(again, as this is backdated, I'm writing this with the benefit of hindsight).
I did actually have this rather neat post about 'a day in the life', but, the last few days led to a bit of an
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Mental health
C is for Can do #atozchallenge
(backdated, sorry I was late! It does mean I get to use pretty photos I got on Sunday though!)
Do or do not. There is no try.
Yoda, “The Empire Strikes Back”
Well, sort of.
I’m actually more of the ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” which is another truism I believe in.
But, when it comes to my mental health, I can’t make excuses. I have to keep healthy boundaries, and work hard. There is no ‘try’ at living after all.
But it’s not easy…
The thing about trying to have a ‘can do’ attitude, in the context that I use it, is that it’s almost always about protecting myself. And it’s all about protecting, I guess, the spoons that I have. (In case you’re not sure what the spoon theory is, here’s the woman that wrote the base idea, and I am republishing my spoonie’s guide soon). ANd not always having the energy to do something is not the same as ‘there is no try’, and I think that’s the mistake many people make about what I mean.
If I can’t do something, I’ll wait. Unless I have no choice.
Lately though…
One of the things I started noticing about a year and a half ago, when I started having a few of the things explained to me that made no sense in my life while asking questions and hitting issues with my therapy, that I’m very much of the mindset that (probably unfairly) that if I say no, that my friends won’t like me. I’m very much a people pleaser, to the point that I often do things I shouldn’t. And it’s gotten me into a really difficult pattern to break.
So, my ‘do or do not’ is a complete sentence now. I will do, or I won’t. There’s no emotion attached to it if I can’t do the things I’ve had asked of me. I might feel guilty about saying no, but I can’t always do everything I want to (and as I’m actually writing this on my E day, I’ve already talked about planning fails, I know this). And if they don’t like it, I guess that means my friends aren’t actually my friends. And that might make me sad, but I’ve got to accept that. Luckily, it means that I’ll be ok.
B is for Books – Walking off the earth #Finalchapterinthisbook #newbook #atozchallenge
I’ve had many ‘this is my hardest’s to deal with – probably more than anyone my age has any right to deal with in some ways. But this one hit the hardest about three days ago, and I thought there was going to be a bit of give, a bit of wriggle room, but no. I finally encountered the words that just broke me in two. And I won’t repeat them. I’ve deleted them. But I came to a screeching halt, and I’m not sure how things will change, but change they absolutely will.
But first – I have a heck of a lot of grieving and coming to terms with things to do – and I need to build an actual, sensible plan to sustain my businesses. And I have to accept that part of that is digging out my work ethic and dealing with everything that’s gone on lately and putting things right. And I’ve come to the conclusion that to do that, this book needs to end. This story, no matter that it’s not a happily ever after needs to become something that we relegate to the ‘not touching’ drawer. Not everything that’s happened – no, they’re elements that can be reused. But the tale of the sad girl that lives inside her house and does nothing…that’s a bust. That’s so much of a bust we’re not making it past the first draft.
I’m not ashamed but…
When you’re where I am, you’re not *supposed* to admit bullying gets to you. I’m the moderator of one of the biggest indie communities on Facebook, I run a lot of things for a lot of different people and I find myself, daily, waking up and dreading the comments that appear here, and on the other blogs, I run. In my inbox, on Twitter, by PM on Facebook. And, in with that realisation is that I’m as unkind to myself as all of these people. My self-talk is terrible. I’d rather sleep (or try to) than work. And I hate admitting that, but my sleep is disturbed again, and it’s getting difficult to do *much* of anything.
I do have one ray of light though, beyond my family, who are just the best, and my friends, who equally rock, and that’s my books. I’ll be talking about them more naturally in the coming days, but for now, I just wanted to thank anyone that’s supported me as a writer. I don’t always get to write, but it is one of my few places of solace. And if I’m walking off this earth to another, I couldn’t do it without knowing that I was writing the story as I went.
Today’s other AtoZ’s on the blogs I take part on.
Books by Kai – Black Monday
Oh, if you want to keep track of all my posts in one place, I set up a syndicated blog again. It’ll have everything in it, eventually, though it does take a few hours to catch up with stuff!
Fiction by Kai – the Knight of Coins
Bi-polar bears – Being, not doing
These our Fandoms – a quick skimmer onto the things in Battle Ground by Jim Butcher.
