Feeling The Fear

  Well it's NYD of 2015. NYE hasn't traditionally been my favourite day of the year and I don't really love its following day counterpart. I do like the twinkling, heady lights of Christmas and all of the different things there are to do during Christmas Week but then once we arrive at NYE I wonder what will be any different about NYE of the next year. When I look back at the year just gone I see it as important but nothing really changed with regard to work and my lifestyle. It was a mirror year of the one before it, but without a spell in the mental health facility of a hospital and I learned about loss in the March when a special relative died and I learned to adjust to life without her. I spent 2014 taking little steps towards bigger steps and I've entered 2015 thinking about bigger steps and I can see myself striding at some point in the not too distant future.

  I think to truly make the best of a new year or indeed a new day it's very important to look back and see what we can and can't do differently in the future. Over the last few years I have had a weight problem, I lose it and then I gain it. I eat chocolate and ice cream, I go to Burger King and then I feel much worse about myself. I do these things when I am fed up, I don't have the energy to cook or get up so I eat rubbish and ultimately turn the inner sanctum of my body into a rubbish heap. 2015 is the year that this dangerous and destructive pattern stops and it must stop for good. Quite frankly, I've had enough of it and it's just a silly way to live. Yoyo eating habits and myself separated our partnership in 2014 and I very much hope that we don't meet again.

   I've also spent a long time living in fear and I've made my home in the shadows. I made myself afraid of the world around me and the different things it offers but during the transitional moments of 2014/15 I decided that I just don't want to live like this anymore. I watched a programme called Marvellous and it was all about a man called Neil Baldwin who states he's never been scared of anything and as such has made friends with premiership footballers, high end members of the clergy and he's also received a fellowship degree from Keele University after spending some time pretending to be the local vicar. I watched Neil's story with a keen interest and realised that nothing has ever held him back, he simply wasn't born with the fear factor and as a result he's achieved so much and well and truly lived his life to the full.

  I think that my life could be so much more marvellous if I wasn't so scared so I thought I'd start doing new things. I did something new today and I'm feeling quite pleased with myself about it. I often thought I might like to have my eyebrows shaped but I'd already reached the conclusion that I would be lost in such an environment. I was letting my fears about stepping into the unknown take over me again and I was being silly. I won't fit in I thought to myself but today I stepped into a 'brow bar' and went through the excruciating process of having my eyebrows shaped with a thread thing for the first time. I've got the red eyebrow area and the headache to prove it but eyebrow threading is now something I feel capable of having done to myself.

  I'm heading back to Seville soon after Christmas at home here in the UK and I'm going to rejoin the gym when I return to my Big Square sanctum. I'm going to join the expensive gym close to where I live because there's a pool there and I plan to step into a swimming costume and allow myself to be seen by others in a public place because I really like swimming and it's a type of exercise I'm happy to dedicate myself to. I'm also going to finally force myself to learn Spanish in a proper classroom because I don't understand anything in the country I live in and that's really, really thick of me and I shouldn't have allowed it to go on for so long. Spain is an excellent place and best experienced long term with a knowledge of Spanish in one's arsenal. I want to really know and understand another language regardless of whether or not I live there.

  I'm eager to make my dreams come true in 2015, I want to learn how to make my writings sellable in the commercial market and teach others how to speak English. I'm going to tie up loose ends in 2015, GCSE maths and driving licenses must finally be obtained and a path into the future must be cleared. I'm not planning to change the world in the next couple of months but I'd really like to make my world a better place to live in. Starting these new habits isn't the tricky bit, the beginning is easy, it is the keeping up of the healthier habits that are more difficult. It's time to fly, fly, fly away from fear and into the unknown land of optimism and maybe a little bit of adrenaline rush skydiving.