this moment. I'm scared of how alone I feel. I'm scared of what is waiting for me. I'm scared of getting better. I'm scared of the fact I know I will be leaving a substantial amount heavier than I am right now. I'm scared of what the other patients will think of me. I'm scared of how worthless I feel.

July 2014. London is having the most insane thunder storms, there's 3 different ones in 3 different directions, I go outside and put my arms out, stare up at the sky and feel incredible.

April 2014. It's the early hours of the morning. I don't know what day it is. I don't care anymore. I've never felt so scared and alone in my entire life. I feel like a failure. I've lost everything. I've given up on myself. I spent hours prior having incredibly vivid hallucinations about throwing myself in front of a tube, a car, a bus, anything that could wipe out my existence in one step. I've taken too many pills. I'm dragging a kitchen knife along the centre of my veins as though it's a game of operation, I hit the edges and I'm out. The blood smells like burning metal and feels somewhere between relief and giving up.

November 2014. She tells me she's in love with me and I realise that every moment of the pain was worthwhile.

June 2014.  My best friend and I are stood at the front of a sold out Islington Assembly Hall seeing Sara Bareilles live for the third time together. Her arms are around my shoulders and I'm wiping tears from my face as she plays the opening chords of "December" and I'm really, really fucking glad that I'm alive.

January 2014. It's my first night in hospital and I can't sleep. All I can hear is the girl in the room next to me screaming and shouting. She says she wants to kill everybody. She is a Persian Princess and is biting, kicking, screaming and spitting at everybody who comes into her room. I pull the covers over my head and cry wondering what I am doing in a place like this. It takes 3 hours for her sedation to work. The next morning when we pass outside our floor's kitchen at 9am, she hugs me and gives me a cornetto ice cream, I take it off her and she watches as I open it and take a lick. Her eyes are like a child giving someone a present, holding a breath, hoping that they'll like it. I say thank you, head back to my room, throw it in the bin and spend the next hour purging. I don't feel anything.

February 2014. Oh my god, Taylor Swift was metres away from me performing my favourite song of hers "All Too Well" I'm so overwhelmed I think I'm going to pass out.

May 2014. I'm walking out of the apartment I'm staying at and a dead pigeon falls out of the sky at my feet. I trip over it and spend the next 45 minutes wondering if having a dead bird fall at your feet is sign of good luck. I never did find out.

June 2014. Two of my friends have come over to the apartment I'm staying at for an impromptu Tony Awards viewing party. Jessie Mueller and Carole King are performing together and I can't stop crying because it's so amazing.

October 2014. She takes 3 buses across London at 4am just to come and be with me whilst I'm hurting. I can't describe this feeling.

August 2014.  Two months ago I started watching the TV show "Pretty Little Liars" and I've just finished binge watching five seasons, because why the hell not!

September 2014. I'm hanging out at my friend Becka's friend pub in Soho with her, our friend Kerison and my cat who is on a leash fast asleep on a lap. We're drinking gin and it dawns upon me that I am sat in a pub, with my cat on a lead and somehow this doesn't even make the top twenty of most ridiculous things to happen to me.

May 2014. It's a Sunday afternoon and I'm lay in the bathtub of my hospital room's en-suite listening to Joni Mitchell's album "Blue" at full blast, the sun is shining and I realise that not everything has to hurt.

July 2014. I'm sat in my new favourite writing spot in Soho, I'm writing about him, and then a song comes on that just makes me know that he is with me. All the time. He lives in my heart.

December 2014. It's early in the morning and for some reason I'm the first of us both to be awake. This is rare. I'm lying listening to the rain with the love of my life nestled into my side with her arms wrapped protectively around me. Life is so beautiful.

June 2014. The Red Arrows are going to be flying over Buckingham Palace. I don't usually care about things like this but I'm staying around the corner of Buckingham Palace and as soon as I hear the helicopters in the distance, I'm filled with this childlike excitement and grab the keys and race up onto the roof of the apartment in just a towel with soaking wet hair and watch them fly past with a trail of red, white and blue smoke. Wow, I suddenly realise that I'm LIVING in London and this is just a casual day for me.

September 2014. I'm wrapped up in a throw, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire in my friend Victoria's garden and drinking gin. Life is good. Little do I know what is waiting for me around the corner. It's only going to get better.

October 2014. Lindsay Lohan tells me my outfit is cute.

April 2014. I want to change everything about myself. I hate myself and I hate the traces of who has been left on me. Hair. Hair. It has to start with the hair right? I go and get inches upon inches cut off my hair had my hair and am now fashioning a shoulder length bob. I feel free. This is liberating.

July 2014. I accidentally get a kitten.

May 2014. It's a terrible night. I'm exhausted and my head is screaming at me. I've gained a huge amount of weight because of the medication that I'm on and I've just had enough of it. I spend the day in bed refusing to leave or eat anything. Nurses have been trying to coax me out of bed or to eat something all day and evening. One of my doctors enters my room for the third time that day and I just lose it, I start screaming and I'm howling with sobs. I can't breathe, I can't feel anything. I wake up 13 hours later to find that I had been sedated.

