A short end of the year post.

There hasn't been much to get excited about this year, but I've made it through so something had to be going right. I started the year in a very bad place mentally. I had just accepted that I was dropping out of uni, and after 4.5 years of fighting my various problems that was a huge blow. I tried so hard to keep going to uni the last couple of months but things were just getting worse and worse. It seemed the more I did to try and strengthen my back the more I made it worse. I was hitting my head against a wall with the NHS whose answer was very much a we don't know, we don't care to know and we won't try to help you attitude. My dr was lovely, the people he sent me to see just had nothing to offer. The final straw was developing IBS. It meant I was left with only codeine as a painkiller, something which meant that I couldn't always leave the house and was the last nail in the coffin for my hopes of a degree.
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So fast forward a couple of months living in the house in stoke, visiting my best friend when I could and enjoying the company of my housemates, one of whom was also home most of the time due to chrones. There were a few tense weeks when Cleo ended up in hospital. I was very concerned for her, but she was fine after her op. It hurt a lot to go to the hospital everyday, but an acute illness in a friend feels far more important than a chronic one in myself.
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During that time, Ainsley and I joined a group of Europeans forming a competitive minecraft team. The original idea was for a group of us to train together for competitions on champions of the map servers. These are a series of challenges where you are fighting through dungeons and at the same time fighting the opposing team with a bow and arrow. Both teams have a symmetrical "lane" which is surrounded on all sides by a void, so if you get knocked off your lane you die losing everything you held. The idea is to collect a number of blocks from the dungeons and place them all on a victory monument before the other team. Due to my ill health and my computer having a terrible habit of crashing I had to stop training to be on a team, though I do join sometimes to help the practising of our main teams. One of our members set up a normal server for us all to create a minecraft community on. The tesseract server is great fun, we have many community projects, as well as all having our own section of the world where we can create everything we can dream up. There is no limit to how much of the world we use, so long as we don't try to build through someone else's project. If we want more space for a new idea it's simply a case of running out to a new area of land. I'll make a post of the server soon. We recently started a minecraft feed the beast server, another member of the group is hosting it for us. This is a heavily modded version of minecraft with many amazing new things to craft and interact with that causes your creativity to go in entirely different directions.
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So I've come to the summer, my tenancy ran out and not having any income as the benefits system is a joke I had no choice but to move home. I have no major problem with being home. I wish my sister wasn't also back home, though if she would just accept that and adapt to it for now we'd be much better. I've gone from being able to have 3 people cooking together in a tiny galley kitchen to having a much larger kitchen where if she's in there I can't even go get a glass of water. It has been very tough here, at first my best friend was a couple of hundred miles away and the distance was horrid, now it's even worse as she's only around 20 but it might as well be a hundred for my ability to travel it. Part of the problem has been that my scooter's engine blew so it's not been up to the journey, but i'm also not up to it. If I go over, I have to pack for several days so that i'm not sitting in the car for the trip twice in one day. In many ways it's worse being so close yet still unable to see each other much.
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Sometimes I make it out the house on a saturday to meet up with a group of friends, we get together to play magic the gathering and, dungeons and dragons. This has been great when I can do it, though the pain is almost not worth it. It hurts like hell on the night and for several nights after.
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Christmas was nice in as much as being a few days to chill with mum and dad when I could manage to sit downstairs, but rather meh. I'm feeling so depressed all the time now and it's a real struggle. I tried to go out for a ride to clear my head just now, but my scooter is refusing to start. So I'm sat writing this blog entry instead. Hopefully sometime soon I get accepted onto ESA and can at least then afford more than just my groceries. I recently started a new exclusion diet called FODMAPs which will hopefully help with my IBS. If we can get it under control I hope to start losing this weight I've been putting on all year.  I should soon be hearing from a living with pain course which gives coping strategies for chronic pain. My future right now just feels rather bleak and I can't see anything changing anytime soon. Fingers crossed for the upcoming year.