See you tomorrow!
A for ‘are we there yet?’ #atozchallenge
Late start to the AtoZ I know, but I’ve had work and other stuff to deal with today.
I think the title of this might give you an insight into me, more than anything else. I’m not… exactly … a patient person. I love to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, and be there.
I do not do well with waits. Waiting is anathema to me in fact. My impatience is so bad that I’ve actually made up games just to get through hard meetings. I think part of it is because I’m anxious (which I’ll mention later), but part of it is just that I can’t stand being still. Even for a minute. And I hate that my body lets me down so that very often, even if I don’t want to be, I am.
A also really stands for a couple of other things.
I’m an animal lover – I have two cats, and would adopt more if allowed. I want a dog, though, practically, I’m not allowed them. I’m also anxious. If you want a bit of background on that, I talked a little and will talk more about it on my mental health blog, bi-polarbears. Anxiety does, however rule my life.
I’m also also, an author. That, I’ll be showing off on both fiction.bykai and booksbykai. Writing is life for me. As evidenced by the fact that I’ve linked to *all* of the AtoZ blog posts I’m doing this month by mentioning I’m also sharing an AtoZ with a friend, and my post today was American Gods. An amazing book.
With all that awesome ‘all about me’ A entry, I think I’ll close with adieu 😉
(because I’m not sleeping and I’m a goofball).
(later in the month I’ll just link back to each post ;))
Tell me something beginning with A about you?
Rebuilding my world
So. I’ve talked about the unexpected stuff that happened while taking time off, but I’d already planned to take a few steps back this spring and sort out a few things.
In April, I’ll be back in Uni, completing a course on Python for the first year of my Cyber Security Year, but I’ll also be doing other stuff. Like Blogging from A-Z. We’re already discussing the These Our Fandoms work, but I’ll also be running here at a minimum. I’ll be joining up, and announcing around the 8th of March for those projects, when this year’s theme is revealed.
Books though….
One of the major elements of my ‘big rebuild’ is that I’ll be working on putting my books back. As everything is offline, I’ll be editing the books before they go back up, and straightening everything up.
While I’m looking at all of this, I’m thinking about what I want to do with new stories, and working on everything. My books are important, and working on them is something I’d like to do regularly – books are a part of my life. Writing is a part of my life. So, when rebuilding my stuff, that’s one of the things I’m really focussed on.
Gaming…
I’ve not really talked about it much here lately, but I’ve completed a few games, I’m starting a few others, and I’ve watched my partner play through other games – we were lucky enough to get a PS5 recently, so we’ve been enjoying a lot of games, and it’s been good just having that to escape to. Though Assassin’s Creed: Vallhalla has resulted in A LOT of heckling in the house.
Family
I’ve been talking about various things that’s gone on in our family – we’ve been through multiple losses, and that’s not the happiest thing to actually confront, but we’re having to. Extending our family isn’t easy. And I guess that’s what’s leading me to a lot of the non-fiction books I’ll be writing this year. The pandemic has definitely impacted us, as a family – not just keeping us apart, and losing people during that time – but as we’ve changed things. I’m also – currently – the only one of my family that’s been vaccinated, which is a bit…weird. My children – both asthmatics – are my worry, so when I ended up being invited, I was rather surprised, but I’ve had my first dose (felt like I was kicked in the arm by a horse for a few days), and we’ll go through and that’ll be awesome. I am really looking forward to things becoming less restricted, and going home, and seeing everyone, but I’m also looking forward to re-finding our rhythm as a family.
And finally, business
I’ve been off for several years, and not working outside of a few basic assignments, but I’m thinking that there’s a couple of things that I want to focus on. Mostly hosting and formatting for now, though we’re also looking at apps and other stuff while we work through stuff. I think one of the important things at this point is because I’ve been off, I’m taking it slowly. I know that this is probably critical to building things back again, but, I think a lot of what I have to address is what direction we want the company to run in. I’d rather have a small set of complimentary projects, than be as spread out as I used to be.
I’m not sure when things are going to be back to normal for me, and how tired I’ve been. I’m not really finding, after the transfusion, that I’m as energetic as I expected. I’ve improved a little, but I am still bone weary, which I guess I should be discussing with my GP. Again, there’s a book involved in that, so… lots of stuff that I’m trying to balance through. My life is in desperate need of a proper schedule, but, while I’m grieving, it’s hard to do that.
