Dear Diary,

I'm living in a way as if I died at the end of the month. No, I'm not committing suicide and I'm not dying (not immediately soon anyway).

I will go through something wherein life will not be the same ever again and I may be a different person unrecognisable from before.

For now I've got to do all the boring stuff, get all the basics of living life down to a tee. I don't think I can do very much in my life, the things that I can do I suppose I will focus on. Today I've set up a to do list of things to get on with. I'll get on with that, I suppose.

I'm trying not to feel panic. I'm experiencing panic fairly regularly, and night terrors. It sucks. On the plus side, I think I'll get my contract renewed from June. That juicy money coming in will be good I hope.

Dear diary, today I was working on a Sunday and I went to see some friends afterwards. It felt nice, almost normal. Life with a paying job feels good. I like ordinariness

Dear Diary,

I am posting less and less on here. Fear not. I'm not quitting this blog. Christopher Robin hasn't outgrown Pooh just yet.

Life's changing a lot. In ways you can't imagine. Things aren't great. But, once I accept that I have to ask myself: okay, now what?

'Now what?' is the question.

I've got to face the consequences of the mess that I've made of my life. Last week I was told that my contract at The Sentinel was ending soon. I told HR that I'd really like to still be considered for work there, the response from HR was: tell person J about it. Person J said in reply to my email: 'Thanks, C'.

I hope I can still work at The Sentinel. I don't think my life's very good at the moment, but it's my life, and I'll make of it what I can.

I have my demons facing me. My demons are very promient, very prevalent.

Lately I have been taking more to writing on paper. I feel that it helps me. There is something about paper that helps me. It also makes me realise that I can't rely on paper. I need this blog, but using paper makes me rely on the typed word less, even though it is what I need.

I'm working 2 days tomorrow. Yesterday I wrote up a pricing/spending matrix over the next 6 months.

I think that the next pay check after May will be likely at the end of July, which pays for August. Even if I get a job offer in May, I will still be paid next in August. As things currently stand, I will be working over the next

Dear Diary,

I'm a little bit too busy to talk about the minutiae of my life lately. However I thought that I would try when I can to express thoughts here and there.

Maybe an update on my life:

• I'm the desk administrator/payroll/freelance contact for a magazine in the Sentinel right now - that involves 1 day a month of cover. I'm still a temp, just one who is setting up the administrative systems of a single magazine, it seems.
• Last week I spent 6 days working from sunday to friday. God damn was it tiring.
• In that last week I was working on the foreign desk of the sentinel newspaper, and the illustration/pictures desk. I have worked with the woman on that desk before, but usually to cover for her when she's on holiday. Let's say that her name is Janelle
• Janelle makes me feel a lot of unease -- but I think that she respects that I am doing a job very well, she got me to do all the caretaker and dull tasks. I used my coding skillz to make a super sophisticated pay spreadsheet and a semi-automated interface for logging holiday.
• The thing that I feel is unsettling is the amount of unresolved thoughts that Janelle throws at me. For one, she said that 'I wasn't supposed to come in for 5 days' when HR told me that I was. Eventually she told me that her manager said it was 5 days and she wasn't aware of it and I felt for that whole week that she was reluctant to let me do the 5 days. That felt very unclear to me.
• The other thing that felt exceptionally unsettling about Janelle was that through the duration of friday, she was sort of asking if I'm coming in next week to help out, she then said that her boss wanted me to come in on a semi-regular basis to help out at her desk, but without any resolution or confirmation either from herself, her manager or HR about whether they want me to cover. 

In other news - I'm having regular night terors, anxiety, eating problems and my room and life is a fucking mess. I'm trying my best to live with what is moderate anxiety and moderate depression. I guess it is a matter of life with blight --some of it is sunshine, and some of it isn't.. It's not all bad. I've got to see it like that. I didn't really accept it was possible to enjoy life with depression. Back in the day i thought life was a lot more absolutist and anything that wasn't perfect success was an abject failure.

Okay,, so that's me expressing myself.

Good night.

Around February or so, I bought a safety Razor. I thought that I was sick of buying extra gillette cartridges and I was reading for some time about possible alternatives. The safety razor is the old style of blade that granddads and dads of my generation probably used to shave with.

Shaving with a razor is a refined act, it involves time, effort, precision, repetition and and class. It takes longer to shave, but it is also more robust and arguably cheaper, once you’ve bought the handle. The handle of the blade feels like a master’s tool. The handle weighs heavy yet is small. The handle opens up the head where you put the double safety razor in. I love the way it is so easy to replace a blade. I love how I bought 100 blades on amazon for like £10. I am not sure if the safety blade is a more ‘sustainable’ option. Is it more sustainable ecologically to use blades and dispose of them once they are ‘less than perfect’ compared to those plastic packaged ones which possibly last about 2-3 times longer? Perhaps I could make the blade longer if I polished the blade a bit after I was done with it. I feel an attachment to my new razor, it feels like a talisman, a tradesman’s proud tool. If I had a son I’d pass it on to him, if not just for its sentimentality.