December 2014. I'm at the Harry Potter Studio Tour with the love of my life. Could life get any better than this?

April 2014. I'm back in hospital, after a gruelling group therapy session which I have stormed out of, I'm sat crying, when a very famous musician sits down beside me, puts his arm around me and just sits there in silence with his arm around me whilst I cry. People are really special.

October 2014. It's Halloween. We're hand in hand walking around London's Southbank. My heart is so content. I can't remember a time before she existed. I didn't know it yet, but I'd found her.

June 2014. I tell myself I'm enough, and I almost believe it. This is progress.

September 2014. I start a new job and gain a new family.

June 2014. An entire outdoor weekend of free theatre proves to be just what the doctor ordered.

November 2014. For the first time in a very long time, I pick up a razor and don't see it as a weapon to hurt myself with.

July 2014. I'm at an event photographing Keira Knightley. My love for portrait photography has flooded back to me.

October 2014. I have my own flat. My very own place to call mine, finally.

September 2014. I'm browsing Etsy and I never realised how much I needed a taxidermy rat dressed as Captain America until right this very moment.

21st October 2014. My life is changed forever. For the better.

November 2014. For the first time ever, somebody has the ability to bring me out of a panic attack. She holds my hand, strokes my face and looks into my eyes and suddenly I can breathe again.

December 2014. I'm seeing Taylor Swift with my favourite person on the planet.

23rd November 2014. Love, just love.

December 2014. The most romantic night of my life. I'm so in love. I'm the luckiest person in this universe and my life is incredible. What difference a year makes.

my mind is somewhere hazy

There are some days, like today, where I actually wish that I was ill again. It was so exhausting and lonely and killed my spirit. But fighting it?  This is equally as exhausting and lonely.

It's so hard to fight against every single thought you have. I put up such a bright and bubbly front all the time, but underneath it all, I'm not this "recovered" person. I have to fight against almost every single thought that comes into my head, my automatic thought processes tell me to self destruct, that I'm not worthy of simply existing, and I have to fight that every second of every day, and it drains me.

Today my brain actually aches because of everything that has gone on. It's hard to fight the thoughts when your brain is completely drained of any kind of energy or motivation.

In a bizarre series of events, the song "Days" by Kirsty McColl just came on in the restaurant that I am in, a song that I associate with the loss of the greatest light in my life, my heart and soul. It's been seven long years without him, and my grief got tangled up amongst eating disorders and depression and self loathing.

Grief poured out of me disguised as blood.  It was grief trying to get out. It's still trying to get out. It buried itself so deep within me that it became a part of me. There are shrapnels of him inside of me.

How do you allow yourself to move on? To grieve seven years worth of mourning. The more the issues that were tangled together with the grief get dealt with, the more the grief has to come out of hiding.

I can feel his hand in mine as he slipped away, it's so real, all the time.

I think it's a sign, I really do. I think it's a sign to deal with it and to fight. Maybe once I've began to tackle this, the feelings of wishing I was ill again will go away. Maybe.

Today has been a bad day, those days that you know will happen but dread it and fear will set back your entire recovery process. I thought it was important to just have some kind of record that I am here in a bad day, but I am okay.

I am okay.

I am okay and I am enough.

What I am doing is good, I'm conquering a lot of things, but I'm also recognising the falls and the mistakes. I've made many, but we can only keep moving forward can't we? I need to keep telling myself, forward is the only way, well, as the song by Yazz says; "the only way is up"

there's beauty in the breakdown.

"So let go, jump in.

Oh well, what you waiting for? 

It's all right, 'cause there's beauty in the breakdown.

So let go, yeah let go,

Just get in, oh it's so amazing here,

It's all right, 'cause there's beauty in the breakdown."

Sometimes, you have to decide to let go of the hatred you hold for someone. Even if it isn't hatred and just a strong dislike. Let it go. Negativity is a waste of energy, a waste of your mind and a waste of your time. 

Maybe you can't always forgive, but you can forget. Holding onto hate can cause your heart to turn very bitter. No matter the reasoning behind the negative feelings. Freeing your mind of the negative energy simply gives you more room for positive energy. 

Build bridges. Bridges don't necessarily have to have the same foundations they once had. Once it's burned, it can never be replicated, it won't be the same, it will be different. But build them anyway. You don't have to love or like the person, you just simply have to let go and move forward.

I made a choice today to try  let go of all negative energy to a few certain people who have harmed or wronged me or my friends and family. If it's unforgivable, they don't even deserve another thought, they're forgotten and not forgiven, but I can't hold onto it, it's not healthy. If it is forgivable, I'm need to learn to let it go, I want to attempt to rid all of the negative energy out of my life. I don't want to hold onto grudges or previous wrong doings. We're all human, we all make mistakes. 

the darkness in which I swim.

catch me, i'm falling.