If anyone has tips, I’d really appreciate it.
When you’re just not ready to say goodbye
Dragonflies
There are some posts you just never want to write. Some things that you just don’t want to say.
Last week, my grandmother passed away. And while we’ve – not callously prepared, but due to the circumstances – been sorta worried this would happen, given the current health climate in the world right now, let alone the fact that we’ve got to accept this – as much as we want to keep people with us forever, it’s just not possible. As hard and as much as we wish it could be, there’s a reality that we can’t escape. And that’s something I’m personally struggling with. There’s the logical side of me that says ‘nope, there has to be ways to fix this, while the emotional is just going ‘nope’. My psych nurse says it’s completely normal, but I’ll be entirely honest, while I’ve got a little self-care routine that involves meditation every morning (something gran taught me, a little at least), and a few times a week in the evening, I’m kinda disconcerted to find that I’m managing *about* five minutes before breaking down and crying. Which is normal, but as I’ll come back to, I guess, because I have mental health challenges, I wasn’t sure it was till my psych nurse told me. And it feels awful to put it this way – I’m focusing on me when the loss affects all of us, but I’m trying to balance being a mum, a daughter, a mourning granddaughter, a partner. And I’m aware we don’t really ‘grieve properly’ for about six months (though, everyone has their own path). All of this is leaving me feeling a bit out of sorts and feeling like engaging with the world just isn’t something I want to do right now. But I’m a writer. I should know how to talk about this.
Spoiler alert – I don’t.
What are the right words?
This has been one of the toughest weeks I’ve ever gone through. As a family, we’re not geographically close, but though we live all over the country, we do all talk. My gran and I used to see one another at least once a week before we moved to the Cotwolds (and she moved further north for a while), because we lived in the same district in Edinburgh. I am very lucky – our family, no matter what, are always there for one another. My children have been abroad with her when they were younger (and my mum too) – we’d see each other at least one day when we were home, and we talked on the phone regularly.
So, to be told that she’s gone, and how sudden it really was, despite the fact she’s been unwell and the stuff going on with the pandemic etc., we thought that we’d get to see her again when the lockdown lifted. So, to say that I’m a bit stunned and numb is an understatement.
A good woman, my gran
I’ve said in various posts talking about this in private that grief is one of those things that takes our words away. We are silenced by the shock, by the pain, by many things. In my case, it’s unusual to be without words, but my gran was an integral part of a lot of my writing. She and I talked about stories – she’s a part of one of my pen names (and, my real name) – but we just talked books an awful lot. My family have all had a lot to do with my writing life. And it’s just…hard to say the right things. So I’ll say simply this. My gran was a good woman. She was a spiritualist healer, she was a kind woman. She was funny, and fun and our good memories will be what we focus on.
We will miss her, a lot. Words aren’t sufficient to express that.
Dragonflies
One of the many things though, that gran told me that sticks with me, not just the poem in the image above, is that butterflies and dragonflies are our family that are gone, checking in with us. She and I talked a lot about that, because of my love of dragonflies and hers. So, this year, when and if we go to the little lake we know that there are dragonflies, I’ll be looking out for the one that comes to me, and maybe I’ll get to say hey.
I’ll be working through this and everything else as we move through the next few weeks – her funeral is next week, and when we can go home, as long as the UK lockdown roadmap remains static and as planned, we’ll see our family in the summer. But… for now, I’m a bit lost, and a lot numb, and just taking time out.
If you could think happy thoughts for us, that would be great. If you’re going through similar, I’m really sorry. 2020 was a horrible year, and 2021 was supposed to be better, and in reality, we can’t ask for that, but….it’s hard to deal with knowing where we go from here.
It’s not desertion…
Recently, I talked about a few ideas I had about boundaries with a few friends, and for the most part, I’ve had great conversations about how to segment off time. But… I wanted to talk about something that had come up, and something I think it’s hard to talk about because when we do this stuff, it’s supposed to be positive and empowering.
It all started with a share…
So, I shared this a few days ago – and one friend said to me that I was far too focussed on how I was feeling right now. So we talked about that and she said that all I need to focus on now is making sure that we *all* survive in the community – that ‘community’ won’t survive unless people get their heads out of their asses.
And that literally left me…well…breathless.
