Christmas eve 2007, nearly 3 years after the break up of my relationship with Jackie, 3 years of personal torment, abuse and probably a nervous breakdown. Battling to keep in contact with my two young children, battling even harder to keep in contact with my self, the part of me that for so long I had to repress, ignore and hide in order to stand a hope of making a relationship work. 3 years of depression, anti-depressants, self-doubt, confusion and nearly "going under." In fact the only reason I think I didn't "go under" was the fact that I didn't know how to. Somewhere inside of me was a bit of me that just kept saying "you don't do that, you get up in the morning, go to work, come home go to bed, get up, come home, etc. etc." I don't think I'm trying to demonstrate any particular strength of character or purpose in saying that. It felt most of the time as though I was on auto-pilot. In fact when something a bit out of the ordinary came along (a court case for example) I would feel a huge surge of stress and often a nearly overwhelming urge to run away or just give in (probably amounting to the same thing.) Then I would have to adapt my autopilot to cater for the new circumstances I found myself in. Anyway MOST of the time now I feel as though my decisions, thought processes and resulting actions are actually being calculated, considered and are valid rather than some unconscious process so maybe I'm getting better!

I must be honest I don't really know what a blog is, and I've never read one but as far as I can make out its where you put down some of your thoughts, so I thought I'd have a go at it. Most of this will seem incredibly self-absorbed, self-centred, hopefully increasingly self-aware, but I truly, truly hope it doesn't come across as self-pitying. I don't feel full of self-pity. I feel some incredible injustices have been done to me, but I feel this has left me with mainly unresolved anger more than any other feeling.

I don't know why I've started a blog, I'm nothing special. Millions of people lead more interesting lives than me, millions of people have had harder lives than me, millions of people are more intelligent and incisive than me. Maybe this means my blog will be better than theirs! I suppose there's a certain amount of cathartic value in actually writing something down in the public domain rather than in a secret journal, possible someone might read this and relate to some of it, in which case I would welcome their comments, maybe it might help anyone going through similar experiences themsleves. Maybe its a reaction to being painted as "the baddy" by my former partner to all our old friends, and I see this as an opportunity to "put the record straight" however unlikely it is that any of them will ever read it. You decide.