I hate myself. 

What is so wrong with me that I have to always do or say the wrong thing. Why can I never do anything right in my life? Why do I have to be so sensitive about every single thing? Why do I manage to annoy everybody all the time? Why am I such a burden? Why am I even here? 

Why have I let something out of my control make me so upset and angry? I cannot process these emotions quickly, it takes me a long time and whilst I'm feeling that I then have all of these "sub emotions" that come into play; irrationality, self loathing, paranoia, anxiety, and so many more. It doesn't take a simple "deep breaths" for me to stop feeling these things and understand why I felt them, it can take me hours.  This is what I call "the danger zone" it's when I react to those emotions without caution, or without thinking about the repercussions  I cut, I purge, I go to some very dark places and it takes me a very long time to get out of that danger zone.

I've been in that danger zone now for seven and a half hours. There has been no light yet. I've felt incredibly alone and isolated, through nobody's fault, and I've quite literally had to sit on my hands for a large portion of the night to prevent myself from hurting myself. 

I've had panic attack after panic attack. I' I'm like a wrecking ball. I've gained all this momentum and I can't stop. Where does it end? When will it end? 

Bad days can change everything. They can set you back. I'm trying, I'm really trying. I want to keep moving forward, I need to keep moving forward. Help. 

another dream, another love you'll hold.

"now they'll walk on my arm through the distant night,
and I wont let them stray from my heart,
through the wind, through the dark, through the winter light
I will read all their dreams to the stars.

i'll walk now with them,
i'll call on their names,
and i'll see their thoughts are known,
not gone,

not gone.

they walk with my heart, not gone
and i'll never let them go, not gone."

there's a grief that can't be spoken.

I've been staring at an empty page for a while now trying to think of a  profound, or beautiful way to put what I want to say but I think the only way I can do this justice is to just say exactly what I feel. Raw emotions, no edits, no glossing feelings over to make me look slightly less unhinged. What I'm writing is straight from the empty space where piece of my heart - that was taken away from me six years ago - used to be.

At the age of seventeen, I'd lost quite a number of people to death. But none of them could prepare me for the biggest loss of my life. There isn't a manual to tell you how to grieve, or how to cope with the loss of a loved one. I wish there was, it would make life so much easier. But that's life isn't it? Experiencing life and experiencing death. 

Nothing could have prepared me, it wasn't an expected death, not that I think that makes it any easier. No amount of time or words would have relieved or numbed the pain even in the slightest fraction. 

We spent an excruciatingly long night camped out in a tiny relatives room on 3 small sofas praying for a miracle, for the medicine to work, for anything.

But no amount of praying or wishing or hoping could have changed the outcome, the next morning, the words "there's nothing more we can do" were spoken, and the world that I knew was altered forever.

They removed the monitors and machinery keeping him alive and I held his hand and whispered in his ear. I can still feel his hand, how it felt that morning. It was different to every other time I had held his hand, this time it was lifeless, it still dwarfed my tiny hands and I knew this was the last time I was ever going to see him alive and feel the complete security and warmth that I felt every time that I grabbed his hand.

It didn't take very long, I suppose it never does. You remove the machine keeping the body alive, because the  body can't keep itself alive, and it's a waiting game of how long it can sustain itself before finally giving in. It was twenty minutes or so. I say it wasn't enough, but what amount of time would have been enough? 

I felt it instantly, a gaping hole was punched through my chest, my legs were no longer able to hold me and I fell to the floor. I'm still there now. 

I can visualise it all as though it was yesterday. And it does feel like yesterday, sometimes I hate the way my brain holds onto every painful detail, it makes the flashbacks and nightmares a lot more hard to recover from.

The pain in my chest that he left has become a normal sensation now. I don't think it will ever disappear. It aches, it burns, it hurts. This is my life now, a world in which he doesn't exist. 

It was an indescribable loss and I'm not going to sit here and try and find a collection of words that can't  even remotely articulate the emotions correctly.

One thing I can say, is that there have been times when I have felt his presence around me. As ridiculous as that may sound, there are times when I've sense him behind me, or in the room with me. His scent floods my senses and I'm immediately comforted. There was even a period of time when I felt something sit on the end of my bed each night and move a framed photograph of him and I next to my bed from another side of the room. Make of that what you will. But I take that as a sign that he still walks beside me. He may not be physically present, but for as long as I am living, he remains at my side, in my heart, and in my soul. 

I wish I could attest that "time heals everything" maybe it does. Time, that little paradox; running out by the second but on an indefinite infinite span. I have yet to be healed by time. But I have hope that I will. 

So, as we approach the night that six years ago changed my life forever. I am trying my hardest to remember the wonderful, beautiful, loving, inspirational person that he was. Not the huge gap that he left behind. I am who I am because he loved me, he taught me, he shaped me, he made me soar, and he was there when I fell.