I’ve been trying to articulate a lot of what I’ve been thinking about and it’s beginning to come down to a couple of concepts.
1) I’ve got some fairly cruel-to-be-kind friends – a good or bad thing, depending on what I’m doing.
and 2) If I’m suffocating/drowning/got no spoons, I’m useless to my community, and in real world communities, those that can’t contribute and have in the past are often seen far better than we behave towards those around us in the community right now. And by community, really, the main ones I’m around are the mental health advocate and the indie author community.
First, get your own mask on
Regardless of what my friend believes, the rule about oxygen masks that’s oft quoted – get your own mask on before trying to help others is important. Possibly critical. I’ve spent the last few years struggling against that, but things aren’t getting easier for me. So, my first step is my ‘oxygen mask’. For that reason, and that reason alone, I’m ressurecting ‘SMSCDT’ or Social Media Self-Care downtime.
My second action is my silo – something I’ll be talking about in another blog post.
But I wanted to be clear on this – if you need to step back – whether this is something you’ve done over and over recently, or it’s the first time – though it’s hard, you have to follow your gut, or your heart. Be aware that some people won’t be happy – and that if you’re accused of letting them down, you can either stop and think as to whether they’re right, or if you’re being guilted (I’m pretty much in both camps. When I step back, if I’m working on stuff that needs sorted, I’ve got plans for that too.
Step back, or be ashes
As this all went down on my chat server, another two friends saw what was being said and put their opinions in – part of the opinion that was shared was that not only was I right to be stepping back, but it’s not my place to burn myself up to keep other people warm (there are a lot of these metaphors, huh?) and that if I didn’t step back soon, they wouldn’t be surprised if I was just a pile of ashes at the end of it. It was at that point the friend admitted that if I stepped back, long term, I wouldn’t be around for her stuff and that she was relying on me to get stuff done. Flattering as that is, it’s not changing that I’m on downtime.
But you take downtime regularly, don’t you?
Anyone that’s around on my social media knows that I take May off for my #Kaiatus, which often leads to a lot of work pulling showing up at the end of May. But, I’ve spent the last three years doing downtime and coming back whenever summoned. That’s not happening this time. And the next essay, which I’ve called ‘The Grain Silo’ (and is a part of the reason I finally went forward to write ‘And Miles to go Before I Sleep’) to explain why. But it’s about resting, not quitting, even if people feel like I’m deserting them. I don’t like that feeling, I’ll be honest, but I’m not sure what to do other than the path I’m on. WHen the road less travelled isn’t one I’ve ever been on, ever, it’s hard to know if it’s the right choice. But I guess I’m doing the best I can, and this is what it’ll take.
What’s your thought? Downtime, yay or nay? Should you consider community before self always? Are you going to be considering some time out, especially given the year we’ve all had?
The radical changes I need to make #Mondayblogs #Wedswriters
So, I was a bit quiet about it, but I went on holiday for two weeks in the middle of August. I spent the last two weeks battering around a pile of theme parks – Disney, Universal, Blizzard Beach (One of Disney’s waterparks), plus Nasa, Gatorland, the Florida Mall, Denny’s, IHOP… we did so much that I’m spending so much time just exploring my experiences and filing them away carefully. My memory being what it is, I’ve also got about a gazillion photos that we all took – me, David, his mom, his sister, the kids.
I’ll talk about that more in another post (because this blog is getting picked up again as my ‘personal’ place to talk stuff, aren’t y’all lucky), but I need to touch on something I realised while I was away. I am doing far too much. FAR too much. There’s no room for me to learn and explore my world, and there’s no room for writing, none at all.
So, you might say ‘but you knew this already Kai, this isn’t a surprise’. And you’re right. But between barely holding it together to grief, and to sleep deprivation (I sleep six hours a night, on my best night. Normal nights are closer to five hours clawed back, with melatonin and other meds), so my little brain needs to be taught the hard way.
And the hard way was basically taking me offline for most of two weeks. My phone doesn’t do roaming and I decided, early on, that I wouldn’t use the wi-fi, so I basically read, spent a lot of time hanging out with my kids (my son and I played pool a lot) and just enjoying *being*.
