walking around Copenhagen and saying “wow, just like Japan!” whenever I see a 7-Eleven

Jeg elsker at besøge en コンビニ

I both ended and started the year madly in love with a new partner. It would be nice to pretend that the middle part didn’t happen.

I ended my post about 2024 saying that I need to recover and heal and I am so tired now reading over that again. My general health is maybe doing a bit better than it was then, or at least I have figured out how to manage things a bit more. I mentioned replacing my mattress there. I have now replaced the awful pull-down wall bed that I had then with a more stable one. I thought, moving into a small house, that I should be optimising for space but I ended up doing so at the expense of my own comfort and long-term health and even then I ended up not even optimising for space very well. I think I am going to go for an even firmer mattress too; going back to Ikea for one was a mistake. Caoimhe³ has a new, firm King Koil mattress sleeping on it I feel an immediate difference. It is expensive but I am probably going to get one for myself.

Early in the year I released that I was suffering from some sort of photosensitivity problem and had been since at least late 2024. Anti-migraine medication has not seemed to help with it but some prescription sunglasses have, as well as simply recognising when it is flaring up and turning down the lights. The cause remains mysterious. MRIs have revealed some demyelinating lesions on my brain and spine, but my neurologist says that they are not on the visual cortex or any other area one would expect to be causing symptoms related to vision and, thankfully, they do not seem to be progressing (though another MRI in April is going to be double-checking that). There is no known history of autoimmune disease in my family that would explain the lesions and apparently the damage not extensive enough to diagnose me with anything serious like MS I remain in that grey area of sick enough to have problems, not sick enough to have answers.

But, health issues and general burnout mounting, I did a spring clean this year and got a lof of things off plate. I stepped away from a local trans community organisation, some kink meetup stuff. I pushed myself to keep going with The the Ring Podcast until April because I had an April Fool’s bit that I really wanted to do but ended up putting it on hold after that and did not get around to returning to it for the rest of the year. Journey of the Monkey King has not had an episode for all of 2025, the second time it’s gone on a year-long hiatus. I do want to get back to them but I need to do it in a way that doesn’t just burn myself out again. I am definitely not going to try to stick to a schedule again. Episodes will get done and go out whenever we can manage. I also got formally diagnosed with ADHD this year and started taking methylphenidate which has been a big help and I felt that I getting my momentum back recently but I got suddenly quite sick again a few weeks ago and it knocked me on my arse. Thankfully, Caoimhe was here to take care of me, as she has been a lot this year¹, as Ellie was doing before she died.

The weeks after that were the worst in my life. I cannot describe the pain of it. But I had wonderful people helping me through it and I was fortunate enough to be able to take an extended period off work. My brother sent me a copy of Abiotic Factor as something to keep my occupied and I ended up playing it nearly every day with my friend Ruby for a while. Caoimhe was amazing as a shoulder to cry on and also just bringing me shepherd’s pies and the like to save me cooking. My other partner in Copenhagen was able to make it over a few times in the aftermath as well and I got to see her in Edinburgh in January and October in Copenhagen itself. I have a lot of wonderful people around me and it’s made it bearable.

I also flew out to a kink con for the first time in the autumn. It had been booked long before Ellie died and while I was not really emotionally up for doing anything with anyone I think it was still a very useful experience. I took a lot of notes that I have since brought back to Caoimhe and everyone was very lovely and understanding about me crying all the time. I did a lot of sexual exploration the past year and it has been a really positive and freeing experience. Not unrelatedly I have put in a request for bottom surgery through the public system. That will take a while but I think I do want to go through with it, scary as it is. I don’t think I’d be able to deal with the recovery period without a partner at this point, though. I have been living alone with just Easóg for a long time, but that has felt a lot lonelier since Ellie died.

But I still have people I love dearly, and we keep going. I got a few lines from a poem that Ellie would quote when she was struggling tattooed on my arms as a reminder of that and of her.

I love you, get up, we are going to keep going.

It could not kill me, I would not die.

I picked this up on a whim in a bookshop in Copenhagen. The start was interesting, though a dense read, but quickly started to feel very meandering and directionless, full of its own cleverness and unfunny comedy. But I am nothing if not stubborn and decided to stick it through to the end, if only to experience what a reviewer in The Irish Times would call “a dazzling, poetic triumph” in 1968. The answer is, of course, constantly misogynistic, frequently racist and occasionally homophobic. It does manage to pick up in the back half and get some sense of momentum and direction going and eventually a meaning actually starts to coalesce around a man trapped in a capitalist nightmare that traps even those would would notionally be its masters, a self-perpetuating system from which the author seems to imagine there can be no true escape or break from. Or perhaps that escape is saved for Nunquam, the novel that is apparently the second half of the story started in this one, though I don’t think that I will be reading it.

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and ADD or ADHD and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an ADHD assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had ADHD as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have ADHD and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.

I was on holiday in Copenhagen last week. Here are some photos.