I promised myself I’d make the year 2024 a year in which I’ll finally allow myself to go on some adventures, or I could say I’ll make it a year where I’ll have faith.

Funnily, I was made redundant from my 5 year old job at the end of February, but with this bad news, came a silver lining – I can have some time for myself and whilst I can’t afford to not have a job for very long, I had a feeling that this event was somehow a gift (I suspect quite often it is our choice what we make out of a situation, but I couldn’t help but to feel that at least to some degree, a Higher Power was at play here), or a bit of a push towards the unknown. I don’t think I would otherwise have courage to leave my job in the pursuit of something more fulfilling.

I perhaps should go back a few years and explain how did I get to this point.

“Nobody ever thinks that something really bad is going to happen to them. Until it does. And nobody comes back from a perforated bowel, aspiration pneumonia, and an ECMO machine. Until somebody did.
Me.”
~ Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers And A Big Terrible Thing

In the winter of 2021 I fell into an alcoholic addiction (which was an on and off thing for me for a few years at that point) and it seemed this time it might develop into something really serious. But then it didn’t.
To this day I’m still not sure why and I fabricated a story about the Higher Power in my head (I suppose I could say God, but since most of literature I read about overcoming alcoholism uses term Higher Power, I’d go with that).

My return from alcoholism to sobriety (though I guess this wasn’t really a return to some previous state of being, but rather a newly adopted lifestyle) wasn’t anywhere as dramatic as Matthew’s return from coma, but I get his point about gratitude and the question that follows, “Why?”.

It’s over two years now I’m sober and only now I’m beginning to understand, that it’s not alcohol that I had problem with. I suppose it was Matthew that made me realise that I too am an excitement addict and underneath this common addiction is my struggle with living the life on life’s terms. This means living the life with all the pain it brings, all the messiness, all the confusion, brokenness and ultimately death.

So I suppose all the excitement I’ve been pursuing has only one single purpose, to distract me from the ever present ticking of the clock. If Captain Hook was driven mad by the Tick-Tock crocodile, underneath the facade of i-am-okay-ness I display to keep my family and friends at peace is even greater madness, but I suppose we’re all mad down here, aren’t we?

And as I was trying to figure out how to keep myself sane without using any mind altering substance and opt for more healthier coping mechanisms an answer (sort of) came in a form of hazy epiphany when I attended Adam Johnson’s memorial and I realised that only the living can do something about their lives and whilst it didn’t take away anything from my fairly nihilistic view, for the first time in a very long time I understood that life doesn’t really have a meaning, it is what we make it and this meaninglessness is what makes life precious.

At least for me in that moment of staring down into the dark emptiness of nonexistence as I was trying to grasp the absurdity of Adam’s death one thing became clear – it will be my turn to depart one day, it’s inevitable, but despite the relative irrelevance of how I lived my life before the final curtain drops, I noticed a subtle change in my view, as if a first ray of sun made its way through the dark clouds – I am still alive and I can do something about it.

It’s not that I discovered something groundbreaking. I’m sure in the face of one’s own mortality everyone’s life suddenly becomes precious and in that moment I wasn’t desperately trying to get to the next moment of being excited or stimulated by whatever pleasure I still allow myself, but I felt strange peace from just being alive.

Despite trying to keep a gratitude journal on and off a few times in the past few years only now I understood what gratitude actually feels like. For the first time I wasn’t trying to write down 5 or 8 things I’m grateful for as if it was a homework, it just was there. It was almost as if I saw an angel. I don’t need to see it again, once was enough.

I guess in a way I was trying to promise Adam that if he had to go, I’ll remember him by using his death as a catalyst to not only create better life for myself, but ultimately for all I reasonably can.

I’m still far from truly living as I promised myself, but I’m definitely better than I was.

I’m sure it won’t be as easy as I’d like it to be, but that’s okay. I’ll take it one day at a time.

Dedicated to Matthew Perry and Adam Johnson