Now, my being is books and writing, so I spent a lot of time trying to work out what I should do with myself. I don’t read or write nearly enough, and just behind that, I’m not doing a day of learning that I promised myself. So there’s all that. Behind that, and not far behind that either, I have a business to run – hosting and apps as it happens, and a diary I designed to help with all of this stuff. I know it works because I hit the ground running when I came back.
I know it sounds like I’m happy with all of this, but I’m not. It’s one of the most important things in my world- the ability to get to the point where I am comfortable and happy and can work with what I’d like to do, and I’ve lost that.
I’ll get there, but I’m sure it’s going to be bumpy for the next few weeks. I’m happy to get with it, but there are things that are important to me, lost in the shuffle. And all it took was a two-week holiday to spot it.
My mental health is still deteriorating, but I think I know how to sort that out too – I just need a bit of space to do it. Space isn’t easy to come by though, so while I do, I need to make sure I’m holding up my end of other stuff too.
But there is a ray of hope. Writing and my books. While this is a personal blog, the pro stuff will appear here too. One thing I did learn while I was away was that while my heart is full helping others, my soul sings for words. And I have so many stories to tell. And I want to tell them.
And then she said….follow me :)
I know, I know, I said yesterday I’d post something, but we filmed this, we filmed some other stuff, and then…well, other things got in the way, so we changed the order we did the vids in, and stuff.
I’m writing this from my bed today – I’m not having a great week already, but I’m sure it’ll get better 🙂
So, today, I’m inviting you over to Authorinterrupted, which you, Constant Reader, may or may not know, is my ‘professional’ writer’s blog, but which, for a very long time last year was just ‘my blog’. I’m going to split off the personal posts and either mirror or redirect those to here.
For those of you asking how best to keep up with this instead of remembering where I left off the day before, if you go to ByKai, you should find that all the posts mirror there, though they may appear slightly out of synced order to when I post on Facebook to say there’s a new post live. But, also as requested, Kai’s Blog Page, or Kai’s Blogging Network as I prefer to call it, has started this week too! Exciting stuff.
So, without further ado, my promised freebie, and see you later, over on Authorinterrupted.com – let me know what you think!
If it’s not behaving here, I’m launching my own Youtube Channel too, so please join me over there, or on my page at Facebook, where I’ll load it direct!
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Uh….ooops?
Have you ever wondered why people blog?
I have. I think about it every day, to find the reason that I’m blogging. A problem though, and a bit of a hiccup to it all is that if I’m not careful, I start trying to justify why I spend time.
Spend is right actually.
Blogging, and time most specifically, is a sort of currency for me. As is social media, and everything else I do. But I think what I mean by that is TIME is a currency that I struggle to decide how to spend. Blogging seems to be something I didn’t want to ‘spend’ on at all, and I don’t really know why. Or I didn’t until last week.
The thing is, I’ve been given back a lot of time lately.
When last I posted, I was ok. I wasn’t brilliant, but I was ok. My life was on a downward trend though. February 2015 was right smack bang in the middle of the first six months of what I was told was a very short treatment course with the team – anxiety, while hard, was manageable. I wanted to sleep more, but it’s taken until NOW. This week, I can actually say that five days out of seven, I’ve slept more than the goal I have on my fitbit. It’s taken Haloperidol, melatonin and changing my eating patterns to do it.
And you know, I’m talking about this as if it’s a tiny thing. It’s huge. I spent the last year and a half struggling to sleep more than four hours at a stretch, and struggling to go to sleep AT ALL some nights. I’d be up all night, and my brain wouldn’t stop. It just wouldn’t stop. It still doesn’t. But it’s easing. The grip on my head is easing, and oh, it’s so nice. I’m still needing to randomly nap in the afternoon, but I’m finding it so much… not quieter but, I don’t know. I’m sleeping. Which seems to make it easier for me.
So, I thought Id talk about this in a way I could understand myself when I look back, but more importantly, in a way that makes sense to everyone else. I need to work out how to spend my time – though I’m not sure how I’m going to measure it right now – and make sure there’s a nice balance for family, exercise, writing, work, and all of the things I want to do. If I can’t do that, I don’t know what I’m going to do.
And last week, it hit me. I stopped blogging because I lost things to say. It wasn’t so much I didn’t even have stuff to *babble* about. I just looked at each single blog I had as one blog, instead of a continuum. It’s going to take a bit of organising, but I think I’ve got an idea that will work.
