Sailing to Sleep

I ended up getting out of bed at lunchtime on Wednesday, mostly because I'd got meetings at the office in the afternoon. This highlights the benefit of work in this process: the obligation/reponsibility is strong enough to force me into action even when I absolutely do not feel like it. On Thursday I forced myself to cycle to work since exercise is usually the best antidote to the blues. It helped and on Saturday I did a proper 50km ride, with the same goal in mind. I've also been keeping myself busy, one way or another. But in spite of all this I'm still struggling, though not as badly as on Wednesday.

Actually I have to admit that I feel kind of unwell. It's hard to describe quite how I feel, but things in my head aren't working properly. I seem to have problems recalling simple things, like people's names. And I constantly have the feeling that I've forgotten something. I can concentrate, but only with a relatively narrow focus and concentrating is quite hard work. But mostly I'm extremely tired. I'm starting to wonder if going on holiday was such a good idea. For a few weeks life weighed less heavily and returning to the "normality" of our post-Kay lives seems to be almost unbearable.

However I have done one thing in the last week that has given me a lot of joy: editing up a video of our sailing holiday. This turned out to be a huge amount of work. I'm no expert in video editing - I prefer photography - but I'd got some good material during the holiday using my GoPro sports camera and decided to try and make something of it. I started out 10 days ago using iMovie on the Mac, but rapidly learned that I couldn't do what I wanted with it. So I bought a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements and reconstructed what I'd done with iMovie. Premiere would let me do what I wanted but it works very badly on the Mac and is rather difficult to use for a beginner. In the end I gave up a bought a copy of Apple Final Cut Pro X and this turned out to be great: fast, easy to use and able to do what I had in mind fairly easily.

I have spent a stupid number of hours editing 5 minutes of video, but just looking at the various clips and photos and experimenting putting them together in a fun sequence has kept me busy and smiling and thinking about how much fun we had sailing. I've gone to bed thinking about sailing and video editing, slept fairly well and woken up with new ideas in my head and a desire to save up my pennies and buy a yacht. For those interested (or who haven't seen it on Facebook), you can find the video here.

I guess that another thing that's affecting me is some kind of post-birthday-season reaction. I have been so worried about getting through the various birthdays, Kay's in particular, that it now seems strange to be largely on the other side. Or rather, my reaction is possibly a realization of just how hard I have had to work to maintain an equilibrium during the last weeks/months. Possibly the symptoms described above are indicative of mental exhaustion. I guess that would make sense. But if so, I have absolutely no idea how to deal with it.

We have now seen all the red letter days, bar one. We're almost through the dreaded first year. And in some way this depresses me too. I haven't managed to put my finger on why, yet. The last year has been a complete nightmare and so I would of thought that I'd feel relieved to have seen the worst of it. But really I'm so terribly, terribly tired of living in a world in which hope and joy seem to have been largely extinguished. The idea of having to live another year like the last one, albeit a repeat and hopefully diminished experience, is too dreadful to contemplate.

Anyway, I'm extremely tired and one thing I learned earlier this year is that going to bed early helps, as much as I dislike shortening the day. On the other hand, I'll play the video, remember the holiday and hopefully go to sleep with sailing on my mind.