So, my mission this week is to keep a diary about what I do, and how I’m spending time, and then, from there, I should be able to understand what time I actually have and whether I enjoyed what I was doing, and if there’s anything I can tweak.
My other major projects are sorting out a crowdfunding campaign for a project I’m doing, that I’m hoping will be good for others (it’s not to pay to publish something – it’s a product I need dev money for), and some other things. But I’m starting small this week – tracking.
And, hopefully, I’ll be blogging here semi-regularly again. Let’s make it a date, ok?
The adorable, endless grind
I guess I’m going to get some funny looks for this post, but writing is an adorable, yet endless grind. I’ve been arguing with people today about it today, but we grow, and we learn. And writing is both pleasure and pain, or at least for me. And I’m still stretching my muscles and wearing them in again.
I set myself a goal of 100,000 words this year, and I’m already a fifth of the way there, just blogging, doing 750words.com and a tiny bit of fiction. I want the fiction to be much more of an element in it, but seriously, it’s easy to write 100,000 words, just by blogging and doing 750words.com. I may need a bigger goal!
In the interim though, I thought I’d introduce my new readers to a few things that they might have missed:
My main Facebook page.
My main G+ page.
My twitter
My writing Blog
My PR blog (which I share with Kriss Morton)
I’ll stop there – I’ve got pen names too, but y’know, it’d be great if you’re following the main stuff…it’ll cut down on your clutter too.
We (Kriss and I) are sorting out some other stuff to launch too – a horror blog and a couple of other things besides.
But yeah, that’s where we are right now. I’m back to looking for a job, which is really fun, and really tiring. We’ve temporarily stopped trying for a baby, while I settle into everything. We’re coming up with new and interesting ways to amuse the now not so kitten-sized kittens. Life is as it is.
He had a name…
It was 2001. November 2001, just after they’d decided that I’d damaged my pancreas with a few missed gallstones. I’d spent a month in and out of hospital, unable to eat, unable to deal with most of the pain that had consumed me. I dropped from a svelte mother of two who had been merrily breastfeeding and healthily curvy (12 stones or so) to 8 stones and skeletal. I went from breastfeeding to not and still producing milk, even though I wasn’t feeding. The doctors and nurses looking after me watched me sleep most of the day away, full of morphine and on drips, barely eating. At one point, they spoke of putting in a central line.
I got home and got pregnant again. It was stupid, but still a miracle. It was 2001 – my baby daughter was six months old, my son was just over two years old. By my birthday, after arguing and discussing and going through all of the options, we decided we could manage with a third child, as long as my body would let me. That was a question in and of itself – one that we finally got to the bottom of. I’d be ok, as long as I was careful.
And then, the worst happened. My blood tests showed that actually, I might not be ok. That my liver and my pancreas were struggling – and my relationship was breaking down and things just weren’t working. I’d been making plans by that point to go it alone with the three of my children, as their father was…not whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Our relationship had gone south long before I’d gotten pregnant again, but I thought I could cope.
I was then faced with the worst decision I could ever make. I could die carrying this child. And it’s something I don’t talk about much – there’s the more immediate ‘trying for this family’ always to deal with, but this was different. I really was on my own in many ways.
So, we went to talk about my options, and discovered the little boy I was carrying was dead.
By then, though, he had a name.
His name was Connor. He’d have been born around August 2002, and would be 11 now.
I have a godson, not much younger than my Connor would have been, and I left the father of my children a year after. We’d grown apart by then. And my life moved on. It always does. I don’t think the things that came after would have happened with three children as young as they were, and I know that losing him was the fork in the path that led me, perhaps, to where I am now. And logic suggests that we’ll never know – you can’t go back and change it. You can’t remove a scar – not easily. And there are some we just don’t want to remove.
But around now, every year, I miss the little boy I didn’t really get to know. We talk about stillbirth and miscarriages in hushed tones, and though I know it’s not the same as losing him at 30 weeks, or earlier or later, he still had a name, and I had hopes for him. He has no grave, but he has a tree in the place I spent some of my teen years. There is no marker, nor other people to remember him, aside from the people that lived it with me, thousands of miles away. And those that got to know me after, while I was still dealing with all of it. But I was the only one that knew him really. I wish, more than anything else, that everything I’d hoped, and all thing things I couldn’t have predicted for him came true, and there was a smiling boy on this post instead of an empty space where his happy face should be.